If that shiny Snow Leopard disk is singing its siren song, promising you a computing experience full of joy and love and pretty ponies for everyone, plus dazzling performance previously inexperienced by mere humans -- stop. You’re expecting way too much from what is a really nice but not earthshaking upgrade. You are going to be disappointed.

And if you’re struggling to get your upgrade-addicted brain and OMGgottahaveitnow grabby little hands under control, here are ten points to ponder.

1: "Pioneers get the arrows; settlers get the land”: No one seems to have any idea of who said this first, but it’s become the early adopter counter argument. If you’re the first kid on your block to muck about with new technology, you will also be the first to experience the bugs that slipped by the quality assurance team. Your life doesn’t need any additional complications right now? Wait for Snow Leopard 10.6.1.

2: Bigger benefits down the road: Some of Snow Leopard’s promised performance gains aren’t going to manifest until developers fine-tune their applications to take advantage of Grand Central Dispatch, which enhances the way that software takes advantage of multiple processing cores, and OpenCL, which grabs power from your Mac’s graphics processing unit.  For the full-on Snow Leopard experience, give programmers a few months to catch up.
 
3: Your Mac can’t handle Snow Leopard: 32-bit Intel Macs, machines with graphics cards that are more than a couple of years old, even Macs that were released more than two years ago will not magically turn into speed demons with Snow Leopard. If you want to run Snow Leopard just to take advantage of other features like the enhanced Services menu, perkier iChat, and improved accessibility, might as well wait for the likely-improved 10.6.1 release. Of course Snow Leopard WILL NOT work on any PowerPC Mac. This is an Intel only party.

4: Your favorite software doesn’t work with Snow Leopard: The majority of core business applications run fine on Snow Leopard, but some apps aren’t playing nicely with the new OS. Check the list at The Snow Leopard Wiki to see what’s not working and what’s sort of working before you upgrade. The Wiki currently lists 70+  apps that aren’t compatible with Snow Leopard, such as Adobe CS2 Suite, Cyber Duck, CuteFTP, Google Gears browser extension, TiVo Desktop 1.94, Parallels 3.0 (v.4.0 works),and others that are “sort of” working, like the Adobe CS3 Suite, where Photoshop CS3 and Dreamweaver are reportedly experiencing minor bugs. Your mileage may vary here -- sometimes bugs manifest due to a combination of issues that may not be present on everyone’s machines -- but if a program you rely on is on the “not working” list you might want to wait a week or two to see if others experience the same problem.

5: You have ancient peripherals that you respect or can’t afford to replace: Your rather mature mobile phone, that slide scanner you only use a few times a year, the creaky old printer you rely on for faxing and cranking out documents cheaply, the old camera you keep to futz around with in the rain or by the ocean… don’t blithely assume they’ll be supported in Snow Leopard. If you love it and don’t want to lose it, wait and see if the manufacturer rolls out updated drivers in the next month or two -- certainly newer products will be first on the provide-support priority list.

6: You don’t have time to do an upgrade properly:  This is likely of deep concern only to geeks, the rest of you should feel free to scamper along to #7. Nerds know that getting the most out of an update involves trashing all the old crap that lurks on the computer, dumping the 9,001 applications you tried out once and never used again, checking out the health of hard drives (maybe -- thrill of thrills -- re-partitioning them), backing up data or making a mirror copy of your computer if you can’t afford more than an hour of downtime, etc. If you don’t have the time to do the upgrade right, wait until you do. Otherwise, you’ll always wonder just how good it could have been.

7. Exchange Isn’t Plug and Play: Don’t believe the hype, out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange doesn’t mean Exchange is going to work if your IT department still has to turn on Exchange Autodiscover. And don’t expect IT to instinctively understand how to get you Mac going with Exchange, especially if you work in a mostly-PC shop. If IT lacks patience, you may want to wait until the brave early adopters report back with full details on how to get Exchange going.

8: You are super paranoid (but that doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you): Snow Leopard includes some new anti-malware capabilities, warning users about programs that are included in file. Currently only two programs are blocked and both are certifiably bad news. But (put on those tin foil hats) Apple and pretty much anyone who has access to the machine could -- in theory -- upgrade the no-go file to block all sorts of applications, torrents, program hacks and cracks, etc. (Some Windows users really have experienced this when overenthusiastic malware programs refuse to download application cracks, claiming that Trojans lurk within). The deeply suspicious among us will want to wait and see how this shakes out before they upgrade (and if they weren’t worrying about this before -- hah! -- they sure are worrying now).

9: Snow Leopard isn’t a killer upgrade: Seriously, what do you expect for $29 bucks or less? Snow Leopard is indisputably the start of something really new and cool -- an operating system that wrings every last drop of power from hardware and software components. It’s an exciting glimpse into the future, but the here-and-now reality of Snow Leopard isn’t thrilling.
 
10: If it ain't broke, don't fix it: Happy with the way your Mac is performing? Leave it be. No, really. Hands off. Put the disk down and back away from the Mac right now. Oh, who are we kidding? Happy upgrade day, everyone!