top of page

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (Final Retail)

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.

 

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.

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.It's not a stretch to imagine that many of the artists and developers who piled on the user-visible features in Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 have been reassigned to iPhone OS (temporarily or otherwise).

 

After all, Mac OS X and iPhone OS share the same core operating system, the same language for GUI development, and many of the same APIs. Some workforce migration seems inevitable.

Mac OS X 10.6.7 Snow Leopard - Final Retail - MAC OSX

Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.8 - WINDOWS OS

iATKOS S3 Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.3

bottom of page