An Apple director has inadvertently broken word that his company may be planning to release Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard three months earlier than expected.
Speaking at the Large Installation System Administration (LISA) conference in San Diego last week, Apple's director of Unix technology Jordan Hubbard ran a series of slides [] as part of his presentation, which have since been linked off the conference's .
Of possible interest is one slide (below) that outlines the frequency in which the company has released major new versions of the Mac OS X operating system dating back to its inception in 2000. In addition to all past releases, it pencils in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard for a release during first quarter (Jan - Mar) of 2009. The slide notes that its arrival should come a little more than 14 months after the last major Mac OS X release, Leopard.
While Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard at its developers conference last June, Apple stated that the software was "scheduled to ship in about a year," which would have put its release somewhere in the second or third quarter of the year, rather than the first.
Hubbard's revelation would suggest the Cupertino-based company may have plans to accelerate Snow Leopard's deployment schedule to the point where it can show off a near finalized copy at January's Macworld Expo and follow up with an official release a couple of months later.
Rather than add new usability features, the Mac maker said the goal of Snow Leopard will be to of Mac OS X, set a new standard for quality and lay the foundation for future Mac OS X innovation.
In particular, the software will be optimized for multi-core processors, tap into the vast computing power of graphic processing units (GPUs), enable breakthrough amounts of RAM, bundle support for Microsoft Exchange 2007, and feature a new, modern media platform with QuickTime X.
A slide from Jordan Hubbard's presentation at the LISA conference last week.
It should be noted, however, that external testing of Snow Leopard has thus far been extremely limited and at a frequency uncharacteristic of an Apple operating system bound for market in a few months. The company has released just one new test build of the software since June, which arrived late last month.
In that build, Apple introduced developers to a Mac OS X Finder that had been , a move towards a 64-bit kernel, and . The build, however, was rife with issues and a number of components were either suspended or exhibited quirky behavior.
Readers looking to keep up to date on Snow Leopard can find an archive of related reports on ÌÇÐÄVlog's . ÌÇÐÄVlog has also recently begun its which offers an in-depth look at the real-world benefits of the new operating system.