Must be a slow news week.
A few people... wait, I'm sorry... "numerous" people whine on the Apple forum about getting a spinning wheel and that is newsworthy?
Service Pack? What Windows service pack rewrote the whole explorer? SL's Finder is completely rewritten in Cocoa leave alone all the other under the hood changes.
Most of the so called Spinning Wheel issues I have seen so far were caused by 3rd party software like Paragon for one that is not yet compatible with SL.
Given some of the key changes in Snow Leopard (moving to 64-bit architecture for the majority of the OS, Grand Central Dispatch, dropping all PPC code), the handful of "spinning beachball" problems Information Week cites is far below the number of Vista installs that went to crap - both in terms of straight numbers and percentage of the user base.
I'd venture to say practically all spinning beach balls and kernel panics have been caused by third party software.
With a Mac it's just too easy. At the price of $40-$100 for an external drive and CCC (for those that don't want to spring for SD!), a bootable backup should be on everyone's priority list above buying and installing a new OS.
Then you're prepared for any troubleshooting that may be required after an OS upgrade. To anyone that believes an OS developer can go out, find, and test every single piece of 3rd party software that exists to make sure none of them have any issues, wake up and smell the roses.
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