Snow Leopard coming this Friday

Apple announced today that the Snow Leopard version of their Mac OS X operating system will go on sale this Friday, August 28, 2009, and that their online store is now accepting pre-orders. This release brings their operating system to Mac OS X 10.6.

The upgrade is $29 for owners of Mac OS X 10.5 systems, and a five-user, single-household license for $49. For older systems the upgrade will cost more.

Here are a few interesting quotes from the press release:

"To create Snow Leopard, Apple engineers refined 90 percent of the more than 1,000 projects that make up Mac OS X."

"Snow Leopard is the only desktop operating system with built in support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 ..."

Of course, key to Snow Leopard is Apple's Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) technology. Here's a quote related to that:

"Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) provides a revolutionary new way for software developers to write applications that take advantage of multicore processors. OpenCL, a C-based open standard, allows developers to tap the incredible power of the graphics processing unit for tasks that go beyond graphics."

According to the press release, many OS X applications will run faster. Read the press release for more details.