Amazon Trims Snow Leopard Price Before Launch
At its Worldwide Developer Conference in June, Apple said it would charge just $29 for existing customers to upgrade to Snow Leopard from Leopard, and $49 for a "family pack" of five Snow Leopard upgrade licenses.
Amazon is now listing the Snow Leopard upgrade for $25, a savings of 14 percent, and it's selling the Snow Leopard 5-license Family Pack for $44, a savings of 10 percent. Apple has also cut the price of Snow Leopard Server from $499 to 444.99, a savings of 11 percent.
Under Apple's Snow Leopard Up-to-Date Program, which runs through Dec. 26, customers who bought a qualifying Mac or Xserve after June 8 can upgrade to Snow Leopard for $9.95.
Mac users generally don't waste any time when it comes to upgrading to a new OS X release, and the addition of native Exchange support in Snow Leopard could lead to an even bigger sales surge as more businesses make the decision to bring Macs into their environments.
Apple's Snow Leopard marketing has focused on the architectural changes in the release, which include Grand Central, a set of technologies that adds support for multicore processors and parallel computing, and OpenCL, which lets applications tap into unused GPU computing power.