Snow Leopard in January?
November 19th 2008
Quoting comments from Jordan Hubbard, director, Unix technologies engineering, MacRumors reports that Apple's Snow Leopard could be release as early as the first quarter of next year, in line with IGM's initial report on the subject which said the next-gen version of the OS ship at Macworld San Francisco. Whether Apple means to ship the OS in the first quarter or simply demo it isn't clear.
At this year's Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple executives said Snow Leopard would ship in about a year. If one assumes plus or minus two months as the meaning of "about a year," then earliest delivery date by that reckoning would be April and the latest being August.
Hubbard's comments came at LISA (Large Installation System Administration Conference), a technical conference targeted at engineers and system administrators and a written reference can be found in his presentation slides, viewable here (pdf).
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Apple has said that Snow Leopard will be much faster than Leopard and require less disc space. Further, the company has promised that the next-gen rewrite of the current OS will feature improved support for multi-core processors and GPU processing.
It's bears repeating that it's almost certain that Snow Leopard won't support PPC Macs. If Apple does indeed deliver the OS in Q1 of next year--less than three years since the last PPC Macs shipped in August of 2006.
Given that a Mac can be expected to last at least five years, Apple should provide PowerMac G5 owners et al a low-cost / subsidized upgrade path to ease the costs of the transition...
What's your take?
