Apple Mac OS X Snow Leopard for $29

At the recent developers converence Apple revealed that the next version of its OS X operating system will be released in September and it will cost $29. (No matter what the exchange rate, it'll probably be £29 here in the UK.) The reason for the September release is probably to beat Microsoft Windows 7 and it's hardly surprising, but why is it so cheap? It is normally more like $129.

Pricing it at $29 is very unusual for Apple, a company this is not known for selling cheap products, so what are the reasons behind it? Basically, it wants to move everyone from a 32-bit operating system to a 64-bit one on Intel hardware. By supporting only one hardware architechture - Intel - instead of two - Intel and PowerPC - in the long term it will save time, effort and money, which is important in the current economic climate.

Apple has rewritten and recompiled OS X and the built in applications like Safari and Mail for 64-bit Intel processors. This is because they can handle data more efficiently, which means better performance. Removing the support for older Macs with PowerPC architechture means that there is less code. The end result is that Snow Leopard is half the size and twice as fast as Leopard. This is briliant news for everyone using newer Intel Macs, but bad news for everyone else.

The reason why it is only $29 is two fold. First Apple wants to encourage as many users as possible to a 64-bit operating system, and second, it's taken so much time and effort to rewrite the OS that there's not much that is actually new. There won't be a huge number of new features, so charging full price probably isn't an option, despite the speed boost and space saving.

Next year you can expect to see rewritten and recompiled 64-bit editions of Apple software like iLife and iWork.