Apple began shipping Snow Leopard on Friday but the true importance of the Mac OS X update is likely to emerge much later.
That’s because Mac OS X 10.6 begins a long-term attempt by Apple to get ahead by cracking a problem facing the entire computer industry: squeezing useful work out of modern processors. Instead of stuffing Snow Leopard with immediately obvious new features, Apple is trying to adjust to the new reality in which processors can do many jobs simultaneously rather than one job fast.
