So I've been running Mac OS X Snow Leopard for a few days now and I suppose it's time for a quick review of my thoughts so far. If you've read any other reviews about the latest Mac OS then prepare to be unsurprised.

What makes Snow Leopard so different from every other major release of Mac OS X is that there are 'no new features'; nothing user-interface wise that can really be shown off as a major reason for upgrading. Leopard had Time Machine, new interface theme, new Dock, blah blah blah, but here Apple has decided to instead allow their development group to give OS X a good spit and polish, refine every aspect of the operating system, make features easier to understand and use.

Calling Snow Leopard a 'no new features' release is a terrible lie though, because what they have added will make Mac OS X the most advanced operating system able to take full advantage of where computers are heading.

64-bit processing is now fully supported everywhere, including all the built-in applications, which is no big surprise considering Leopards already pretty good support for 64-bit CPU's.

Grand Central Dispatch is much bigger news. This technology allows software developers to easily create multi-threaded applications by managing the creation, data manipulation and other aspects of multiple threaded software automatically. Basically this means that when software writers start using GCD, then everything will become snappier as the app takes full advantage of all the available CPU cores in a system - these days being at least 2, sometimes 4, and can be up to 16 in a Mac Pro!

Next up is OpenCL, which is Apple's open- and industry-standard creation to allow software writers to take advantage of the ridiculous computing power that sits on modern day graphics cards. Like Grand Central, it's pretty much all handled automatically by Mac OS X, with software writers simply having to just compile-in support for OpenCL.

Also, Apple has finally killed off PPC support, meaning Snow Leopard is for Intel-Macs only. During the install process the installation of the Rosetta PPC emulation engine is disabled by default!

So really, Snow Leopard is about making Mac OS X future-proof for the next decade, by allowing the OS to make better use of multiple CPU cores and graphics processing power, while making the user interface easier, cleaner and less bug-prone.

I wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone, being powered by OS X, has a hand in dictating how Snow Leopard was developed. Not only by straight stealing of developers to work on iPhone OS, but ensuring technologies like GCD and OpenCL are added. I wouldn't be surprised if a next-gen iPhone gets given multiple low-powered CPU cores, and a OpenCL-capable graphics chip.

To be honest, if this was a full priced new Mac OS release, you could easily live without Snow Leopard, at least for a while until app writers began to take advantage of GCD and OpenCL, but at £29 you can't go wrong. There's enough tidying up of the user interface, new features (though small), and other little delights to make upgrading right away a no-brainer.