A few months ago, Apple announced that the next version of Mac OS X – that’s 10.6, or Snow Leopard, to give it its pussycat name[1] would be released in September. Now we all know software release dates. September often turns into next July, or worse, but this time things are different. After a bit of speculation, it’s been confirmed that Snow Leopard will be formally released this Friday, 28 August. OK, that’s only a few days before the beginning of September, but by software standards it’s more than a little unusual.

Snow Leopard isn’t a massive upgrade – it’s mostly a matter of refinements, tweaks, and a lot of background stuff that users won’t see, but which will provide developers with a solid platform to make better applications. And it’s for those reasons that Apple are keeping the price down. Subject to the usual mutterings about US to UK price conversions being a bit dodgy ($29 becomes £25, but it’s important to note that the US price does exclude sales taxes), it’s remarkably cheap for an OS upgrade. And if (like me) you have multiple Macs, there’s the 5 licence “family pack”, which I’ve ordered from Amazon at a quite reasonable £39.

I’ll be installing it on the MacBook more or less immediately, and on the Mini and the iMac soon after. Details, reports, and comments may follow. Or not, depending.

[1] All these versions of Mac OS X have been named after some kind of kitty cat. The current one, 10.5, is Leopard, before that there was Tigger Tiger, and so on and so forth