Apple Thoughts: Mac OS X Snow Leopard Announced at WWDC '09

"In between new notebooks and fawning over the iPhone, Bertrand Serlet got up on stage to talk about Snow Leopard, the next release of Mac OS X. Apple took a few digs at Microsoft for stumbling with Windows Vista and trying to play catch-up with Windows 7. The picture that our friends in Cupertino are trying to paint is that Leopard has been a huge success and that Snow Leopard will be even better."

This was the expected announcement of the next version of Mac OS X. I'm not a guru or anything close when it comes to software, so some of these changes are exciting according to the reports I've been reading, but to be honest, I don't understand all of it. From what I do understand though, one big change is that OS X will be fully 64-bit with this version. So the only thing holding back the software is the limits on hardware, ie RAM (which is improving to 8 Gigs on the new MBP line). And since all Macs have a 64-bit processor already built in, this should also speed performance. Grand Central and Open CL support are in this version also. Grand Central allows better utilization of the processors and Open CL allows developers to use current graphics processing power and makes it available for any application, which should speed up performance dramatically. And last but certainly not least, the addition of Exchange support. This makes the Mac running OS X compatible with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. If any company was on the fence or pondering a switch to OS X, this should make the decision much easier.

So some modifications and additions to speed up the processing of your programs, along with more security, but I'm still not sure if I will upgrade right away. The release of Snow Leopard will be in September 2009, and you can't beat the price. $29.00 USD for single license or $49.00 USD for the family version. How about you, is this one in your future? Or is the current version of OS X good enough?