Apple plans to ship Snow Leopard in Sept. for $29; execs tout new laptops

Computerworld - Apple today announced that it will launch its next operating system, dubbed Snow Leopard, in September, and charge just $29 for the upgrade.

A Family Pack, which includes five licenses to the new OS, will cost $49.

If Apple makes its September ship date, it will beat rival Microsoft to market. Last week, Microsoft announced that it would have Windows 7 on sale Oct. 22. Microsoft has not yet revealed prices for Windows 7, but recent analysis by Computerworld noted that if the company cuts prices by the same percentages it did for Vista more than a year ago, some editions of Windows 7 could run about $100.

That made the price for Leopard stand out even more. "Leopard was $129 but we want all Leopard users to upgrade to Snow Leopard, so we're pricing it at $29," said Craig Federighi, the vice president of Mac OS engineering, during the WWDC keynote presentation Monday.

Snow Leopard, also known as Mac OS X 10.6, was introduced a year ago at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), the same locale for today's announcement. In 2008, Apple touted Snow Leopard as a performance and stability update that would "take a break" from major new features.

The company continued that line today. "We love Leopard, we're so proud of it [that] we decided to build upon Leopard," said Bertrand Serlet, senior vice president of software engineering. "We want to build a better Leopard, hence Snow Leopard."

Even so, Serlet bragged that company engineers refined more than 90% of Leopard's core code to create Snow Leopard, rewrote the Finder and added new features such as Expose integration with the Dock.

He touted Snow Leopard's improved performance, as well as faster speeds in some of the Apple-provide applications, such as Mail. Snow Leopard also adds in-box support for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, and synchronization support to Mail, Calendar and Address Book on the Mac from Exchange.

As expected, Snow Leopard requires an Intel-based Mac, the first time that Apple has crafted an operating system that drops support for the older PowerPC-based Macs.

Apple also launched an upgrade program for people who buy new Macs between today and Dec. 26, 2009. Dubbed "Mac OS X Snow Leopard Up-To-Date," the program provides customers who bought a qualifying Leopard-powered Mac with a copy of Snow Leopard for a shipping and handling fee of $9.95.

On the hardware front, Apple unveiled an updated 15-in. MacBook Pro. The new laptop, which starts at $1,699 and can be configured up to a 3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, has an integrated battery that Apple said will last seven hours.