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What Snow Leopard feature are you anticipating the most?

Now that we have the actual ship date for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (August 28th for those who haven't yet had a cup of coffee to wake them up), it's time to start thinking about what benefits you can gain from the newest member of Apple's cat family.

Apple has told us from the start that Snow Leopard is predominantly about streamlining both the size and speed of the operating system. Installing Snow Leopard should take about half the time of performing a Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard install, and it's expected that you'll gain about 7 GB of space back on your hard disk.

Snow Leopard is also bringing some new features to the table, including 64-bit support, Grand Central Dispatch's multicore support, and OpenCL, all of which can provide better performance for applications. There are amazing improvements to the Mac OS X Universal Access features, particularly for the vision-impaired. For those who use their Macs in a predominantly Windows office environment, the full built-in support for Exchange should make life much simpler.

TUAW would like to know what Snow Leopard feature you're anticipating the most, so we've come up with a short list for you to choose from in a poll. We'll use these results to provide you with detailed coverage about those features. If your favorite improvement or feature isn't on the list, leave a comment and tell us what you're excited about.

What Snow Leopard feature are you anticipating the most?
Faster startup and shutdown3549 (16.8%)
Smaller footprint2675 (12.7%)
Improved Exposé and Stacks1386 (6.6%)
Faster Time Machine backups888 (4.2%)
Chinese character input254 (1.2%)
Hi-resolution iChat788 (3.7%)
64-bit support2831 (13.4%)
Grand Central Dispatch (multicore awareness)3977 (18.9%)
OpenCL1186 (5.6%)
QuickTime X1335 (6.3%)
Universal Access improvements65 (0.3%)
Microsoft Exchange support2137 (10.1%)


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Software Snow Leopard

Now that we have the actual ship date for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (August 28th for those who haven't yet had a cup of coffee to wake...
 

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ericafelid

Support Snow Leopard conservation
http://snowleopard.org/

September 01 2009 at 5:24 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
net whirr ker

Waiting for Bluray support so I can upgrade my Mini... still. :(

August 29 2009 at 12:21 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
kindakrazy

really can't wait!

August 28 2009 at 1:17 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
kindakrazy

Can't wait to update!

August 28 2009 at 1:13 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jack

I can't believe this website didn't even mention what I consider the most hopeful new improvement -- that being fewer and shorter appearances of the spinning beachball. What other more important improvement could there be?

August 27 2009 at 8:50 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Randy Green

It is time for me to clean off and re-install the OS on my 1st gen MacBook Pro. My hard drive is just about full so Snow Leopard could not of come at a better time for me. I am hoping Snow Leopard will make it feel like I got a new faster MBP.

August 26 2009 at 7:46 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
gshearman

I can't believe how many people put faster startup and shutdown times as their most anticipated feature - I hardly ever shut my mac down and hence hardly ever go through startup.

August 26 2009 at 4:46 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Gilles

Text substitution.

August 26 2009 at 2:10 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
jefftl

Exchange support, for sure. I run my email account on my personal domain off of GoDaddy's hosted Exchange service, so I can have push on my iPhone with my own domain. I don't use Exchange for calendar and address book currently, since iCal and Address Book are more comfortable for that than Entourage, so I'll be getting a lot more bang for my buck on email hosting with over the air sync of those items.

August 25 2009 at 3:19 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
nirmal

The most awaited feature : tapping now enabled in bootcamp on the touchpad!!

August 25 2009 at 11:32 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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