In a move that drew gasps and applause from the audience Apple announced that the next iteration of the Mac operating system, Mac OS X 10.6, will cost only $29 to upgrade.
Apple’s SVP of OS X Software, Bertrand Serlet, presented the mostly under the hood improvements and refinements of Mac OS X 10.6 on June 17, 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco during the Worldwide Developers Conference Keynote presentation.
The two most important, in my opinion, are 64-bit native applications and Grand Central Dispatch, which is built in support for multicore processing. Serlet said that Snow Leopard installation will be 45% faster and give back 6GB of hard drive space.
Here are some of the features presented:
- Exposé in the Dock, and Stacks are able to handle large contents better and can open folders without leaving Stacks.
- Finder’s Icon view now has a magnification slider on the bottom right corner which allows resizing of the icons. Live preview lets users browse PDF files or play videos while in Icon view.
- Chinese characters (presumably as well as Japanese and Korean) can be inputed using the glass trackpad.
- Quicktime has been renamed to Quicktime X with the interface totally redone. The window title and on-screen controls fade away as soon as the video starts playing leaving a clean view of the video. The controls fade back in when the mouse pointer is moved over the video. Quicktime X also supports editing and trimming, and sharing of video via MobileMe or YouTube, or uploading to iTunes.
For more screenshots of the refinements and new features in Snow Leopard, check out AppleInsider.
Pricing and availability
As previously mentioned, a single-user upgrade to Snow Leopard will just cost $29. A Family Pack is also available for a household with five Macs and will retail for $49.
Mac OS 10.6 will be released September 2009.
Filed under: OS X, Quicktime, Safari, OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard, WWDC 09
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