Apple’s Mac OS X “Snow Leopard” to be Available this Friday

At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference this past June, the company announced that OS X “Snow Leopard” would become available to consumers in September. Well, there’s good news for Apple fans, as the OS’ release date has been pushed up to this Friday, the 28th. Even without knowing what the latest version entails, if there’s one reason to get excited, it’d be for the $29 US upgrade price.

What makes Snow Leopard a little bit interesting is that it’s not a release that focuses on unveiling new features, and that’s no doubt the reason for the $29 price tag. Rather, the goal is to release a product that’s more secure and faster, both of which are helped by the fact that about 90% of the OS has been re-written – the first time that’s happened since OS X first debuted in 2001.

As a result, many aspects of the OS will feel much faster, including Finder, Mail, Time Machine and even QuickTime (which becomes QuickTime X). How all these optimizations affect install size is staggering. Apple claims that after upgrading to Snow Leopard, you will regain up to 7GB of hard drive space, as a result of the latest version taking up half the size of Leopard.

Another major feature of Snow Leopard is the fact that almost the entire OS was coded with 64-bit addresses in mind, so you’re really going to be taking full advantage of your processor, more so than Windows or Linux would avail you. It will be interesting to see if consumers, after upgrading, notice notable speed gains, because with all the time and effort Apple’s developers have put into the latest version, it’d sure seem likely.

For the first time, system applications including Finder, Mail, iCal, iChat and Safari are 64-bit and Snow Leopard’s support for 64-bit processors makes use of large amounts of RAM, increases performance and improves security while remaining compatible with 32-bit applications. Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) provides a revolutionary new way for software developers to write applications that take advantage of multicore processors. OpenCL, a C-based open standard, allows developers to tap the incredible power of the graphics processing unit for tasks that go beyond graphics.