News: Snow Leopard Shipping on Friday

As many have expected, Apple beat its own estimate of a September ship date for Snow Leopard. Instead, copies of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will be on their way to customers starting Friday, August 28.

Pricing remains as originally stated: $29 for the “Upgrade” copy for Leopard (10.5) users, $49 for the Family Pack, or $9.95 for users who bought a Mac after June 8. For those still running on Tiger, Apple offers the Mac Box Set for $169, which includes the latest versions of iLife and iWork, as well ($229 for the Family Pack).

More comes from Apple’s press release:

CUPERTINO, California—August 24, 2009—Apple® today announced that Mac OS® X v10.6 Snow Leopard™ will go on sale Friday, August 28 at Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers, and that Apple’s online store is now accepting pre-orders. Snow Leopard builds on a decade of OS X innovation and success with hundreds of refinements, new core technologies and out of the box support for Microsoft Exchange. Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade for Mac OS X Leopard® users for $29.

“Snow Leopard builds on our most successful operating system ever and we’re happy to get it to users earlier than expected,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering. “For just $29, Leopard users get a smooth upgrade to the world’s most advanced operating system and the only system with built in Exchange support.”

Also, some have speculated that as this is an upgrade disc, it will still let you install Snow Leopard on a blank hard drive if the machine you’re using it with was sold after Leopard was released (aka Macs newer than October 2007). For those who have Intel Macs that were sold before that, there could be some issues, so keep your Leopard disc handy. Again, this is speculation and we’d love to hear comments from users when they get a hold of Snow Leopard.