5 Things You Should Know About Snow Leopard

For years, Apple has churned out versions of Mac OS X pumped full of new features geared toward the average user. And it seems like with every iteration of Mac OS X, the new feature count balloons. While many of these new features are small -- for example, Apple touted additional fonts as a new Leopard feature -- new features still drove marketing and appeal for new Mac OS X versions. With Snow Leopard, Apple is taking a detour, and is focusing on performance, under-the-hood improvements, and user interface refinements. That doesn't mean Snow Leopard isn't worth paying attention to, though. Here are five things you should know about Snow Leopard.

Speed and Efficiency

Snow Leopard includes a host of new features with performance in mind, such as Grand Central Dispatch (which allows Snow Leopard to better take advantage of multi-core processors) and OpenCL (which lets Snow Leopard use the graphics card to do general computing tasks). This has uses beyond science, 3D, gaming, and such, but could be put to work for everyday tasks. Also, Snow Leopard should use much less disk space; Apple claims you could regain over 6 GB of disk space by installing Snow Leopard, but your mileage will most certainly vary.

As a point of comparison, Windows 7 Release Candidate saw a slight performance boost over Windows Vista in our preliminary testing.

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