News 

In a slide listing the OS X releases, Jordan Hubbard, director of engineering for Unix Technologies, listed version 10.6 as arriving in the first quarter of 2009.

Apple had previously announced that version 10.6, known as Snow Leopard, would ship "about a year" after it was announced in June of this year.

One reason for the potential earlier introduction maybe that Snow Leopard does not contain any new applications or headline features. Instead it focuses on under-the-hood technologies, designed to provide the basis for generations of the OS to come.

These include Grand Central, which enhances support for multi-core processors, and the new Open Computing Language which allows applications to tap into the huge but often unused power of graphics processors. There's also a completely new multimedia engine, QuickTime X.