Apple announced yesterday that the new operating system Snow leopard will ship on August 28th. This is – of course -being contrary to proponents of the rumor mill that expected the product to be released during September’s annual keynote presentation.

Apple boasts that Snow Leopardhas several amazing new features and the price for the OS is amazingly low considering.

Some of the more prominent claims include:

1. 64- bit Support – Apple feels that the computing industry in steadily moving from 32-bit processors to 64. With this premise they have prepped Snow Leopard to handle 64-bit support and 16 terabytes of RAM. Don’t worry 32-bitsters, Snow Leopard still has support for us.

2. Free QuickTime Pro – QuickTime X is the next generation QuicktTime pro player that has all the features of the old pro version but will not cost you extra. QuickTime X leverages several new technologies such as Core Video, Core Audio and Core Animation with the promise of giving users faster load times, enhanced playback and better quality. QuickTime X will also allow users to stream audio and video from most webservers, where prior versions only allowed this to work on special servers. Watch out Flash users this may take a big chunk of the market.

3. Expose – Apple has re-factored Expose into the dock to allow quicker access to documents with easier recognition for the user. You will now be able to view your documents in an unshuffled organized view by holding down a click on the application folder.

4. Faster time machine backups – users have complained in the past about how long it takes to complete a backup to the time capsule. Now Apple is claiming that you will be able to backup your Mac up to 80 percent faster.

5. Faster Shutdown and Wake up times – Travelers will certainly enjoy this new feature, Apple boasts that wake up times will increase by 2x the norm. In other words when you open your macbook up the system should load twice as fast as it does now. If your laptop is set to go into sleep mode when you close it, Apple states that this will now happen 80 percent faster. Allowing you to quickly stuff your Macbook in your bag without worry of damaging the hard drive.

6. OS Size Reduction - Snow Leopard has been cut down in size to free up an additional 7GB on your hard drive. This of course leaving you with more space to add more of the photos and files you need.

7. Redeveloped Finder – Finder has been redeveloped using the Coca programming language to be more responsive to your file searching demands. Apple claims that PDF and JPEG icon refresh rates will greatly increase when compared to Leopard OS X 10.5.

8. Better PDF Support – No longer will you have to spend time fussing with copying and pasted multiple columns from PDF files. Apple’s new Preview will be able to auto detect columns using what they refer to as “sophisticated artificial intelligence algorithms”. In addition Preview will be able to open multiple PDF documents and output the contents in rows much like a contact sheet.

9. Faster, Higher Resolution iChat – If you have every used iChat in the past for video conferencing you probably ran into a few speed bumps trying to get it to connect to certain routers. Apple has listened and claims that Snow Leopard’s iChat is now more compatible and uses less bandwidth to upstream your video. This opens the door for many of us to use higher resolution video conferencing.

10. ActiveSync & Microsoft Exchange Support – Similar to the iPhone you will now be able to sync your contacts, email and calendar on MS Exchange Server 2007 foregoing to the need to purchase additional software, like MS Entorage that comes bundled with MS Office for Mac (currently $189.49 at Amazon).

All of this comes with a nice price tag of only 29 dollars for Mac users currently equipped with the Leopard OS X. You can pre-order Mac OS X version 10.6 Snow Leopard here to support our blog or go to Apple’s site. It should be noted that users with older Macs (Pre- Leopard) will have to pay $169.00 for the new Snow Leopard OS.

These are a lot of big claims for any operating system, but having worked with a Mac for the past year I am confident that Snow Leopard will undoubtedly live up to the hype.

Update: The Price has been lowered to $25.00