Snow Leopard confirmed for August 28 release

Apple has confirmed the rumor that Snow Leopard (a.k.a. Mac OS 10.6) will be released this Friday, August 28, 2009 -- ahead of its estimated ship date of September.

To create Snow Leopard, Apple engineers refined 90 percent of the more than 1,000 projects that make up Mac OS X. Users will notice refinements including a more responsive Finder™; Mail that loads messages up to twice as fast;* Time Machine® with an up to 80 percent faster initial backup;* a Dock with Exposé® integration; QuickTime® X with a redesigned player that allows users to easily view, record, trim and share video; and a 64-bit version of Safari® 4 that is up to 50 percent** faster and resistant to crashes caused by plug-ins. Snow Leopard is half the size of the previous version and frees up to 7GB of drive space once installed.

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.

Snow Leopard will be available as a upgrade to Leopard (10.5) for $29 or $49 for a five-seat Family Pack. A Mac Box Set including Mac OS X Snow Leopard, iLife '09 and iWork '09 will be available for $169 for a single user license and $229 for a Family Pack. If you purchased a qualifying Mac with Leopard installed after June 8, 2009 you can get a copy of Snow Leopard for a shipping and handling fee of $9.95 plus tax via Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard Up-to-Date Program.

Full details are on Apple's product page: http://www.apple.com/macosx/.