All Things Apple

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Snow Leopard was released last Friday.

(CNN) -- Snow Leopard, the highly anticipated new operating system for the Mac, will be released ahead of schedule Friday, Apple announced Monday.
"Ordered already: I'm just one of those nut cases," one Twitter user wrote about the new release.

"Ordered already: I'm just one of those nut cases," one Twitter user wrote about the new release.

The Mac OS X Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade to the current Leopard system for $29 and can be pre-ordered now, the company said.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/08/24/snow.leopard/index.html

More information and pricing located here.
 
Apple in general is just overrated. I only like them for media. But that's interesting...
 
You could say that it is in some ways.
The Mac OS X Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade to the current Leopard system for $29 and can be pre-ordered now, the company said.
So they're charging for a service pack?

Well, I guess that pretty much sums it up...
 
So they're charging for a service pack?

Well, I guess that pretty much sums it up...

I read these posts in the comments section of an article relating to this story.

Bias much? I hate to sound like an apple fan boy since i'm not, but Vista was horrible, the service packs and updates that people downloaded didn't fix anything and there was a new update every day, they those updates were huge.


Windows 7 is amazing, i've played with the RC's and it works great, BUT in all fairness, it IS a service pack, aside from the new animations and maximizing options, it IS vista how it should have been, theres nothing new aside from a smaller footprint.


Apple never really stated snow leopard was amazing, in face this was the first time i've see an apple product just so silently launched, and what's more its 29 dollars!!! windows 7 wont even come close to that price, and theres only 2 versions of osx! not 1000000000000.
I'm not a W7 hater by any means, in fact I love the OS. However as one poster wrote its what Vista should have been!!


For those that complain about snow leopard and their lack of legacy support - hello you are the same people that complain for years because MS hasn't made any major milestone changes. Apple in large cut legacy support with Mac OSX just so for that reason. Legacy support does little more than hold back an OS. You really can't have it both ways!


I love this statement "Incremental vs. Monumental:" WTF is so monumental about W7. Its not leaps and bound better than anything MS has now!! In fact millions upon millions of XP users have said they are sticking with XP, hell from an enterprise stand point I don't think W7 is a threat to XP's dominance. Snow Leopard and Apple products by in large aren't meant for the enterprise level, they are too costly so saying its no threat to MS in the enterprise level is well a foolish...duh

When MS pulls out a $29 OS upgrade let me know. Then you can come back and make your bias statements and I might swallow that pill. However until that happens I'll leave your MS lip service behind.
Point one. I'm sorry but Win 7 RC actually runs faster on my XP box than XP. RAM = dirt cheap and a 1GHz cpu is pretty low on the req side. Don't knock it before you obviously tried it.


Point two. Apple is releasing what is pretty much a service pack and charging $30 for it. Scam anyone?


Point three. It's going to be MS or Google. Apple's closest device would be the iPhone which I love or the rumored iTablet. Apple will not be able to compete with Google or MS in this market as they always price themselves higher.


I'm tired of you Mac Fanatics. Yes I have a Mac and an iPhone, but I'm not as blindly loyal to the truths. And that is that Snow Leopard is a $30 service pack.
I do want to comment on this statement: "As for your final point, I already addressed that. Microsoft frequently puts out operating system and application upgrades similar to Snow Leopard. They're called Service Packs and they're FREE and Microsoft doesn't hype them as new sales."


I'm curious how many users out there can tell me what the difference is between Vista Sp2 and W7, W/O copying and pasting it from MS's site!! What major improvements were made (other than UI) that make it worth the $120+ upgrade fee. For that matter who can tell me the difference from Win2000 to XP, again other than UI.
In some ways, this is a service pack. In other ways, it's not. I personally think there are enough changes to the operating system to warrant another version release.

The 64-bit transition.

The entire computing industry is moving from 32-bit to 64-bit technology, and it's easy to see why. Today's Mac computers can hold up to 32GB of physical memory, but the 32-bit applications that run on them can address only 4GB of RAM at a time. 64-bit computing shatters that barrier by enabling applications to address a theoretical 16 billion gigabytes of memory, or 16 exabytes. It can also enable computers to crunch twice the data per clock cycle, which can dramatically speed up numeric calculations and other tasks. Earlier versions of Mac OS X have offered a range of 64-bit capabilities. Now Snow Leopard takes the next step in the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit.
A graphic shift in performance.

Now a new technology in Mac OS X Snow Leopard called OpenCL takes the power of graphics processors and makes it available for general-purpose computing. No longer will graphics processors be limited to graphics-intensive applications such as games and 3D modeling. Instead, once developers begin to use OpenCL in their applications, you'll experience greatly improved speed in a wide spectrum of applications.
For example, sophisticated financial modeling techniques can be incorporated into desktop accounting software and personal finance software. Media applications can perform complex, intensive operations with larger video and graphics files. Games can have more realistic physics simulations. And scientists and researchers can tackle far more challenging problems using their everyday Mac computers.
Familiar, C-based language with industry support.

OpenCL stands for Open Computing Language. It's a C-based programming language with a structure that will be familiar to programmers, who can simply use Xcode developer tools to adapt their programs to work with OpenCL. They don't have to completely rewrite applications to use OpenCL. They need only rewrite the most performance-intensive parts of their application in OpenCL C. The vast majority of application code can be left unchanged. Best of all, OpenCL is an open standard that's supported by the biggest names in the industry, including AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA.
Introducing Grand Central Dispatch.

Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) in Mac OS X Snow Leopard addresses this pressing need. It's a set of first-of-their-kind technologies that makes it much easier for developers to squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems. With GCD, threads are handled by the operating system, not by individual applications. GCD-enabled programs can automatically distribute their work across all available cores, resulting in the best possible performance whether they're running on a dual-core Mac mini, an 8-core Mac Pro, or anything in between. Once developers start using GCD for their applications, you'll start noticing significant improvements in performance.
I've heard it compared to Windows 98 Second Edition, in which Microsoft charged for updates and tweaks done to Windows 98.

In general though - don't start bitching simply because Apple is charging for this, or the fact that it's simply Apple. There's plenty of anti-Apple people around here who'll jump at any chance they can get to make a smart ass reply about the company in order to make themselves feel better. So it's really no surprise we get comments like this in a thread involving Apple.

Apple in general is just overrated. I only like them for media.
Yet they go around criticizing those who use Mac OS or show any sign of support to the system and automatically label them as an Apple fanboy.
 
I'm no fan of apple, but as said above I don't think that's a reason for shooting them down for everything they do.

If I was - well whether I made this purchase or not would entirely depend on whether I needed to or would feel the benefits. I'd have a look through the features. Is there anything there really worth $30 that I'm missing at the moment? If so sure, I'd go for it, if not then nope.

I completely agree with those comparing it to windows vista / windows 7 - heck I never upgraded to Vista because it was so awful. If anything, the mac situation looks BETTER than the improvement windows 7 gives over vista - the requirements for 7 never got any less, only stayed the same. The latest mac OS claims to use under half the disk space of the original. Hats off to the guys at apple for realising where the bloat was and spending time cutting it all back. That's something I've NEVER seen Microsoft do!
 
Brother GF bought a mac because it was an apple computer and it had iChat. Only reasons she had for buying it.
 
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