Apple announced OS X 10.6 named Snow Leopard as more of a performance release rather than a feature release.
Some of the announced changes include a smaller footprint (giving back some hard drive space), Microsoft Exchange support, extended 64-bit support to allow a theoretical 16TB of RAM, faster clock speeds with the multicore “Grand Central” technology, and QuickTime X which includes optimized support for the latest codecs.
It’s not known yet whether Snow Leopard is the beginning of dropped support for PowerPC by Apple. Several developers are reporting that their developer preview copy runs only on Intel machines.
The rumors are that this will be a free upgrade, but that hasn’t been announced yet.
I had no idea it was possible for 10.6 to be a free upgrade. I was pondering whether it would be worth it to put off getting my first mac computer so I could get snow leopard, but if Apple announces this as true, I would definitely feel that purchasing now would be a much better investment than if a new os was released in a year. I hope they do it!