MacMost Now 92: A Look At Snow Leopard

Hi. This is Gary of MacMost Now. On Monday, the new iPhone 3G got so much attention that a really big announcement wasn't much talked about.  That is the announcement of Snow Leopard, Mac OS 10.6. Let's go and take a look at what we know.

Now Snow Leopard is expected to ship about this time next year, according to Apple. So that will put it in next year's WWDC. In the past with Leopard it actually shipped after WWDC, around October, so maybe that's more likely. Now, what's going to be in Snow Leopard? Well, Apple has said that they're putting a pause on new features; in other words, don't expect really anything new. Instead what they're going to try to do is optimize some things, basically make a better Leopard. Now by naming this next OS Snow Leopard it seems to suggest it is just an extension of Leopard. Maybe we'll even see a price break and have an upgrade price this time. 

Now there's going to be two new pieces of technology in Snow Leopard that use multiple processors for faster computing. The first one's called Grand Central and it allows every piece of OS 10 to actually use all the processors in the machines. Right now we've got Mac Pros with 8 processors and we may see Mac Pros with 16 processors as Intel increases the number of processor cores on a chip. Grand Central also will be able to be used by developers to be able to put some of their processing needs into the multiple processors without having to write special code.

The second piece of technology is called Open CL.  Open CL actually doesn't use the multiple processors it uses the graphic processor. The graphic processors and the graphics cards inside the Macs are really powerful and what Open CL does is allows the programs to be able to use some of that processing power on the graphics card for certain calculations.

Another piece of optimization is going to be a new JavaScript engine inside of Safari, Safari 4. Now JavaScript is the scripting language that's used on web pages for all sorts of things, it's used all over the place. So having a faster JavaScript engine is going to mean faster, cooler web pages. It's unclear at this point whether Safari 4 is only going to be for Snow Leopard or whether there'll be a Safari 4 also for standard Leopard.

Another piece of optimization might be file size. It looks like Mac OS X's going to be slimmed down with Snow Leopard so it'll take less drive space and then the same might translate over to some of the standard Mac applications. Apple has said basically there's going to be a smaller footprint so we have more room on our Macs for music and video. It looks like QuickTime's also going to get some optimization in Snow Leopard. QuickTime is what the Mac uses to play back video and a lot of audio as well. Now it looks like there's going to be something called QuickTime X. QuickTime X will be a brand new version of QuickTime that looks to have the same features, potentially, but just be faster and better.

It looks like there was an announcement of at least one new feature that's going to be in Snow Leopard and that's going to be support of Microsoft Exchange 2007. Now Exchange is something a lot of businesses use to facilitate communication between all the people in the organization. It brings together email, contacts, calendar events, all sorts of things like that; pretty much dominates the business space for this. So having support for that in Mac OS X will certainly help it in the business space. It also looks like Snow Leopard will be able to handle more memory in the machine. Each version of the OS seems to be able to handle a little bit more memory in the machine and now that we commonly have machines that have 2, 4 or up to 16 gigs of memory it's great to hear that Snow Leopard can handle even more. Actually it will be able to handle up to 16 terabytes of memory. That's a lot of memory. 

Now Apple has a page up on their website already, tells you a little bit of information about Snow There's not much there besides what I've just said but perhaps this page will be updated in the coming year as new developments occur.

Until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

According to Wikipedia, the Snow Leopard's also called the ounce and lives in Central Asia Where there's about 4000 to 7500 of them and about six to seven hundred in zoos around the world. They can weigh up to 165 pounds and have furry feet that act as snowshoes.