Amazon.com has begun taking preorders for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and the forthcoming release has already shot to the top of Amazon's best-seller list.
Apple plans to launch Snow Leopard in September but hasn't yet set a launch date. Snow Leopard, which only runs on Intel-based Macs, is $29.99 for a single-PC upgrade and $49.99 for a five-license "Family Pack." Snow Leopard Server, which offers faster performance for file sharing, e-mail and Web hosting, is $499.
Steve Bain, president of Simply Mac, a Salt Lake City-based Apple reseller, says Mac users usually don't waste any time when it comes to upgrading to a new release. The addition of native Exchange support could lead to an even stronger Snow Leopard sales surge as more businesses make the decision to migrate, he added.
Snow Leopard represents a different marketing direction for Apple. With OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple highlighted the hundreds of new features it bundled into the OS and customers busted out their wallets. But Apple has said that Snow Leopard will represent more of an architectural shift with innate improvements.
With Grand Central, a set of technologies that add support for multicore processors and parallel computing, and OpenCL, which lets applications tap into unused GPU computing power, Apple has future-proofed Snow Leopard in a way that'll make it relevant for the next several years.
"These technologies will make it easier for developers to write applications that take advantage of all the horsepower today's systems actually offer," said Nick Gold, sales manager at Chesapeake Systems, a Baltimore-based Apple VAR. "Software always lags behind what the hardware is technically capable of, and Snow Leopard will make it easier to take advantage of what we already have sitting on our desks."
Faster processing of video effects, quicker transcoding between various media formats, and snappier rendering of 3-D graphics and animation are all part of the under-the-hood improvements in Snow Leopard, according to Gold.
"If Macs make it easier for developers to write powerful applications that outperform their PC equivalents, this can only help to push even more businesses that need computing horsepower to move to the Mac platform," said Gold.
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