Exclusive Mac OS X Snow Leopard details.
Monday, June 16, 2008 at 02:38 PM | Posted by kazouz
LoopRumors has obtained some interesting information regarding the recently announced Mac OS X Snow Leopard.
From an esthetic point of view, Snow Leopard has a new default desktop wallpaper that’s similar to the one in Leopard. It resembles the image on the Snow Leopard DVD. There are a few slight visual tweaks to the menu bar and dock. Also, there is now an option in System Preferences to go back to the old 2D Tiger dock. Aside from these, it looks much like Leopard.
Our source, who used an unreleased seed of Snow Leopard, noted that the new OS seemed “much, much faster” than Leopard, and “felt rock solid” when opening and running applications. Here are other highlights from the brief test:
- the default filesystem in Snow Leopard is ZFS, though HFS is still supported
- the requirements on the DVD indeed state that it requires an Intel processor
- when browsing through the file systems, there was no mention of PowerPC in the entire OS
- a new version of Safari is also included, which seems to load pages a bit faster than the existing version
As for release date and pricing information, the source mentions Q1 2009. No exact price is specified, though it won’t cost as much as a full Mac OS X release. It also appears that the exclusive way of buying Snow Leopard will be through a direct download, though it will be in retail stores as well.
Reader Comments
thats like soo cool i cant wait althog that means i have to upgrade my power pc to an intell but thats no biggee small price to pay to get peace of mind with my data
“ It also appears that the exclusive way of buying Snow Leopard will be through a direct download, though it will be in retail stores as well.”
So, I guess there’s more than one meaning for the word “exclusive”. Perhaps a better choice might be “preferred” as in:
“It also appears that the preferred method of buying Snow Leopard will be through a direct download, though it will be in retail stores as well.”
Very positive if Snow leopard is already offering up solid performance advantages. Especially on a release that is likely to be heavily loaded with debugging code. It will also be a feather in Apples cap if they can continue the system speed ups from release to release. Something MS hasn’t been able to do.
Another thing that this aggressive optimization for multiple processors does for us is to make waiting for quad core makes with SMT more desirable. That would be on iMac type hardware. The interesting thing is how this would play on on a Mac Mini with say 4 or more ATOM cores. Intel should be able to stuff 4 of those cores easily onto a single die and still offer a power savings to Apple. Combine the much better use of threads with all the other system speed ups and ATOM could be very useful on low end hardware.
Dave
I have forgotten..what is the advantage of the ZFS file system?
I have seen that Snow Leopard Server *supports* ZFS, but not that it would actually boot from and use-as-default a ZFS mount.
Where are you getting your information?
@DaveG: ZFS is 128-bit addressable...with advanced features like storage pools and multiple file systems (each user could have his/her own root. Practically infinite storage, efficient and native snapshots (huge win for Time Machine storage). By all accounts, drastically simplifies how the OS utilizes the file system.
Huge win overall, in my opinion.
Mac OS X Snow Leopard needs an App Store, just like the iPhone 2.0 and no PowerPC Support and only 64-bit support!
Sounds very promising to me.
It will be an exciting release, especially if ZFS is included.
Can’t wait to switch from my powerMac G5 to an intel Mac Pro with Nehalem CPUs.