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Thu, 20 Nov 2008 Mac OS X Snow Leopard: Ahead of schedule?

Slide shows Snow Leopard will ship in the first quarter of 2009

Jim Dalrymple Macworld.com

Apple first announced Mac OS X Snow Leopard in June and said it would ship in about year. However, a slide presented by an Apple employee at a recent conference suggests Snow Leopard may be ahead of schedule.

The slide shows Snow Leopard will ship in the first quarter of 2009. That's three months earlier than Apple said the operating system would ship at its Worldwide Developers Conference last June.

Jordan Hubbard, Apple's director of engineering for Unix technologies, showed the slide at the Large Installation System Administration Conference, in San Diego last week. Officially, Apple said they haven't changed its timeframe for release Snow Leopard.

"Last June we said we would ship Snow Leopard in about a year and haven't made any further announcements about it since then," Apple spokesperson Bill Evans, told Macworld.

Jordan Hubbard's Snow Leopard slide presented last week.

OSX performance enhancements

Apple confirmed in June that Snow Leopard would focus on performance enhancements rather than new features. The OS X update will be optimized for multi-core processors and enable "breakthrough amounts of RAM."

Apple also promised a new, modern media platform with QuickTime. The update will also offer out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007.

The updated operating system will also feature OpenCL--or Open Computing Language. OpenCL is the latest manifestation of a processing technique that's been around for a while known as General-Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units.

GPGPU helps to offload a personal computer's computationally intensive processes to its graphics chip, such as those that might be found on a Mac equipped with an ATI or Nvidia graphics card or processor.

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Comments received


Brendon Smith said on Thu, 20 Nov 2008

I just purchased the upgrade(Leopard) for my Tiger.Is it wise to still upgrade with Leopard, or should I wait and upgrade with Snow Leopard?

gregorsamsa said on Thu, 20 Nov 2008

It's difficult to say when we don't know Snow Leopard's date of release. It's quite likely to still be a good few months away. Then there's every chance that you'll have a few niggling issues with any major new OS upgrade, which won't be ironed out for a while longer. Leopard is now at 10.5.5, with 10.5.6 around the corner, so most problems have already been fixed & it's getting better all the time. I'd keep Leopard, but that's just my opinion.

Commie said on Fri, 21 Nov 2008

Avoid any new OS until at least the second set of patches. Apple, like the others, tend to run for deadlines which means the code is neither optimized or fully bug tested.

Put a hundred monkeys in a room with computers, at the end of the day if the code does not compile it is a Beta, if it does then release it!

david Barry said on Fri, 21 Nov 2008

Interesting in view of rumours about new iMacs in January running on new multicore chips, this and the likelyhood of a RAM glut, would mean that if apple could release new hardware with a new OS optimised to use it, even with the credit crunch they would have some chance of maintaining sales.

John Crawford said on Fri, 21 Nov 2008

I have installed every OS X update soon after its release and have not had any problems. But then I have a very standard installation and I do not do much "heavy lifting".

As for Apple and dead lines, Leopard was (notoriously?) slipped due to the iPhone launch, so Apple may want to hit deadlines but are not afraid to slip things. The other side of the coin was, of course, MobileMe. But Apple did work hard to rectify that and keep users informed.

Andy said on Sat, 22 Nov 2008

How are they going to peddle this to those of us who are looking for new features from an OS upgrade that are obvious, up-front, easy to use? No talk of a better Mail app, or any improved general-use applications. What do I care about OpenCL, multi-core this and more RAM (anyhow I've got 4GB on both iMac and MB Pro, thanks, quite sufficient to my general needs).

Lurch said on Sun, 23 Nov 2008

Leopard handles great, It's not quite as customizable as Linux but it's very solid. My only hope is Snow Leopard supports backup to Network SAMBA devices rather than a wireless source or a USB/FIREWIRE source. Until the CCC will do the job!

Tommy E said on Sun, 23 Nov 2008

For a company notorious for style over functionality I hope SL is worth buying. Leopard had one saving grace worth the money - Time Machine. They could have sold that on it's own.

I see SL as a move to get users to upgrade hardware, not a great way forward in the current climate.

Tony Powell said on Mon, 24 Nov 2008

Maybe spotlight will work with this new release? Oh and bring back Sherlock and the ability to text from the laptop using address book.

I have tried TimeMachine and it causes far more problems than it solves.

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