Just over a year ago, Apple announced that Snow Leopard (OS X version 10.6) will ship in September, 2009. This update, while not a full operating system overhaul, promises a big improvement on performance, efficiency, and the reduction of the Leopard’s overall memory footprint, but there will be very few cosmetic changes to the OS; most of the changes will take place “under the hood.” Much to the chagrin of pre-Intel Mac owners, this update will only be supported by Macs with Intel processors (e.g., Macbooks, Macbook Pros, Macbook air, Mac Pros and Mac Minis built after 2006), no longer giving support for PowerPC Macs (e.g., Power Macs, PowerBooks, iBooks, iMacs, G3-G5 models). This continues Apple’s trend of phasing out support for the non Intel-based Macs.
Most of the built-in applications have been rebuilt to fully utilize the new Intel chips, which also means support for up to 16 terabytes of RAM. One of these applications will be an all new redesigned QuickTime X, that allows you to easily view, record, trim and share video to YouTube, or iTunes. Mail will load messages 85 percent faster*, searches will be up to 90 percent faster*, and improvements to Safari 4 will boost performance by up to 50 percent*.
Apple also re-wrote the Finder to take full advantage of the Intel chips and here are a few of the improvements you will see:
- Stacks will allow viewing a subfolder without launching Finder. Stacks have also been modified to include scroll-bars for folders with many files
- Faster PDF and JPEG icon refreshes.
- PDF and movie playing in the Finder icon view.
- Search results will now be sortable by name, date modified, date created, size, kind, and label.
- Faster startup, shutdown, installation, Time Machine backup and connection establishment.
Snow Leopard is half the size of the previous version and frees up to 6GB of drive space once installed. For those who have Leopard (10.5) already an upgrade will be available for $29, or up to five computers with the family pack at $49.
*All speed claims in this article have been provided by Apple, since they have not released a version of the OS for testing.
[...] integration with Microsoft Exchange that Outlook does. With the release of Mac’s latest OS, Snow Leopard, they are promising better integration with Microsoft Exchange 2007 built into the MacMail [...]