14 DAY TRIAL // Apple has posted an announcement on its Mac section revealing that buyers of a Mac or Xserve that have made their purchase after June 8 are eligible for a $9.95 upgrade to Snow Leopard. Naturally, the offer is available until Snow Leopard is released, at which point Apple will start selling Macs with the new cat pre-installed on them.
Apple's original message is available below in its entirety.
Mac OS X Snow Leopard Up-to-Date Program
Mac OS X Snow Leopard refines the elegant Mac OS X user experience with lots of little touches and performance improvements that will make using your Mac even more enjoyable. It also includes a few big foundation technologies designed to tap the power of today’s computer hardware and provide a strong base for innovation. If you purchased a qualifying system or Xserve on or after June 8, 2009 that does not include Mac OS X Snow Leopard, you can upgrade to Mac OS X Snow Leopard for $9.95.*
Please check back on June 16, 2009, for additional information.
*Covers product plus shipping and handling fee. U.S. customers add appropriate sales tax.
During the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address delivered by Phil Schiller, Apple revealed that it was going to charge only $29.95 for the upgrade to its next-gen OS. While not expensive, the price isn't exactly a steal, given that Snow Leopard is just an improved version of the current Mac OS X. But hey, Apple has to reimburse those testers one way or another, and we reckon they won't settle for iTunes gift cards.
But Apple has lowered that upgrade price even more, for buyers of a Mac or Xserve between June 8 and sometime around September, when the company plans to unleash the new version of Leopard. Apple is likely to confirm the exact launch date on June 16, as the company encourages visitors of its website to check back in on that day.
And there couldn't be a better time to buy a “qualifying” Mac in order to benefit from Apple's offer. The company has recently updated its entire line of notebook computers, from the white, polycarbonate 13-inch MacBook, to the 17-inch MacBook Pro.
The now-updated unibody family of notebooks has made room for another Pro, the 13-inch MacBook Pro. The laptop is an upgraded version of its predecessor, the 13-inch unibody MacBook, and now adds a better display, a backlit keyboard, an SD card slot, more upgradability support (including support for a 256GB solid state drive), and retains the original $1,199 price.
The white 13-inch (plastic) model ships with 9400M graphics from NVIDIA, boasts 2.13GHz of Core 2 Duo raw processing power, 2 GB of DDR2 RAM at 800MHz and a 160GB hard drive for the unchanged price of $999.
These are, of course, the cheaper, consumer-level choices you can make, in order to benefit from the promotional upgrade price for Snow Leopard. For a bigger list of your options, visit Apple's Mac section here.
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is the latest version of the Mac OS, which includes 100+ new features and enhancements. The software has been optimized for GPU-based operations and 64-bit.