Apple has been releasing development versions of Snow Leopard. Apple will showcase various features of Snow Leopard at its Worldwide Development Conference in June (WWDC), but Apple does not intend to release Snow Leopard to the public at that time.

Information listed here is subject to change but is likely to be accurate based on available information from non-Apple sources. Please note that this is not official information provided by Apple and is not intended to be definitive or relied upon for any purpose.

Apple will likely release Leopard to the public in late August, just in time for students to buy new computers. It will be installed and included with all new Mac purchases, including MacBook, MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, iMac, and MacBook Air. It will also be available as an upgrade package for existing Mac users. It will be able to upgrade Leopard Macs with minimal data loss in the process. It will likely be $29 as an upgrade for existing Leopard users. Computers purchased during the summer before it is released will likely qualify for a upgrade with pricing based solely on shipping/handling of media.

Kinks to be worked out include the stability of Grand Central (using graphics CPU for non-graphics processing) as well as low-level 64 bit kernel extensions to Unix/Darwin (similar to hardware “drivers” in Windows). As there are comparatively few hardware platforms for Macs (compared to Windows), this should be no problem.

While Snow Leopard will support both 32 and 64 bit applications, Apple is pushing developers to build 64 bit applications exclusively. Meanwhile, Apple is retooling all included applications to be full 64 bit applications.

The underlying code base may be re-numbered “Darwin 10″.

Developers will be provided with Cocoa tools and objects for parallel programming in Xcode 4.0 that are not available in Xcode 3.0. These parallel programming tools will assist developers in building applications that automatically delegate tasks to the graphics CPU in modern Macs and will provide load balancing algorithms.

Additional information to be released as appropriate.

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