Mac OS X Snow Leopard to arrive in Q1 2009?

By on Nov 19, 2008 at 10:43 AM
Rumor November 19, 2008

When Apple previewed OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” at WWDC this past summer, it said the latest update to OS X would arrive in about a year. A rather long development cycle of 18 months for a relatively minor upgrade (from the user’s perspective at least) that improves multi-core processor support, enhances GPU performance, enables larger amounts of RAM and features the new QuickTime X. A recent presentation by Apple’s Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies, Jordan Hubbard, revealed that the actual ship date for Snow Leopard may be much sooner than the original target date. A single slide during Hubbard’s presentation at LISA ’08, a technical conference for engineers and system administrators, chronicles Mac OS X development from its public beta in 2000 to its current iteration. The last line on the slide includes a projected release date of Q1 2009 for OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Surprise, surprise – that is a good six or seven months earlier than expected and makes for a slightly speedier 14-month development cycle. This seemingly contradictory release date leaves us wondering whether this is an oversight, an optimistic projection that may be end up being a moving target or is Hubbard hinting at good things to come for the upcoming Macworld 2009 slated for January 5-9 in San Francisco? We are hoping for the latter but only time will tell.

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  • Dtest54

    “relatively minor upgrade (from the user’s perspective at least)”

    and thats the problem with consumers wanting them to rush out OS’s. I for one do not think its a minor upgrade and think that fine tuning and fixing things is hardly minor. Its not like its been 5 years since they released Leopard. Good writing but stupid sentiments.

  • MadMike

    Not to sound like a glaring Mac/BSD Fanboy but the entire evolution of Mac OS X should serve as a lesson to Microsoft. Mac OS 9 and prior, for lack of a better term, sucked gangrenous deer nuts. I was always a fan of Nextstep – to the point that I even used WindowMaker on my XFree86 rigs almost exclusively (after the bloody death of Enlightenment) until BlackBox wm came out.

    Microsoft should take a look at what Apple is doing. They rewrite the entire OS from scratch based on OpenBSD. The release more frequent updates for 1/3rd the price of what M$ charges – which means they make 3x the money. Also, take a look at Snow Leopard. A release that serves to clean up the OS.

    Microsoft should do a complete rewrite, from scratch. Give us a pure 64bit OS that natively supports as many processors and cores that you cna throw at it. Give us the new relational journaled file system and the new administration scripting language. Make a FUNCTIONAL OS instead of stupid eye candy.

  • GS

    Well this doesn’t come as a surprise. I heard from a very reliable source (Apple insider) that the new IMac’s will be announced by year’s end, so an update is expected!!!!

  • MadMike

    @GS: While that was a circulating rumor, Apple has publicly stated that their holiday lineup is complete. The soonest you will see an update would be Macworld in early January.

    However, by years end – I am sure you will see a slew of rumors about the possible releases slated for Macworld 2009.

    I personally am hoping for a 17″ MacBook Pro based on the new “brick” architecture. Then hopefully 10.6 will allow the support of 8GB on the new laptops.

    I already have my money in a special savings account gaining interest to buy a new MBP.

  • MadMike
  • http://www.jphotog.com Eric

    This story doesn’t make any sense. First of all, WWDC was in June. That’s the START of Summer, not Fall! So “about a year” means “about June. End of 1st quarter is three months before that. Let’s not mention the bad math about Leopard coming out in Oct 2007 and Snow Leopard arriving by March of 2009. That’s not two years by any stretch of the imagination.

    Microsoft said Win7 is coming the middle of 2009. So what is Apple doing? Getting ahead of Microsoft to get the release of Snow Leopard out.

    Yes, it appears to be a minor upgrade to the interface and applications that come with it, but it’s a major upgrade in many ways, Quicktime X being a big one. Plus offloading processor load to the GPU should be pretty cool too.

  • Evilhomer

    Anyone thinking that Snow Leopard is a minor upgrade doesn’t know their stuff. This is not a “for looks” upgrade, like Vista. This a core OS change and is going to KILL.

  • http://www.bgr.com Kelly Hodgkins

    @eric
    my mistake. I was writing wwdc but thinking of that special event in september. my mistake for writing and not really thinking about what i am writing. I did fix it. thanks for letting me know.

    @Evilhomer
    I only said relatively minor to the user as the average user wont notice the more substantial enhancements under the hood. Most people, pc and mac users alike, don’t even know what a gpu is, never mind care that gpu will be handling the graphics processing. I did not mean to underplay the changes and thereby seem to be promoting microsoft and/or vista.

  • Evilhomer

    @Kelly: Gotcha. I did notice that you qualified your remarks in parentheses from the “users perspective” and you are probably correct in assuming the average or casual Mac users won’t notice a difference. However, the “average” user isn’t really BGR’s audience. ;-)

  • http://www.bgr.com Kelly Hodgkins

    @EvilHomer
    you’re right I definitely wrote for the wrong audience. You all are far more technical than the average user. thanks for keeping me on track!

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