Apple announced on Monday that it would be releasing Snow Leopard, its latest Mac OS X operating system update, on Friday, August 28th.

Back in June, at the World Wide Developers Conference held in San Francisco, Apple announced that Snow Leopard would possibly be released in September. However, rumors that Apple would release Snow Leopard in late August persisted.

A five day notice may seem odd to some, but Apple typically announces the exact release date of an OS only days before the date itself.

Features of the new upgrade include:

• A more effective Finder
• Loading messages in mail should be twice as fast
• 80 percent faster initial backup
• Exposé integration within a Dock
• A redesigned player to easily view, record, trim and share video through Quicktime X.

The upgrade is also bringing 64-bit technology to nearly all its system applications.  This technology “can enable computers to crunch twice the data per clock cycles, which can dramatically speed up numeric calculations and other tasks,” according to Apple’s website.

Newsreaders built for Apple do not currently support 64-bit technology. With this new upgrade, users are destined to see new upgrades with enhanced performance and features as a result of this new operating system update.