Snow Leopard 10.6 Coming Q1 2009?
Apple first previewed Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) at the Worldwide Developers Conference 2008. They announced that the next Mac OS X would be releasing sometime within a year. According to MacRumors it’s looking like it might be a little less than a year.
Jordan Hubbard, one of Apple’s engineers spoke at a conference where he focused on engineers and system administrators. Most of the presentation you might not be too interested in, but he did drop some very revealing information. On of his slides Hubbard either purposefully or mistakingly put the Q1 2009 release for Mac OS X 10.6 on one of his slides. The image of the slide is down below:
There have been some improvements for Snow Leopard mentioned. It looks like those upgrades are mostly going to be taking place under the hood. Here are a list of features you can expect to see when Mac OS X 10.6 releases.
- 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.
- 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 CPU.
- 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.
Since 2001, Mac OS X has delivered more than a thousand innovative new features. With Snow Leopard, the next major version of the world’s most advanced operating system, Mac OS X changes more than its spots, it changes focus. Taking a break from adding new features, Snow Leopard — scheduled to ship in about a year — builds on Leopard’s enormous innovations by delivering a new generation of core software technologies that will streamline Mac OS X, enhance its performance, and set new standards for quality. Snow Leopard dramatically reduces the footprint of Mac OS X, making it even more efficient for users, and giving them back valuable hard drive space for their music and photos.
Here we go!!