Apple has announced that Snow Leopard – that latest update to the Mac OS - will be available later this week.

Mac OS X v10.6, as it’s also known, will be released on 28 August – that’s this Friday. Apple has priced the release up at upgrade price of $29 (£18/€20).

So what’s changed since Leopard? Well, the first thing to note is that Snow Leopard takes up less than half the storage capacity - according to Apple - to give you an extra 6GB, or so.

Snow Leopard also boasts a more responsive Finder, Mail that loads messages up to twice as fast and improvements to Time Machine that apparently results in an 80 per cent faster initial backup.

Other “refinements” include a clutter-free interface on QuickTime X and high-tech support for Chinese characters. The latter is actually quite a cool feature because the upgrade enables you to draw Chinese characters into your Mac notebook using the muti-touch trackpad.

To save you some time, literally, Apple has added an automatic time-zone set-up option to Snow Leopard. A new option that allows the OS to automatically search for and update printer drivers should also be handy.

JavaScript performance in Safari has been boosted by 50 per cent, Apple claimed, and the browser is now…ahem…apparently “even more resistant to crashes”.

A full rundown of Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard’s features is available online. ®