Edible Apple

Hardmac is reporting that Snow Leopard will most likely see a release date sometime in September at the earliest. They note that Apple still has a considerable amount of fine tuning left to do on underlying core technologies such as Quicktime X, Open CL, and Grand Central.  The public at large will most likely get their first look at Snow Leopard this June when Apple holds its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC).

Snow Leopard, of course, is being touted as an OS X upgrade focusing primarily on “under the hood” improvements such as system performance and efficiency.  Some of these expected improvements in OS X 10.6 include a new Finder completely re-written in Cocoa, 64 bit support, Quicktime X, and support for multi-core processors and GPU processing.

There are also rumors hinting at a significant UI overhaul that would replace the current Aqua theme in OS X.  Hardmac also reports that the latest build of Snow Leopard “will support Blu-ray but that Apple has not negotiated yet a licensing agreement, and now there is not a single interlocutor to deal with.”

This of course refers to a recent agreement announced by Sony, Phillips, and Panasonic whereby companies wishing to manufacture Blu-ray devices will now only need to attain a single license in order to do so. That’s a pretty big deal considering that 18 separate companies currently hold Blu-ray patents.

This new licensing arrangement will undoubtedly speed up the licensing process, and more importantly, will make the whole ordeal a heck of a lot cheaper for interested companies, Apple included.

Related: Blu-Ray licensing gets easier, will Apple be tempted?