Two years after shipping Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, Apple has delivered Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. A cat of the same family, Apple bills its new operating system as a better Leopard, and we think Snow Leopard on the Mac is destined for anything but rarity. But "Snow Leopard" is a new breed, too. It runs only on Intel hardware, leaving PowerPC hardware (such as Power Macs, PowerBooks and iBooks) rapidly heading toward extinction.

Despite its own Intel requirement, though, Snow Leopard can still run most Mac OS X applications written for PowerPC hardware, along with native Universal Binary and Intel-only applications. (Snow Leopard accomodates both "Carbon" and "Cocoa" types of applications.) Apple's "Rosetta" code-translation technology, introduced for the first Intel Macs, is the magic that makes this possible. (Of course, "classic" Mac applications are already extinct; Apple dropped support for those with Leopard.)

Discarding heaps of pre-Intel code and rewriting the much-criticized Mac OS X Finder from scratch, Snow Leopard trades legacy support for the promise of faster, leaner and more reliable performance. It also overhauls QuickTime (now "QuickTime X"); adds support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 in Mail, iCal, and Address Book (licensing Microsoft's ActiveSync protocol), and brings additional improvements.

Leopard was the culmination of years of breakneck development that added feature upon feature to Mac OS X. With Snow Leopard, Apple's developers took a break to get back to basics. As with Windows 7, the new operating system is intended to refine and improve its predecessor, fixing bugs, polishing and smoothing rough edges, and improving the core.

There are new features — tons of them — but they're almost all little things that make Mac life a little easier. That's hard to sell, but Apple's also taking a break from its usual pricing. Instead of the $129 price tag that every new Mac OS X version carried previously, the upgrade from Leopard is a paltry $29. That's impulse buy, oh-why-not range. And that's obviously what Apple wants — everything about this product is pushing to help every Intel Mac user adopt Snow Leopard as quickly as possible.

A "Family Pack" upgrade lists for just $49. If you're still running Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, you're directed to a Mac Box Set/Snow Leopard bundle, which lists for $169 (single-user), or $229 (Family Pack) but also includes Apple's iLife '09 and iWork '09 application packages. Recent buyers of Macs and qualifying Xserves, purchased from Apple and authorized resellers between June 8 and December 27, are eligible for a $9.95 upgrade via Apple's "Up To Date" program.

Along with the Finder, the foundations of Mac OS X are improved in Snow Leopard, too. It's now almost entirely 64-bit optimized, which yields small but significant performance improvements for 64-bit (Core 2 Duo and Xeon) processors. Apple has introduced new features that will help developers more easily harness the power of multiple processors in future applications, and its latest technology may help security in a few specific areas, as well..

A new Snow Leopard Server, built on the same core operating system as Snow Leopard, lists at $499 for an unlimited number of clients (the same as the old 10-client price and half the old "unlimited" price). It requires a "Mac desktop or server with Intel processor" and 2GB of RAM. We won't attempt to review it here, but Snow Leopard Server features a new "Mobile Access Server" and "Podcast Producer 2", along with other improvements.

Unlike Microsoft, Apple severely restricts discussion of its beta-test software, so we can expect the usual shaking-out period, where customers identify bugs and misfeatures, and third-party developers scramble to identify and resolve compatibility issues, as Apple gradually addresses Snow Leopard's most critical problems. But, warnings aside, we are optimistic about Snow Leopard's potential for improving the Mac experience. This report is based on our initial experiences, and full assessment of something this complex is a process that will play out over weeks and months ahead. We welcome your participation and feedback in this exploration, and we have set up a new "Snow Leopard" reader report section for ongoing discussion, research, analysis and problem solving.

Source: (Robert Mohns and the MacInTouch staff, 2009) http://www.macintouch.com/specialreports/snowleopard/