Snow Leopard Ships in September for $29
Rawr!
Apple previewed some of the features of Snow Leopard at the WWDC keynote. The operating system update is still being pitched as an under-the-hood refinement to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard); those users will be able to upgrade to Snow Leopard for $29 when it ships in September.
Snow Leopard rewrites more of the underlying technology to utilize 64-bit chips and otherwise boost speeds. Apple touts speed improvements to Mail, Preview, the Finder, the installation process, and more.
Improved multi-core support will let the OS dynamically manage multi-core threads. With Leopard, an idle program can hog the ability for the multi-core chips to execute instructions--individual treads. Snow Leopard allocates these threads so that idle apps don't waste resources.
OpenCL support lets essentially any company tap into chips that had been designed for video processing. Many graphics processors aren't taxed by general use, so software can capture these under-used resources to speed up anything.
QuickTime also gets updated with interface and tech improvements. Our favorite assists in compressing and re-encoding video for other devices, such as iTunes and iPhone.
And Snow Leopard adds Exchange support for Exchange Server 2007. This business standard will work with Mail, iCal, and Address Book to share contacts, meetings, and calendars over a network.
All together, these and other updates should improve the OS without drastically changing it... except for one more thing. Snow Leopard will work only on Intel Macs, finally ending support for PowerPC processors.
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benet
November 10, 2009 at 10:35pm
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Scion of Tytehran
June 08, 2009 at 10:06pm
Hmmm... but I wonder how much this upgrade will cost those who don't currently use Leopard. I've had a tendency to skip over an OS upgrade so I'm still on Tiger. Still, at $30 I could just get both at the same time without much worry but since I haven't seen the WWDC yet I wonder if it will be sold as a stand alone upgrade.
Makaku
June 08, 2009 at 8:47pm
I've been waiting for more information on Snow Leopard, but to find out its only going to cost me around $30 is awesome! Now, if it were only September already!!!
sonicseamus
June 08, 2009 at 4:45pm
I was getting nervous about buying snow leopard when I thought it would be 100$ but now that its 30$ im definitely buying it!!!
nholley73
June 08, 2009 at 4:41pm
I agree, we couldn't ask for a better deal! Apple does it again.. Thanks
nah
parker.t8
June 08, 2009 at 4:37pm
Wow, I was so excited to hear about Snow Leopard coming out and with an affordable price! Then I was crushed when I read the Last line of the article. So PowerPC processors are going to be treated like the ugly stepchild even by APPLE. How sad! I was looking forward to it.
homemaderobot
June 08, 2009 at 3:45pm
I don't think I could be any happier with this price... unless it was free...
So how much is Windows 7 going for? lol
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