Mac OS X Snow Leopard one step closer to release, now Golden Master
Mac OS X 10.6, AKA Snow Leopard, is one step closer to being released sometime in the next month. Multiple reports indicate that build 10A432 of the new OS has reached Golden Master status, which indicates that all testing has been completed to the satisfaction of the development team.
As we've noted before, Snow Leopard won't introduce many new features. Instead, it's intended to reduce the size of the OS and run much faster on Intel hardware. Snow Leopard will be the first version of Mac OS X that cannot be run on PPC Macs. Amazon.com is already taking pre-orders for Snow Leopard at US$29 for a single-user license or just US$49 for the five-license Family Pack.
The next step is to release the OS to manufacturing, so that the requisite millions of copies can be burned into DVDs prior to the actual release date. When will that actually happen? My personal guess is September 25th, as the last two versions of Mac OS X were released on a Friday (October 26, 2007 for Leopard and April 29, 2005 for Tiger). Of course, Apple could release Snow Leopard on September 15th to rain on Microsoft's release of the Zune HD.
Take our reader poll and give us your best guess for when Snow Leopard will arrive.
[via MacRumors]
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