Apple Nearing Completion of Snow Leopard?

While the iPhone has dominated the rumor scene in the weeks leading up to WWDC, we've heard little about the status of Apple's Mac OS X Snow Leopard operating system. Snow Leopard was first announced last summer at the 2008 WWDC. At the time, Apple had announced that Snow Leopard would be delivered in "about a year".

While Apple has been making steady progress, some reports pushed the release date of Snow Leopard back to September. We've since heard, however, that Snow Leopard may be further along than we thought. Apple is reportedly referring to internal builds of Snow Leopard as Gold Master candidates, suggesting that the operating system could be feature complete and mostly bug free. We've heard no further evidence, however, of the rumored "Marble" interface that was said to be part of the final Snow Leopard release.

Apple will likely detail its launch plans for Snow Leopard at WWDC next week.