Upgrade from Mac OS X Leopard with Snow Leopard, a simpler, more powerful,
and more refined version of Mac OS X. It delivers a wide range of enhancements,
next-generation technologies, out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange
Server, and new accessibility features. Apple Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
is the world's most advanced operating system, finely tuned from installation to
shutdown.

Mac OS X. It's what makes a Mac a Mac.

• Power of UNIX. Simplicity of the Mac.
  Mac OS X is
  both easy to use and incredibly powerful. Everything--from the desktop you
  see when you start up your Mac to the applications you use every day--is
  designed with simplicity and elegance in mind. So whether you're browsing
  the web, checking your email, or video chatting with a friend on another
  continent, getting things done is at once easy to learn, simple to perform,
  and fun to do. Of course, making amazing things simple takes seriously
  advanced technologies, and Mac OS X is loaded with them. Not only is it
  built on a rock-solid, time-tested UNIX foundation that provides
  unparalleled stability, it also delivers incredible performance, stunning
  graphics, and industry-leading support for Internet standards.
  
  
  


• Perfect integration of hardware and software.
  Since
  the software on every Mac is created by the same company that makes the Mac
  itself, you get an integrated system in which everything works together
  perfectly. The advanced technologies in the operating system take full
  advantage of the 64-bit, multicore processors and GPUs to deliver the
  greatest possible performance. The built-in iSight camera works seamlessly
  with the iChat software so you can start a video chat with a click. Your Mac
  notebook includes a Multi-Touch trackpad that supports pinching, swiping,
  and other gestures. And the OS communicates with the hardware to deliver
  incredible battery life by spinning down the hard drive when it's inactive,
  by intelligently deciding whether the CPU or GPU is best for a task, and by
  automatically dimming the screen in low-light conditions.


• Elegant interface and stunning graphics.
  The most
  striking feature of a Mac is its elegant user interface, made possible by
  graphics technologies that are built to leverage the advanced graphics
  processor in your Mac. These technologies provide the power for things like
  multiway chatting, real-time reflections, and smooth animations. Fonts on
  the screen look beautiful and extremely readable. A soft drop shadow makes
  it clear at a glance which window is active and which ones are in the
  background. You can preview just about any type of file using Quick Look,
  and because the previews are high resolution, you can actually read the
  text. Built-in support for the PDF format means you can view or create PDFs
  from almost any application in the system.


• Highly secure by design.
  Mac OS X doesn't get PC
  viruses. And with virtually no effort on your part, Mac OS X protects itself
  from other malicious applications. It was built for the Internet in the
  Internet age, offering a variety of sophisticated technologies that help
  keep you safe from online threats. Because every Mac ships with a secure
  configuration, you don't have to worry about understanding complex settings.
  Even better, it won't slow you down with constant security alerts and
  sweeps. And Apple responds quickly to online threats and automatically
  delivers security updates directly to your Mac.


• Built for compatibility.
  The versatility and power
  of Mac OS X make it compatible in almost any environment, including Windows
  networks. It works with virtually all of today's digital cameras, printers,
  and other peripherals without the need to manually download separate
  drivers. It opens popular file types such as JPG, MP3, and Microsoft Word,
  Excel, and PowerPoint documents. In addition, Mac OS X includes built-in
  support for the industry-standard PDF format, so you can read and create
  PDFs from almost any application in the system--perfect for sharing work
  with colleagues whether they use a Mac or a PC. If you want to run Windows
  on your Mac, you can do that, too. And Mac OS X Snow Leopard is the only
  operating system with built-in support for the latest version of Microsoft
  Exchange Server, so you can use your Mac at home and at work and have all
  your messages, meetings, and contacts in one place.


• Innovation for everyone.
  Mac OS X comes standard
  with a wide range of assistive technologies that help people with
  disabilities experience what the Mac has to offer--including many features
  you won't find in other operating systems at any price. For example, the
  built-in VoiceOver screen-reading technology makes it possible for those who
  are blind or have low vision to control their computer using key commands or
  gestures on a Multi-Touch trackpad. Mac OS X also offers out-of-the-box
  support for over 40 braille displays, including Bluetooth displays, and many
  other accessibility features, such as dynamic full-screen magnification,
  playback of closed captions, and a scalable screen.


• Reliable to the core.
  The core of Mac OS X is built
  on the same ultrareliable UNIX foundation that powers industrial-strength
  servers, helping to ensure that your computing experience remains free from
  system crashes and compromised performance. Even upgrading your Mac to the
  next version of Mac OS X is reliable and easy. It checks your applications
  to make sure they're compatible and sets aside any programs known to be
  incompatible. If a power outage interrupts your installation, it can start
  again without losing any data. Best of all, upgrading doesn't require
  reformatting your drive; you can keep all your compatible applications,
  files, and settings. And if something goes wrong when you're using your Mac,
  Time Machine is there to keep automatic backups of everything on your drive.
  


• Fully featured, fully loaded.
  Mac OS X comes in a
  single, full-featured version that includes a large collection of
  beautifully designed applications. They not only let you surf the web,
  conduct video and text chats, manage your contacts, and accomplish other
  day-to-day tasks--they also work together to make you more productive and
  let you have more fun.

WHAT'S NEW IN SNOW LEOPARD:

• Refined, not reinvented.
  Mac OS X is renowned for
  its simplicity, its reliability, and its ease of use. So when it came to
  designing Snow Leopard, Apple engineers had a single goal: to make a great
  thing even better. They searched for areas to refine, further simplify, and
  speed up -- from little things like ejecting external drives to big things
  like installing the OS. In many cases, they elevated great to amazing. Here
  are just a few examples of how your Mac experience was fine-tuned.


• A more advanced, more nimble Finder.
  The Finder has
  been completely rewritten in Cocoa to take advantage of all the modern
  technologies in Mac OS X, including 64-bit support and Grand Central
  Dispatch. It's more responsive from top to bottom, with snappier performance
  throughout the Finder. And it includes new features such as customizable
  Spotlight search options and an enhanced icon view that lets you thumb
  through a multipage document or watch a QuickTime movie.


• New look, new features for Expose and Stacks.
  
  Expose is refined and more convenient. It's now integrated in the Dock, so
  you can just click and hold an application icon in the Dock and all the
  windows for that application will unshuffle so you can quickly change to
  another one. Expose also has a whole new look. Windows are displayed in an
  organized grid, making it even easier to find what you're looking for. And
  stacks -- Dock items that give you fast access to a folder of files -- are
  now scrollable, so you can easily view all items. You can also navigate
  through folders in a stack to see all the files inside it.


• Quicker Time Machine backup.
  Introduced in Mac OS X
  Leopard, the revolutionary Time Machine made backing up your hard drive easy
  for the first time. Time Capsule took backup even further with its wireless
  hard drive that works seamlessly with Time Machine. Now Snow Leopard makes
  Time Machine up to 80 percent faster and reduces the time it takes to
  complete your initial backup to Time Capsule.


• Faster to wake up and shut down.
  With Snow Leopard,
  your Mac wakes from sleep up to twice as quickly when you have screen
  locking enabled. And shutting down is up to 80 percent faster, saving
  precious moments when you're trying to head home or to the airport.


• Faster, more reliable installation.
  Upgrading your
  Mac has never been easier. For Snow Leopard, the entire process has been
  simplified, streamlined, and is up to 50 percent faster, yet more
  comprehensive and reliable.2 For example, Snow Leopard checks your
  applications to make sure they're compatible and sets aside any programs
  known to be incompatible. In case a power outage interrupts your
  installation, it can start again without losing any data.


• Smaller footprint.
  Snow Leopard takes up less than
  half the disk space of the previous version, freeing about 7GB for you --
  enough for about 1,750 more songs3 or a few thousand more photos.


• Another leap forward for QuickTime.
  QuickTime X is
  the next-generation media technology that powers the audio and video
  experience in Mac OS X Snow Leopard. It includes a completely new QuickTime
  Player application with a clean, uncluttered design, a new trimming
  interface, and easy uploads to YouTube and MobileMe. And it delivers more
  efficient media playback, HTTP-based live streaming, and greater color
  accuracy.


• Innovative Chinese character input.
  Until Snow
  Leopard, if you wanted to enter Chinese characters on a computer, you had to
  type in the phonetic spelling of Chinese words and the computer would
  convert them into proper Chinese characters. Snow Leopard offers a
  breakthrough new way to enter characters: You write them directly on the
  Multi-Touch trackpad in your Mac notebook. They'll appear on the screen in a
  new input window, which recommends characters based on what you drew and
  lets you choose the right one. The input window even offers suggestions for
  subsequent characters based on what you chose.


• More reliable, higher-resolution iChat.
  Having a
  video chat using iChat is more reliable and more accessible than ever in
  Snow Leopard.4 It includes technology to address many common router
  incompatibilities that can interfere with connections. And if iChat can't
  make a direct connection, it will use the AIM relay server to create a
  successful chat session.
  Now more people can have high-resolution,
  640-by-480-pixel video chats, because the technical requirements are less
  demanding: You need only one-third the upstream bandwidth previously
  required -- 300 Kbps instead of 900 Kbps. And finally, iChat Theater now
  offers 640-by-480 resolution, four times greater than before.


• The right service at the right time.
  The Services
  menu in Mac OS X lets you use features of one application while working in
  another. In Snow Leopard, services are more simplified, streamlined, and
  helpful. The Services menu is contextual, so it shows just the services
  appropriate for the application you're using or content you're viewing
  rather than all available services. You can access services with a right
  click of your mouse or Control-click of your trackpad. You can configure the
  menu to show only the services you want, and you can even create your own
  services using Automator.


• Automatic updates for printer drivers.
  Snow Leopard
  makes sure you always have the most up-to-date driver so you can get the
  most from your printer. When you plug in a printer, Mac OS X can download
  the latest driver available over the Internet. And it periodically checks to
  make sure it has the latest driver. If not, it downloads the newest version
  through Software Update. Easy.


• Automatic time zone setup.
  If you're traveling
  around the world, the last thing you want to worry about is whether your
  computer is set to the correct time zone. Snow Leopard takes care of that
  for you. Using the Core Location technology, it locates known Wi-Fi hotspots
  to set the time zone automatically, so you'll always know the right time no
  matter where you are.


• Easy PDF text selection.
  Here's an enhancement that
  exemplifies the pursuit of perfection. When using a PDF viewer such as
  Preview, have you ever tried to copy text from a PDF document that has more
  than one column? It's almost impossible. Instead of selecting only the text
  you want, your cursor selects all the text across the page, so you end up
  with a mix of words from every column.


• Faster, more powerful Safari.
  Safari 4 is the latest
  version of the blazing-fast web browser. It renders web pages at high speed
  and delivers a range of new features, including full history search, smart
  address and search fields, an innovative way to display your top sites,
  industry-leading support for web standards, and more.


• More reliable disk eject.
  Snow Leopard improves the
  reliability of ejecting discs and external drives. Sometimes when an
  application or process is using the files on a drive, Mac OS X prevents you
  from ejecting it, but you don't always know why. In Snow Leopard, you'll get
  fewer of those errors and when you do get them, you'll see exactly which
  application is using the drive, so you can quit it and eject the drive
  properly.


• More efficient file sharing.
  The Bonjour technology
  in every Mac makes file and media sharing virtually effortless. Now Bonjour
  in Snow Leopard makes sharing more energy efficient. If you have a computer
  in your home or office that shares files -- like media files for your Apple
  TV -- you have to leave the computer on all the time, which isn't very
  energy efficient. With Snow Leopard and a compatible AirPort Extreme or Time
  Capsule base station, however, your computer can go to sleep yet continue to
  share its files with other computers and devices, waking when you need it
  and sleeping when you don't.

FEATURES

• Dock + Finder
  The Dock in Mac OS X provides fast,
  one-click access to frequently used applications, folders, files, and even
  downloads from the Internet. The Finder makes working with your files and
  documents as easy as browsing your iTunes library.
  The Dock at the bottom
  of the screen gives you quick access to your most frequently used
  applications, files, and folders. With its visually appealing,
  high-resolution icons, the Dock practically begs to be clicked. When you do,
  your applications spring to life instantly, and a bright signal tells you
  which applications are open. You can also use Expose from the Dock to
  instantly see all the open windows for an application.


• Expose
  Instantly view all open windows in stunning
  style with a single keystroke. Expose unshuffles overlapping windows on your
  desktop into an organized thumbnail view, so you can quickly locate and
  switch to any window or get to any file on the desktop.
  With one
  keystroke, Expose instantly tiles all your open windows, scales them down,
  and neatly arranges them, so you can see what's in every single one. And you
  definitely can see every one, because Expose preserves the visual quality of
  the window in its reduced size. To see a full-screen preview, just press the
  Space bar. That's not all. Move from one tiled window to the next and you'll
  see its title displayed at the bottom of the window. When you find the
  window you need, just click it. Magically, every window returns to full
  size, and the window you clicked--whether it's a folder, a PDF, a QuickTime
  movie, or a Word document--becomes the active window.


• Quick Look
  Instantly preview the contents of your
  documents without ever opening them. Flip through multipage PDFs, watch
  full-screen video, view photo slideshows, and more. With a single click.
  
  Quick Look is the innovative technology that gives you a sneak peek of
  entire files--even multiple-page documents and video--without opening them.
  All you have to do is select a file in the Finder and press the Space bar.
  An elegant transparent window appears, showing you the contents of the file
  instantly. It's great when you're looking for something specific but don't
  have time to open lots of files to find it.


• Spotlight
  With Spotlight, you can find anything on
  your computer as quickly as you type: files, email, contacts, images,
  calendar events, and applications. And because it's built into the core of
  Mac OS X, search results update instantly whenever files change.
  
  Spotlight is the lightning-fast search technology built into Mac OS X that
  makes it easy to find what you're looking for, even if you don't know where
  to look. Conveniently available in the Mac OS X menu bar, the Spotlight
  search field gives you instant results as you start typing, encompassing not
  only files, folders, and documents but also messages in Mail, contacts in
  Address Book, iCal calendars, items in System Preferences, applications, and
  even dictionary definitions. Spotlight searches aren't confined to your
  computer--you can also search other computers on the network.


• Safari 4
  Experience the web with the fast,
  easy-to-use web browser. With its simple, elegant interface and support for
  the latest Internet standards, Safari gets out of your way and lets you
  enjoy the web.
  Safari 4 in Snow Leopard outraces all other browsers. On
  even the most demanding Web 2.0 applications, Safari delivers blazingly fast
  performance using the new Nitro Engine. For example, thanks to 64-bit
  technology in Snow Leopard, JavaScript performance in Safari 4 is up to 50
  percent faster than the 32-bit version of Safari. In addition, Safari offers
  top-flight HTML performance--the best on any platform--loading pages up to 3
  times faster than Internet Explorer 8 and almost 3 times faster than Firefox
  3.5. What does all that mean for you? Less time loading pages and more time
  enjoying them.


• Mail, iCal, Address Book
  Three built-in applications
  that work as one: Mail, iCal, and Address Book bring the power of Mac OS X
  to your email, calendar, and contacts. You get elegant, easy-to-use
  interfaces, lightning-fast searches, and complete integration across the
  applications and your Mac.


• iChat
  Included with Mac OS X, iChat is a rich
  instant messaging application that works with your AIM or MobileMe account
  and makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using text and
  video, whether they're on a Mac or a PC.


• iTunes
  iTunes plays all your digital music and
  video. It syncs content to your iPod, iPhone, and Apple TV. And it's an
  entertainment superstore that stays open 24/7.
  Forget rifling through
  stacks of CDs or flipping through channels. iTunes puts your entire music
  and video collection a mere click away, giving you an all-access pass to
  thousands of hours of digital entertainment. Browse. Organize. Play. All
  from your Mac or PC.


• QuickTime X
  Watch pristine-quality video in a clean,
  uncluttered window. Record and trim your own movies. And easily share them
  over the web.
  Completely redesigned in Mac OS X Snow Leopard, QuickTime X
  debuts a brand-new version of QuickTime Player, the application used by
  millions to watch a wide range of video formats and files. Using the power
  of the Core Animation technology in Mac OS X, QuickTime Player offers a
  clean, uncluttered interface with controls that fade out when they're not
  needed. And large thumbnail images make navigating chaptered movies simpler
  than before. Instead of text-only chapter names, QuickTime Player displays
  frame-based thumbnail images for each chapter marker, so it's easy to
  navigate your chaptered media.


• Photo Booth
  Take fun photo snapshots and video clips
  with your built-in iSight camera using Photo Booth. Send them to your
  friends, use one as an iChat icon, add them to your Address Book, or
  organize and edit them in iPhoto.
  Photo Booth is a fun application that
  makes it easy to take photos using the built-in iSight camera in your Mac.
  Just look into the lens, smile, and click. Before it snaps your photo, Photo
  Booth flashes your display with bright white to add more light to your face.
  Take a single snapshot or use the burst mode to take four quick pictures.


• Time Machine
  Never again worry about losing your
  digital files. Time Machine automatically saves up-to-date copies of
  everything on your Mac--photos, music, videos, documents, applications, and
  settings. If you ever have the need, you can easily go back in time to
  recover anything.
  Time Machine works with your Mac and an external hard
  drive. Just connect the drive and assign it to Time Machine and you're a
  step closer to enjoying peace of mind. Time Machine will automatically back
  up your entire Mac, including system files, applications, accounts,
  preferences, music, photos, movies, and documents. But what makes Time
  Machine different from other backup applications is that it not only keeps a
  spare copy of every file, it remembers how your system looked on a given
  day--so you can revisit your Mac as it appeared in the past.