snow leopard - News, Features, and Slideshows

Ten months after it debuted rudimentary malware scanning in Snow Leopard, Apple this week quietly added a signature for a third piece of malware, security researchers reported today.

On the surface, Apple's Snow Leopard Server feels like a $US499 maintenance release, but underneath, there's much more - improved performance, more polish and new apps focused on collaboration and content sharing.

Less than two weeks after Apple launched Snow Leopard, the company today issued the new operating system's first security update. In a separate upgrade, Apple patched 33 vulnerabilities in 2007's Leopard, and about half as many in the even older Tiger.

Snow Leopard is out and users seem generally satisfied with the latest version of the Mac OS X operating system. The release hasn't been without some controversy though, part of which has been the debate over the malware protection features Apple included in Snow Leopard.

Apple's latest operating system update, Mac OSX Snow Leopard, should be ready to roll on August 28, and while Apple says the new OS is "refined, not reinvented," it'll become the de facto competitor to Microsoft Windows 7 come October. We love a good argument, so here's your fodder: five innovations for each OS being touted by their respective makers.

It's the best of times if you're a lover of operating systems, with the nearly simultaneous release of Apple's Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" (available right now) and Microsoft's Windows 7 (available Oct. 22). This leads to the inevitable debate: Which is the better operating system, Windows 7 or Snow Leopard?

For months, Mac engineers across the country worked to certify Snow Leopard in their enterprise computing environments for an anticipated late September release. When Snow Leopard hit the market a month early, they were duly blindsided.

After a year of hype, Snow Leopard is finally here. But does it have claws? Apple's newest Mac OS has been billed as an under-the-hood upgrade-a necessary evolution of the operating system. But it's a little light on new features that Mac users can touch, see and feel (except, of course, for the mouse that responds to multiple finger gestures).

The release of the next version of Mac OS X, also known as Snow Leopard, is by all accounts a minor update with few new user features. Even Apple calls most of the changes in the OS UI refinements that will occur "under the hood."