After a mere mention of Snow Leopard last year, Apple finally demoed Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard. So does it come with a whole lot of secret features we didn’t know about? Marble? Well, yes and no. Turns out what we knew was exactly what we’re going to get, save for a few tweaks. Still, is it going to be awesome? Of course!

Snow Leopard was set to be geared for speed, and they’ve done it. 

To create Snow Leopard, Apple engineers focused on perfecting the world’s most advanced operating system, refining 90 percent of the more than 1,000 projects in Mac OS X. Users will notice a more responsive Finder; Mail that loads messages 85 percent faster and conducts searches up to 90 percent faster; Time Machine® with up to 50 percent faster initial backup […]

For the first time, system applications including Finder, Mail, iCal, iChat and Safari are 64-bit and Snow Leopard’s support for 64-bit processors makes use of large amounts of RAM, increases performance, and improves security while remaining compatible with 32-bit applications. Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) provides a revolutionary new way for software to take advantage of multicore processors. GCD is integrated throughout Snow Leopard, from new system-wide APIs to high-level frameworks and programming language extensions, improving responsiveness across the system. OpenCL, a C-based open standard, allows developers to tap the incredible power of the graphics processing unit for tasks that go beyond graphics. – Apple PR

So that’s it for all the performance improvements. Among the changes we can actually see are integration of Exposé with the Dock, fixes for the Stacks, and a whole lot of trimming down of the OS. In fact, it’s half the size of the previous version and installs 45% faster than 10.5 Leopard. Snow Leopard also comes with Exchange support for enterprise users, right out the box. For more info visit Apple.com/MacOSX

Snow Leopard will release in September with an upgrade price of $29, and full price of $129. That’s a full month ahead of Vista Service Pack Windows 7. Are we excited about Snow Leopard? Oh yes we are! Are you?