A lot of the changes took place under the hood, so most people won’t notice much of a difference visually. This upgrade was strictly about performance improvements, with a few minor UI enhancements. Hey, I’m fine with that, as OSX Leopard runs smooth as it is on my Macbook. Among one of the big features is integrated support for Microsoft Exchange, so if you’re a Mac based business or an employee with a Mac machine, you can ditch Entourage once and for all tomorrow. All you IT folks out there with a mixed environment of Macs and PCs are probably all too familiar with the shortcomings of Entourage on an Exchange based mail system. I can’t wait to get it setup on my Macbook because honestly using Outlook Web Access to access webmail is a chore, especially on a system without Internet Explorer (Outlook Web Access is very limited in non IE browsers by design- bad form, MS). Our iPhone’s work well with our Exchange server and its about time that our desktops/laptops will too.

OSX Snow Leopard will include the latest versions of Safari 4, Quicktime X, and Finder. While Finder and Quicktime aren’t ‘new’, they’ve been rebuilt in Cocoa and purported to be much faster than current versions. Safari 4 comes with speed improvements and better Javascript performance.

Upgrading will cost you a meager $30, while the full version is a reasonable $130.

Links:

Gizmodo Review
Engadget Mac / Exchange Article