Snow Leopard goes ‘golden master,’ shipping soonish?
See also: Mac OS X 10.6.3 [10D522] begins testing
The trials and travails of Apple’s Intel only successor to Leopard have been well documented. Happily, the year long beta process has been fairly uneventful with more reports of pleasant surprises than tales tester woe. Not pain free, mind you, but quite positive nonetheless.
Thereupon, Mac4Ever (en Francais, Google translation via MacRumors) reports that “knowledgeable sources” say that Snow Leopard OS X 10.6 (10A432) has been named gold master. The import being that the code for mothership’s next-gen operating system, which sheds legacy PPC code while gaining Intel optimizations as well as new technologies, like OpenCL, H.264 acceleration and QuickTime X, has been frozen and sent for manufacturing.
Depending on where Apple has their discs made, perhaps a combination of US (fast) and overseas (cheap volume), we should be seeing product on store shelves in no more than four weeks. Thereupon, it has been intuited from Amazon’s Snow Leopard pre-order blitz that the operating system could go on sale as early as September 1.
Whatever the exact timing, a lot of anticipation has built up around the arrival of Snow Leopard, which many users and pundits will give their existing Intel Macs a significant performance boost across the board.
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[...] OK, so no one uses film anymore—does anyone miss it?—but the handsome visage of Apple’s Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard retail packaging has been caught by a snap of the lens nonetheless and just a few days after sources near and far say the operating system went golden master. [...]