Jake Widman
Tuesday, 25 August 2009 01:17
IT Industry -
Development
Page 1 of 2
Apple's mildly awaited upgrade to Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, will make its official debut August 28. Upgrading from Leopard will be relatively inexpensive, but upgrading from Tiger will require buying a bundled software package as well.
Snow Leopard, the first Intel-optimized -- and, in fact, Intel-only -- version of Mac OS X, will go on sale on Friday.
Apple has been consistent in positioning the upgrade not as one that brings a lot of new features, but as a "refined," simplified, and sped up version of Leopard.
The Finder has been rewritten, for example, and Apple claims a roughly 1.5x improvement in the speed of icon refresh. Not a big feature, but a speed improvement that would add up.
Similarly, Time Machine backups are supposed to go up to 80 percent faster, as is wake-up and shutdown time.
New features include improvements to Exposé's handling of open windows, and to navigation through Stacks in the Dock.
Probably most significant, though, is Snow Leopard's built-in support for Microsoft Exchange Server. The Exchange Autodiscovery feature, once enabled by an IT department, should enable a Mac user to automatically set up Mail, iCal, and Address Book just by entering a user name and password into the Mail Accounts pane.
For pricing and upgrade paths, see Page 2.