page_title: MacOS
section_title: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
hierarchical_section_title: MacOS / Release history / Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
caption_attribution_description: www.benm.at/wwdc
context_page_description: macOS is a series of proprietary graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop, laptop and home computers, and by web usage, it is the second most widely used desktop OS, after Microsoft Windows.
  macOS is the second major series of Macintosh operating systems. The first is colloquially called the classic Mac OS, introduced in 1984, the final release of which was Mac OS 9 in 1999. The first desktop version, Mac OS X 10.0, was released in March 2001, with its first update, 10.1, arriving later that year. After this, Apple began naming its releases after big cats, which lasted until OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Since OS X 10.9 Mavericks, releases have been named after locations in California. Apple shortened the name to "OS X" in 2012 and then changed it to "macOS" in 2016, adopting the nomenclature that they were using for their other operating systems, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. The latest version is macOS Catalina, which was publicly released in October 2019.
context_section_description: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was released on August 28, 2009. Rather than delivering big changes to the appearance and end user functionality like the previous releases of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard focused on "under the hood" changes, increasing the performance, efficiency, and stability of the operating system. For most users, the most noticeable changes were: the disk space that the operating system frees up after a clean install compared to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, a more responsive Finder rewritten in Cocoa, faster Time Machine backups, more reliable and user-friendly disk ejects, a more powerful version of the Preview application, as well as a faster Safari web browser.  Snow Leopard only supported machines with Intel CPUs, required at least 1 GB of RAM, and dropped default support for applications built for the PowerPC architecture (Rosetta could be installed as an additional component to retain support for PowerPC-only applications).
  Snow Leopard also featured new 64-bit technology capable of supporting greater amounts of RAM, improved support for multi-core processors through Grand Central Dispatch, and advanced GPU performance with OpenCL.
  The 10.6.6 update introduced support for the Mac App Store, Apple's digital distribution platform for macOS applications.
caption: Mac OS X Lion was announced at WWDC 2011 at Moscone West
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