Early Snow Leopard in Q1 2009?

Seth Weintraub
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November 19, 2008
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It looks like Snow Leopard might be coming a bit earlier than expected if slides from Apple's Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies, Jordan Hubbard are to be believed.  The presentation was given at LISA '08 last week in San Diego.  

Originally planned for "about a year" from WWDC 2008 (July), the change of schedule would be a significant bump in expections from people outside of Apple.  While Q1 extends to the end of March, this could also indicate that we'll see new Snow Leopard introductions at Macworld 2009 in January.  Perhaps even new devices using the new, optimized code?

The new release schedule would also mark a shortening of the development process which had been widening over the past few releases, though Snow Leopard may be considered a somewhat smaller update due to its lack of feature additions.

We should caution that this is only one person's presentation slide and could be factually incorrect, though he is certainly a person who would be in the know.

Via MacRumors

Comments (9)

macwonder (not verified) | November 19, 2008 - 2:50am

Early Snow Leopard in Q1 2008????

WTF! its already Q4 2008!

hahaha!

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | November 19, 2008 - 3:29am

it says 2009 :)

Dan Birchall (not verified) | November 19, 2008 - 4:16am

The headline (in large print at the top of the article) says 2008.

They must be planning to use Time Machine. :)

admin | November 19, 2008 - 5:25am

jeez, it was 4:45am...

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | November 19, 2008 - 3:50am

Q1 could be either Calendar Q1 or Fiscal Q1, don't get too excited now, only to get pissed off later.

Appanage (not verified) | November 19, 2008 - 5:01am

It has to arrive Q1 2008 since it will be the OS that runs the new device form factor they're launching at MWSF. That's the biggest reason they're compressing the OS footprint.

Benjamin Dobson | November 19, 2008 - 8:51am

While reading the comments (on MacRumors) I noticed a lot of people saying it would drop 32-bit support. Is this true and how do we know?

9to5Mac Noob (not verified) | November 19, 2008 - 9:18am

What does "dropping 32-bit support" mean, in practical terms? Does it mean that code with 32-bit instructions won't run? Or does it mean that the OS will have some 64-bit instructions that can't/won't be emulated with 32-bit instructions?

Benjamin Dobson | November 19, 2008 - 9:23am

The comments were saying it wouldn't run on 32-bit chips. So while my previous comment made little sense, I hope this one does.