Possibly - The developers using the seeded versions might have been given rough guidelines as to minimum specs. Macs released nearer WWDC 2009 and beyond will be able to benefit more from the OS update.
AppleInsider'sarticle comes in with new information, that's hit the front page here at Macrumors. Arn comments:
A rewrite of Finder and other apps from Carbon to Cocoa. This was kind of anticipated, but good to hear.
With Arn commenting that "Apple has reportedly tapped select members of its developer community to begin testing the updated graphical file system manager as part of a new pre-release copy of Snow Leopard belonging to the build train 10Axxx."
It looks like the rumor lid is still fairly well capped on, but we might be able to get some murmurings soon, depending on the actual number of this select developer cabal.
Another feature mentioned by Arn is "a new ImageBoot feature" that could let a Mac running Snow Leopard to boot from a disc image, and so allow someone to store multiple disc images and hence configurations. Testers may well rejoice, and i'd imagine there may be other uses too.
The latest version of Snow Leopard "is expected to be broadly seeded to Apple's developers as early as this weekend."
Whether we hear more of these seeds is up for debate. Haven't been too many whisperings thus far, but then other Apple events have preoccupied the Apple media (laptops, iPhone...)
Edit: Arn seemed to miss a few pertinent details in his overview:
ImageBoot: A 3rd option for "disc image-based installation". It'll not only let you boot your Mac from a remote disk over the network, but will let you set up a number of images on a secondary partition of or external drive.
Appleinsiders take on the opening up of testing Snow Leopard:
ADC getting it's hands on Snow Leopard = lots more juicy details hopefully.
With the 4th Quarter 2008 (4Q 2008) financial results out on the 21st, for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2008 (next Tuesday), we might hear a little more. Was the effects of setting up the hardware to make the new cases for the MacBook and MacBook Pro what was referenced to last quarter, rather than the redesign of the iPod Nano? You'd imagine the former would cost more than the latter... So there might be some more hints to come next Tuesday (With IDF and Atom processor announcements the day before, next Monday).
Edit: The saga of RAM limits on the MacBooks continues, as does a rumour of hardware H.264 acceleration. (More likely next year?)
Edit 2: More info on RAM - Nvidia says it will fit, (which we knew) and also that it would presumably work, but not give really much difference in terms of gaming here
Edit 3: 8GB not going to really do much currently.
AppleInsider'sarticle comes in with new information, that's hit the front page here at Macrumors. Arn comments:
A rewrite of Finder and other apps from Carbon to Cocoa. This was kind of anticipated, but good to hear.
With Arn commenting that "Apple has reportedly tapped select members of its developer community to begin testing the updated graphical file system manager as part of a new pre-release copy of Snow Leopard belonging to the build train 10Axxx."
It looks like the rumor lid is still fairly well capped on, but we might be able to get some murmurings soon, depending on the actual number of this select developer cabal.
Another feature mentioned by Arn is "a new ImageBoot feature" that could let a Mac running Snow Leopard to boot from a disc image, and so allow someone to store multiple disc images and hence configurations. Testers may well rejoice, and i'd imagine there may be other uses too.
The latest version of Snow Leopard "is expected to be broadly seeded to Apple's developers as early as this weekend."
Whether we hear more of these seeds is up for debate. Haven't been too many whisperings thus far, but then other Apple events have preoccupied the Apple media (laptops, iPhone...)
Edit: Arn seemed to miss a few pertinent details in his overview:
ImageBoot: A 3rd option for "disc image-based installation". It'll not only let you boot your Mac from a remote disk over the network, but will let you set up a number of images on a secondary partition of or external drive.
This new feature will allow users to set up a series of test environments or uniquely configured Mac OS X systems, store the bootable systems as discrete disk images, and subsequently store multiple boot targets on the same disk or partition. Currently, only one bootable Mac OS X installation can be stored on a given disk partition. "
With ImageBoot, multiple NetBoot sets can be maintained locally on the same storage partition, and the user can select any one of the disk images available to boot from without having to restore or mount the disk image first. The result is a system that works similar to virtualization software such as Parallels, which can create disk images for different PC operating systems and selectively boot from any of them. The difference is that Mac OS X isn't booting up in a virtual environment; it actually boots a fully native Mac OS X system.
Appleinsiders take on the opening up of testing Snow Leopard:
A little over two weeks ago, AppleInsider noted that Apple was preparing to broaden evaluation of Snow Leopard through software seeds to a limited number of developers. It's now expected that the company's vast developer community, or members of the Apple Developer Connection network, could be added to the mix as early as this weekend.
ADC getting it's hands on Snow Leopard = lots more juicy details hopefully.
With the 4th Quarter 2008 (4Q 2008) financial results out on the 21st, for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2008 (next Tuesday), we might hear a little more. Was the effects of setting up the hardware to make the new cases for the MacBook and MacBook Pro what was referenced to last quarter, rather than the redesign of the iPod Nano? You'd imagine the former would cost more than the latter... So there might be some more hints to come next Tuesday (With IDF and Atom processor announcements the day before, next Monday).
Edit: The saga of RAM limits on the MacBooks continues, as does a rumour of hardware H.264 acceleration. (More likely next year?)
Edit 2: More info on RAM - Nvidia says it will fit, (which we knew) and also that it would presumably work, but not give really much difference in terms of gaming here
Edit 3: 8GB not going to really do much currently.