It's official: Snow Leopard this Friday

Jake Widman
Tuesday, 25 August 2009 01:17

IT Industry - Development

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.