First announced at the WWDC 2008, Apple has finally given Snow Leopard a ship date and a price at this year's Keynote address. The next major update to Mac OS X will be available in September, according to the company, and will be available to current Leopard users for just under $30. Apple says it has refined 90% of the operating system, and simply by installing it on their Macs customers will reclaim a whopping 6GB of hard drive space.

Much of the focus with Snow Leopard has been behind the scenes. It includes a rewritten Finder; performance improvements to Mail, Time Machine, and Safari 4; and a new version of QuickTime called QuickTime X that brings hardware acceleration, HTTP streaming and color synchronization. Snow Leopard will also take better advantage of 64-bit and multi-core processors and introduces OpenCL technology, which will let Macs use their otherwise idling graphics cards to process normal applications.

The company couldn't help itself from taking a few jabs at Microsoft as well, claiming Windows 7 is fundamentally just another version of Windows Vista with "even more complexity."