As I glanced through this list and the short explanations afforded to each on the Snow Leopard front page my first thought was "O.K. but will people pay over a $100 for this?," which was based on the invalid assumption that the pricing would remain consistent with previous releases. I was pleased to find out that Snow Leopard will be available with an upgrade price of $29, a very reasonable price indeed. Perhaps they were merely trying to undercut Microsoft, which apparently will make an upgrade from Windows Vista Premium to Windows 7 available for $50, or perhaps the influence went both ways.

It appears that Apple and Microsoft are focusing their coming releases on on building on the foundation of the existing software, rather than introducing a slew of new features. Apple purports, for example, that many tasks done in Snow Leopard will be faster and more responsive than in Leopard based on a number of refinements, core technology improvements, and rewrites. Refined, not reinvented, they say. Snow Leopard also features a smaller footprint of up to half of the space used by Leopard for equivalent functionality, though I have not found any details to indicate how much savings an average user might see. I'm particularly elated when I see Apple putting a major effort into such topics such as significantly reducing the wake-up and network connect times, and improving the services menu by making it contextual.

As I look through the improvements, I feel as if Mac OS X has gotten an affordable spring cleaning. There are still a lot of items on my honey-do list for Apple, but I'll take what I can get! By focusing inward on Mac OS X, I think Apple has done a great service to itself, it's users, and the future of the operating system. Will I buy an upgrade? Maybe..

Checkout more Snow Leopard improvements in the usual spot: http://www.apple.com/macosx/