(Not sure what you have? Click the Apple menu and choose About This Mac.
The most important question to answer before upgrading to Snow Leopard is whether your Mac can handle it. Here's what you need to know about the upgrade process - which in itself illustrates both UI improvements and under-the-hood advances over past versions of Mac OS X. In Snow Leopard, Apple focused on making the OS run faster using technologies like Grand Central Dispatch (which allows a Mac with a multi-core processor to more effectively distribute work among cores) and OpenCL (which allows a Mac's graphics processors to be used for general computing tasks whenever possible), and making all the core system applications and most core components 64-bit.īut before you can appreciate Snow Leopard's performance, user interface refinements, and technology tweaks, you have to get it installed.
That contrasts with its predecessor, Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5), which added more than 300 new features when it was released two years ago. In building Snow Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X (version 10.6), Apple focused more on under-the-hood improvements to boost speed and stability than on adding new features.
