Though it’s not as good as having it in your hot little hands, you can now preorder the next version of MacOS X 10.5 (”Leopard”) from Amazon.com. Follow that link to see their page on it. Leopard is due out “in October” with a list price of $129.

Leopard comes in the regular flavor and, for the scrupulously honest of you out there, in a family pack that includes a license to use it on multiple machines (last time around it was five machines I believe but the description doesn’t say how many this time). The family pack is priced at $199.

Leopard will run on G4 and G5 PowerPC machines as well as any Intel-based Apple computer. It’s optimized to improve performance on multiple CPU/multiple core systems. It includes the dream of many a Macintosh user, a new finder - styled after the iTunes interface to make it easy to browse files by their meta-data.

The bit in it that I’m most excited about (other than the performance enhancements) is “Spaces”, which provides multiple virtual desktops. Old hat, I know, but having it be officially built-into the OS and supported by Apple rather than be a third-party hack that works most of the time but not all the time, is something I’m really looking forward to and want to have now.

You can read up more on Leopard on at Apple’s web site where they discuss many of the new features in detail.
[tags]Apple, MacOSX, leopard, 10.5, operating system, macosx 10.5, pre-order, spaces, amazon[/tags]

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