Meanwhile, I'd like to hear from current and potential Mac users: Do you plan to switch to Snow Leopard? If so, how soon? If not, what's pushing you away? (Windows and Linux users are, of course, free to chime in, too.) The comments are yours. I plan to have a review of Snow Leopard online and in print as soon as I can. Four years after it announced it would switch to Intel's processors from PowerPC chips and some three and a half years since it shipped its first Intel-based Mac, Apple considers that transition over. If your Mac doesn't have an Intel processor inside, you can't install Snow Leopard on that machine. I like iLife and iWork, but I'm not sure that every Tiger user will appreciate having to pay for those two bundles as part of a Leopard upgrade. If you use 10.4 Tiger, you'll have to buy the 'Mac Box Set,' a $169 bundle of Snow Leopard and the latest versions of Apple's iLife media-creativity and iWork personal-productivity suites. (If you bought a Mac from June 8 on, right after Snow Leopard had its first in-depth demonstration at an Apple conference, you can probably get it for just $9.95.)īut people running older versions of OS X aren't eligible for those deals, and many older Macs can't run Snow Leopard at any price. Apple is emphasizing performance over new features, calling this version 'refined, not reinvented' and advertising such incremental improvements as faster startup and shutdown times, a smaller disk footprint and a more crash-resistant Web browser.Īpple is also pricing Snow Leopard low enough to make it almost an automatic upgrade from the current, already-good OS X 10.5 Leopard: just $29, $100 less than what Leopard sold for at its debut. Snow Leopard - you can also call it Mac OS X 10.6, but Apple, like Microsoft, has been moving away from using version numbers to identify its operating-system updates - will be an unusual release in some ways.

28 - earlier than it had predicted in June - and it's already taking pre-orders for it on its Web site. Mac early adopters can set a date: Apple announced this morning that it will ship its next version of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, this Friday, Aug.

Apple snow leopard order