Snow Leopard was publicly unveiled on June 8, 2009 at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. On August 28, 2009, it was released worldwide, and was made available for purchase from Apple's website and its retail stores at the price of US$29 for a single-user license. As a result of the low price, initial sales of Snow Leopard were significantly higher than that of its predecessors. The release of Snow Leopard came nearly two years after the introduction of Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5), the second longest time span between successive Mac OS X releases.
Unlike previous versions of Mac OS X, the goals with Snow Leopard were improved performance, greater efficiency and the reduction of its overall memory footprint. Addition of new end-user features was not a primary goal. Much of the software in Mac OS X was extensively rewritten for this release in order to fully take advantage of modern Macintosh hardware. New programming frameworks, such as OpenCL, were created, allowing software developers to use graphics cards in their applications. This is also the first Mac OS release since System 7.1.1 that does not support the PowerPC architecture, as Apple now intends to focus on its current line of Intel-based products.
Unlike previous versions of Mac OS X, the goals with Snow Leopard were improved performance, greater efficiency and the reduction of its overall memory footprint. Addition of new end-user features was not a primary goal. Much of the software in Mac OS X was extensively rewritten for this release in order to fully take advantage of modern Macintosh hardware. New programming frameworks, such as OpenCL, were created, allowing software developers to use graphics cards in their applications. This is also the first Mac OS release since System 7.1.1 that does not support the PowerPC architecture, as Apple now intends to focus on its current line of Intel-based products.
