One of the lesser known features of Apple’s forthcoming Mac OS X Snow Leopard will be more reliable ejection of discs and external drives.
Sometimes when an application or process is using the files on a drive, Mac OS X prevents you from ejecting it, but you don’t always know why.
With Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, you’ll get fewer of those errors and when you do get them, you’ll see exactly which application is using the drive, so you can quit it and eject the drive properly.
“We’ve built on the success of Leopard and created an even better experience for our users from installation to shutdown,” said Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, when introducing Mac OS X Snow Leopard at WWDC on June 8th. “Apple engineers have made hundreds of improvements so with Snow Leopard your system is going to feel faster, more responsive and even more reliable than before.”
Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard will be available as an upgrade to Mac OS X version 10.5 Leopard in September 2009 through the Apple Store, Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. The Snow Leopard single user license will be available for a suggested retail price of US$29 and the Snow Leopard Family Pack, a single household, five-user license, will be available for a suggested price of $49. For Tiger users with an Intel-based Mac, the Mac Box Set includes Mac OS X Snow Leopard, iLife ’09 and iWork ’09 and will be available for a suggested price of $169 and a Family Pack is available for a suggested price of $229.
The Mac OS X Snow Leopard Up-To-Date upgrade package is available to all customers who purchased a qualifying new Mac system from Apple or an Apple Authorized Reseller between June 8, 2009 and the end of the program on December 26, 2009, for a product plus shipping and handling fee of $9.95. Users must request their Up-To-Date upgrade within 90 days of purchase or by December 26, 2009, whichever comes first. More info here. Snow Leopard requires a minimum of 1GB of RAM and is designed to run on any Mac computer with an Intel processor. Full system requirements can be found here.
More info about Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s features and refinements here.
