First announced at the 2008 WWDC, Snow Leopard doesn’t offer the parade of new features Mac users might have come to expect from a major OS X update. Instead, much of the focus with Snow Leopard has been behind the scenes, with Apple looking to improve the performance and increase the power of its operating system.
During Monday’s keynote, Apple senior vice president of software engineering Bertrand Serlet said the next major version of OS X would be characterized by powerful new technologies, refinements to existing features, and support for Microsoft Exchange.
Snow Leopard will cost $29 for Leopard users, with a family pack available for $49. That’s a far cry from Apple’s usual price on OS X updates–it costs $129 to purchase Leopard, for example.
“We want all users to upgrade to Snow Leopard, because Snow Leopard is a better Leopard,” said Serlet of OS X 10.6’s price.”
The Snow Leopard ship date joins an announcement of new models of MacBook and MacBook Pro and an update to Safari made at the WWDC keynote, available in a PC World live blog.
Macworld will have more details on Snow Leopard’s refinements and technologies shortly.