On August 28, 2009, it was released worldwide,[2] and was made available for purchase from Apple's website and retail stores at the price of $29 USD for a single-user license.

The goals of Snow Leopard were improved performance, greater efficiency and the reduction of its overall memory footprint, unlike previous versions of Mac OS X which focused more on new features.

Because of this, Snow Leopard still remained somewhat popular alongside OS X Lion, despite its lack of continued support,[17] mostly because of its ability to run PowerPC-based applications.

[citation needed] Snow Leopard is also the last release of Mac OS X to ship with a welcome video at first boot after installation.

In 2020, two developer previews of Snow Leopard that are universal appeared on the Internet that can be booted on select G4 and G5 Power Macs with modification and patching.

For qualifying Mac computers bought after June 8, 2009, Apple offered a discounted price through its "up-to-date" program, provided that customers' orders were faxed or postmarked by December 26, 2009.

Mac OS X Snow Leopard is a release that refined the existing feature set, expanded the technological capabilities of the operating system, and improved application efficiency.

Snow Leopard includes the following changes: While the Finder was completely rewritten in Cocoa, it did not receive a major user interface overhaul.

There are new wallpapers in the Nature (two of which are of snow leopards), Plants and Black and White sub-folders under the Apple folder.

Stuart Harris, software product marketing manager at Apple Australia, said, "For the most part, everything that they experience on the Mac, from the 64-bit point of view, the applications, the operating system, is all going to be 64-bit, but that at this stage there were very few things, such as device drivers, that required 64-bit mode at the kernel level".

Grand Central Dispatch abstracts the notion of threads away, and instead provides developers with the concept of queues—lists of jobs (blocks of code) that need to be executed.

[51] A new C and Objective-C language feature named "Blocks" facilitates creation of code that will easily optimize to take advantage of Grand Central Dispatch.

OpenCL provides consistent numeric precision and accuracy, fixing a problem that has hampered GPU-based programming in the past.

[57] Power management has been improved, with implementation of a new wake on demand feature supported on more recent Macintosh hardware.

[61] Secure virtual memory was an option in earlier releases on Snow Leopard, but the checkbox to disable it was removed later.

[63] Computer security researcher Charlie Miller claims that OS X Snow Leopard is more vulnerable to attack than Microsoft Windows for lacking full address space layout randomization (ASLR) since Mac OS X Leopard,[64] a technology that Microsoft started implementing in Windows Vista.

Since the initial release of Snow Leopard many manufacturers have provided compatible drivers that are available via Software Update.

[77] However, most reviews commented on the large improvement in speed of the native Mac OS X applications Finder, iCal, Mail, etc.

He wrote, "I ended up downgrading back to OSX 10.5.8" then he concluded by writing, "I might try to do it again but it won't be till Apple releases at least 2 major fix updates.

"[79] The single-user upgrade and Family Pack units of Snow Leopard ranked 1 and 2 respectively on Amazon.com's software bestseller charts when Apple announced it would release it within the week.

[81] The BBC reported that a bug in Mac OS X versions 10.6.0 and 10.6.1 which, in rare cases, caused loss of user account data after use of a previously existing guest account by users who had upgraded from a previous version of Mac OS X, received wide publicity.

[83] Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced Snow Leopard at WWDC on June 9, 2008,[84] and it was privately demonstrated to developers by Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Bertrand Serlet.

[85] The first public demonstration was given at WWDC 2009 by Serlet and Vice President of Mac OS Engineering, Craig Federighi.