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.

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