Apple to Release Snow Leopard on 08-Jun-09?
I saw this last week on ComputerWorld, and haven’t had a chance to say anything about this until now. Sorry… Real Life intrusions can suck sometimes. On top of that, I noticed the date… very close to when Apple was going to make its big announcements on 3/17, so I decided to hang out to see if any information about Snow Leopard might also come out on 3.0 Day. It didn’t, not even in the Q&A period; oh well…
As I was saying, I saw that Apple is planning on rolling out Snow Leopard during the early part of June 2009. What I find interesting, if this is in fact true, is that the iPhone 3.0/iPod Touch 3.0 software will also be made available at about the same time, if not the exact same day. (So as a new MB and 2G iPod Touch owner I need to pull together $139.99, plus tax, so that I can buy all the software.) When Apple announced Snow Leopard last year at WWDC, they said it would be ready in about a year; and again, that fits this time frame.
According to The Baltimore Sun, the Moscone Center has an opening June 6 through June 12 marked only as a generic "corporate meeting." That week is the same time of the month that Apple has held WWDC at Moscone in 2007 and 2008. As of this writing, Apple has not yet published a schedule for WWDC; but it seems logical that they will release iPhone 3.0 and at least announce a release date for Snow Leopard during the conference.
With the recent hardware refresh from Apple, all of the desktop pieces are now in place to support Snow Leopard. Speculation of the actual release date, again, is said to be between 6/6 and 6/12 (or right around 6/8).
As with everyone, I am very interested in this latest version of the OS. Its said that Snow Leopard will support OCL (Open Computing Language). OCL allows developers to borrow computuing power from the GPU and apply it to general, nongraphics tasks when the card isn’t occupied. All current Macs now support OCL via their nVidia processors, so there should be a decent performance boost to Snow Leopard compatible Macs.
Does your Mac support OCL? Is it Snow Leopard ready? Will you upgrade your current or relatively new Mac to Snow Leopard? Why don’t you join us in the discussion and let us know.