Apple has officially announced that its much-awaited operating system, MacOS v10.6 Snow Leopard, is scheduled for worldwide release on Friday, August 28, 2009. In addition, Apple will also be releasing a server edition of Snow Leopard, which, priced at £399, will include an unlimited number of client licenses.

The users can either obtain the full version of the new OS or an updated version from OS X Leopard. Specifically speaking, the Snow Leopard will be available for current users of OS X Leopard at a reduced "upgrade" price of £25; and for users of the OS X 10.5 Tiger operating system at a price of £129, packaged with iLife 09 and iWork 09.

About the soon-to-be-released operating system, Bertrand Serlet, Apple's Senior VP of Software Engineering, said: "Snow Leopard builds on our most successful operating system ever and we're happy to get it to users earlier than expected."

Serlet described the Snow Leopard as "the world's most advanced operating system and the only system with built in Exchange support."

Acknowledging the fact that the forthcoming Snow Leopard marks an 'iterative' progression for the company, Apple said that the new OS improves on many of the key features of the Leopard - it offers speedier functioning, and smaller install footprint, thereby pulling at the system design that improve overall speed and performance.