AppleInsider reported that sources have said Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard has achieved golden master status and is on its way to manufacturing. Gold status or gold release refers to a software being ready for wide distribution for use by end users. A software under gold status is considered to be stable and relatively bug-free.
Some changes to the Snow Leopard installation includes the elimination of the “Erase and Install” and “Archive and Install” options in the Snow Leopard installer. This is said to prevent users from accidentally deleting their Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard partition. “Erase and Install” can still be accessed via Disk Utility in the Snow Leopard installation disc though.
Another addition is a software compatibility check of known ‘bad’ third-party applications and once found, are moved to a separate “Incompatible Software” folder. This is to prevent the error that plagued a few users who upgraded to Leopard when Mac OS X 10.5 came out.
More enhancements and changes to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard are listed over at AppleInsider.
Update:
On a follow-up story, AppleInsider said that the Golden Master build of Mac OS X 10.6 have been released to more developers instead just to a select few earlier this week. This Snow Leopard build 10A432 is presumed to be the version ready for duplication to optical media.
Snow Leopard is scheduled to be released next month and is priced at $29 for a single-user license and $49 for a five-user license Family Pack.
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