Snow Leopard is the top Amazon pre-order

If you continue to use the latest Apple products, you will inevitably have to use Snow Leopard. Upgrade in September or whenever.

Apple's had some stinker OS releases in the past.
10.3 broke FireWire hard disks using the Oxford chipset. Fixed in 10.3.1. 10.4 broke fullscreen mode for many apps and wasnt fixed until 10.4.2.
10.5 made every Power PC-based Mac slower than death.

10.6 will probably break something. Make sure you have a good backup.

I am going to stick with Leopard. There is really nothing being offered with Snow Leopard that would warrant an upgrade. I was actually a little underwhelmed with Leopard as well.
It seems as though Apple was not ready for Windows 7 and threw something together.

When is Apple going to remember that us computer users would love some MAJOR feature additions just like it's iphone users.

As far as Windows, I think I will stick with my XP on boot camp until I am sure that Windows 7 can run on it flawlessly.

I saw Windows 7 (I almost wrote "System 7" there, must be an old trauma) last weekend on a windows developer friend's system, running in VMWare. I wasn't in the least impressed, except for the much improved installation process.

Windows 7 looks like Windows 3.1 in watercolors to me. Ugly as hell.

I'll stick to trusted XP for the 1 system that needs to run Windows in my house. For the other systems, I can't wait for Snow Leopard to arrive.

If you believe that Snow Leopard is merely a "handful of features and fixes", then you really don't know much about it.

Snow Leopard is almost a complete re-write optimised for Intel-based Macs and feels much faster and smoother than 10.5.

@George: "Unless 10.6 breaks all Adobe apps or something."

Well, it managed to run CS3 just fine, so if you're using CS4, I'm sure you'll be OK.

Personally -- although I wish them well -- after the last maintainance update to Leopard, I've lost the core of faith that would allow me to be one of the early adopters of Snow Leopard.

They completely hosed many people's HDMI HDTV connections, don't appear to know (or admit) why, don't have a fix even after all this time (although there IS an aftermarket fix, you use an aftermarket scan rate / monitor setup app. Users figured it out when Apple couldn't / wouldn't.)

The simple fact here is that if they can't even get a small update right, what are the reasonable expectations that they can rewrite the entire OS without similar problems in random places?

No, I'll be watching, probably for about a year, while they work the inevitable bugs, bugettes, and outright Godzilla-sized problems out of Snow Leopard. I don't envy you enthusiastic types the experience, either.

My idea of installing Snow Leopard is install, then immediately apply at least two or three major updates, THEN use it. This, of course, assumes that there is something useful to me in the first place, like a newer, more powerful copy of Aperture that requires it, or perhaps the ability to refresh a network share, or the elimination of that bloody "I can't multitask for beans" ball.

In the past I purchased the single upgrade for a couple of Macs. With 3 Macs now, the ethical route seems attractive at $49. Pre-ordered....

I like the imagery that with Snow Leopard, Apple is polishing an Apple (Leopard), and with Windows 7, Microsoft is polishing a turd (Vista).

They generally ship in such a manner that the copy is at your door steps on the launch/release day!

Anyone know if Amazon ships the product the day of release or is that when it gets delivered to your door?

I wish Snow Leopard was a downloadable update like the 10.5.x updates...