Mac OS X 10.6 details leak out

Updated 3:44 p.m. PDT: Apple PR formally issued the press release in question that went out inadvertently earlier Monday.

Apple quickly retracted a few Mac OS X 10.6 tidbits leaked out by its Canadian subsidiary following the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote, but the Internet misses nothing.

Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior VP of software engineering, told WWDC 2008 attendees about Snow Leopard Monday afternoon.

(Credit: Apple)

Scores of sites picked up on a press release that went out from Apple Canada and was pulled at some point after it went live. According to the release, Snow Leopard--which Apple CEO Steve Jobs confirmed is the code name for 10.6--will focus more on improving the basic plumbing of the operating system than adding any catchy new features, as The Unofficial Apple Weblog reported last week.

Apple's Bertrand Serlet was scheduled to address Apple's developers in a session closed to the press Monday afternoon to go over 10.6, and now we have some idea of what he's telling them; much to the chagrin of Apple PR, I suspect. Snow Leopard will improve support for multicore processors and allow developers to exploit powerful graphics processors, as we reported last week.

The release will also come with a new version of Quicktime that improves video playback, and a faster version of Safari. According to the reports, Apple expects to ship 10.6 "in about a year."

[Galaxy5]

Holy Moly! He looks like Two-Face...Apple is so cool they even have superhero badmen for VPs!

[MaLvaDo39]

Haha, that was good, Galaxy5!

Serlet is a genius though, also consider what's behind that mug.

[richardmayo]

@Galaxy

That's the funniest thing I've read all day. Well done sir!

[richardmayo]

@Galaxy

That's the funniest thing I've read all day. Well done sir!

[PaulEdl]

Why is it that Apple gets a free pass on this lame release of a plumbing-only update? Dont they have anyplace to innovate on the desktop? Oh wait... perhaps they are only spending their R&D budget on the iPhone this year. OS X is not equal to Enterprise Ready.

[open-mind]

I'm sure iPhone is part of it. Probably larger though (IMHO) is the near seamless transition from PPC to Intel that they did while 10.5 was in the pipe. They don't get much credit for pulling off that miracle, and I'm sure it took time away their usual levels of QA and optimization. At this point, I think Apple is doing the right thing ... fix the dings and leaks in the ship before deciding on where next to drive it.

[Mr. Dee]

Well, as I noted before, this will require a lot of customer loyality. At the sametime I can understand the reasoning behind the decision. Its more of an opportunity to do some serious spring cleaning in OS X and make it more than ready for future hardware platforms.

[amandachuck]

Yeah, I don't get why this isn't just a .5 release. though, there's the thought of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." maybe they got enough flack for the windows like "improvements" apple made with Leopard over a solid Tiger OS interface that they know that messing with everything again would just **** too many of us off.

[Vegaman_Dan]

Anyone get the urge to take Mr. Serlet's picture and run it through Photoshop to fix it? The lack of symmetry just makes me cringe.

[allmidknight]

If you look up snow leopard server on the apple site the newest OS will offer ZFS support. I would hope they totally get rid of hfs+.

[gsmiller88]

Snow Leopard kinda makes me wish I had saved $116 and skipped Leopard.

[danielszabo1981]

This has the familiar pattern of a trendy fashion designer revamping operations because their "cool" has worn off...

*note, I am an Apple-ite, but even I've got to admit that Stella seems to have lost her groove lately...

[JCPayne]

iS THAT A GLASS EYE???? THE LEFT ONE.

[pablodius]

his left or our left? lol

[Urbanpitch]

Does ANYONE ELSE think that someone has used the clone tool on this mans EYE! SERIOUSLY. THAT AINT RIGHT... if it is him, well, im sorry about it but u should get that fixed... u look like that guy from yugioh with the gold eye
... Pegasus! thats the one.
Also, this sounds like a big upgrade for Hardware purposes, not so much software features. It would probably be a good thing because programs |such as photoshop| will probably work much better than they do now. although, a year is a long time to wait...

[afterhours]

We can only hope they follow through on 10.6 being a maintenance release. How many features on the server side are broken or badly worked. Can we get ZFS? Can the server product actually support VH mail accounts for multiple domains from the GUI? How about that listserve called Mailman -- the opensource product has had VH support for 9 months, but the 'modern' 10.5 OSXS can't. What about support for multiple FTP accounts within the same domain? Keeping PHP and mySQL a little more current would be a wonderful concept. Oh -- I can see the Apple Engineers saying all this can be done with third-party CLI solutions. Geez -- bring back the greyhairs from Apple -- the ones that actually read the Addison texts on Human Interface Guidelines. Apple used to be a company that made the claim the computer should not get in the way of the user experience. Perhaps all those who came from NeXT might want to borrow a copy. The GUI is everything... and it could bring Apple's server product up to snuff. Is Bertrand listening? Is Apple?

[iwuzbord]

if you go to apple's website, you can see more details. They say it is more of an update to hardware support and improving preformance with current and future hardware. You can look here : http://www.apple.com/macosx/snowleopard/?sr=hotnews for more info. They even say that the actual operating system will take up less hard drive space than before, which i think is very interesting and will probably attract more users