Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard is an Apple operating system currently in development that is planned to succeed version 10.5 Leopard. Announced briefly by Apple CEO Steve Jobs at WWDC on June 9, 2008, the software is scheduled to ship "about a year" after the announcement.
The new system will not focus on new end-user features, but rather on improving performance, efficiency and reducing its overall footprint. A developer preview has been seeded to developers.
Changes and improvements
Apple has stated that Mac OS X Snow Leopard will include the following changes and improvements:
- Support for connecting to Microsoft Exchange 2007 servers will be included in Address Book, Mail, and iCal.
- Faster installation times and smaller hard drive footprint. About 13 minutes versus an hour plus for 10.5.
- Support for up to a theoretical 16TB RAM by further developing 64-bit kernel technologies.
- Grand Central: a parallel-programming technology that aims to have the OS take greater advantage of multi-core CPUs.
- QuickTime X, which will feature, optimized support for modern codecs.
- OpenCL (Open Computing Language): allowing developers to code applications to use the GPU for non-graphics purposes.
- A 64-bit kernel, which provides a complete 64-bit environment for applications, along with 32-bit support for older Macs. This completes a long running attempt by Apple to completely unify their products in 64-bit capabilities, harking back to Apple's original adoption of the PowerPC in 1994 which was planned to become natively 64-bit with the PowerPC G5 and slowly built into OS X starting with Mac OS X v10.3 "Panther" in 2003.
- Also, leaked release notes indicate that the Finder will be partially rewritten in Apple's Cocoa API.
- The next version of Mac OS X Server will include all of these features and other server-related features. Apple also states that they will include ZFS write support, but current documentation indicates that ZFS write support does not currently exist in the latest seed (build).
