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.

Read the whole story

Amusing to see them undercut the upgrade price to 7. Even at that low of a price I may hold off upgrading until 10.7 just because the only Mac I have capable of SL is used as an htpc, and its working fine as is.

Well, it might be a jab at MS, but it's pretty much true. ;P They're really just improving on an operating system that works perfectly fine for current tech.

Yeh. Leopard is pretty good, I don't think Apple really innovated anything with SL, they just are improving it and dropping PPC support (which sucks for me, but was inevitable). Aside from an awesome 3d interface like compiz I'm not sure how much more they can improve an OS now (this goes for Windows and Mac).

My comment was more regarding Windows. I haven't really done much work with Macs, but from what I've seen... they're more keen on producing more innovative and good looking features than MS. I've seen some videos touting Leopard and it looks aesthetically pleasing, that's for sure. I'd be interested, again, in seeing a video of Snow Leopard in action.

I'm a 50/50 mac pc user, I run both. For real work I do tend to use PCs more only because of office, but Office 08 on Mac is great. And I also am a Vista user, so I'm probably in the ignored group that doesn't have any problem with either os. I'm only slightly upset with SL because it won't run on old macs., but this happens, I knew it would happen. The same thing happened between 680xx macs vs PPC macs, and yes I was a mac user when that happened.

Wow, now if only Microsoft would match the price for users of Windows.....

Indeed. ;P

Sweet, more money to put towards Windows 7.

LOL! Gotta stay positive people!

This is more like a service pack than a new OS.

It's like paying $29 for Vista SP2. So actually, Microsoft are quite a bit cheaper in this case...

Just to add.. how is this software update conparable to windows 7? I mean Microsoft never charged anybody for any service packs.
Please dont get sucked up by the noise in the media.
windows vista is pretty stable now. and the only issue was with the manufactors drivers. vista along dind't do much wrong. also to add up look at mac os x back in the day when i started. it was WORSE dan vista. it was full of nonesense. get ur facts straight....just dont go by what u hear in the news.

Windows 7 is just going to be SP3 for Vista, so why is paying $399 for that more justified?

Its just like Snow Leopard, a few stability updates and yet again more eye candy.

that's how much an os upgrade should cost not £100+, TAKE NOTE MICRO$OFT!!!

Seems to be some misinformed people after reading their comments.
Service Packs are essentially bug fixes and patches, and they should be at no cost to the consumer. Apple uses automatic software updates in place of SPs (also at no cost), so in the end both companies do their customer base good, just in a different manner. At the end of the day does it really matter how ? Now for software versions, Mac OS X is incremented by 0.1 for each major release, so please don't tell me that Tiger (10.4) is a SP of Leopard (10.5).
Just as Vista (6.0 or 6.1) was not a SP to XP.
Snow Leopard although not bringing any major enhancements to the GUI, does offer much to the user, it will load in only 6GB of space, run faster, be optimised to the nth degree, will feature Quick Time X and make use of systems resources that much better.
This does not sound like security patches or bug fixes, but enhancements.
I should know I have been a software developer for over 23 years and know maintenance versus enhancement concepts, have any of these people leaving comments written even a line of code ever in their lives, me thinks not.
So the bottom line is this, at $29 Snow Leopard is a steel, but Windows 7, which is a very minor enhancement to Vista, what will it retail at ?
Both companies take advantage of their customer base, well that's business folks, but MS has taken illegal, morally repugnant, obnoxious and disrespectful behaviour to the maximum.
I'm fascinated why people continue to throw money at MS, with their shody technology.

it looks great but there is still some kinks that need to be sorted out

everyone on this site neeeeeds to get a life