MacRumors

With today's announcement that Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard would be available on Friday, October 26th at 6 p.m., Apple also released details of the Mac OS X Leopard Up to Date program and educational pricing.

- First, you can simply pre-order Leopard for $129 at the Apple Store for "free delivery on October 26th".
- If you purchased a qualifying Mac after October 1st, you can upgrade to Leopard for $9.95 (plus tax).
- Educational customers have found that the pricing for Leopard is much higher than for previous versions of Mac OS X. Education pricing comes in at $116.
- Amazon has been offering Leopard for preorder, for $20 off and adds a $20 rebate for the purchase of both Mac OS X Leopard and Parallels 3.0.
- Small Dog is offering Leopard for $10 off at $119.
- MacMall is offering a $20 mail in rebate for Leopard.

Note that Apple also offers Leopard Server and Leopard Family Pack ($199).

Update: According to the comments, Educational institution pricing is still $69, so individual universities may resell Leopard to students/faculty for this discounted price.

Today Apple announced that Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will go on sale on Friday, October 26th at 6 p.m. at Apple retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers. Apple's online store will start accepting pre-orders as of today.

"Leopard, the sixth major release of Mac OS X, is the best upgrade we've
ever released," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "And everyone gets the
'Ultimate' version, packed with all the new innovative features, for just
$129."

Apple has also updated their Mac OS X Leopard pages with a new look.

In May, Apple launched the Digital Rights Management (DRM) free portion of their Music Store called iTunes Plus. The copy-protection free songs sold for $1.29 and were encoded at a higher 256kbps quality AAC.

Earlier today, some users had noticed that certain iTunes Plus songs were now selling for $.99 instead of $1.29. At first it wasn't clear if the pricing discrepancy was simply a mistake.

Ars Technica is now reporting that Apple is in the midst of expanding iTunes Plus to include indie music labels and also dropping the price of all iTunes Plus songs to $.99. Apple will reportedly keep the old DRMed songs at $.99.

The article speculates that the price drop is a reaction to Amazon's DRM MP3 Store which has been very well received. Amazon's MP3 DRM-free store launched 3 weeks ago and provides 256kbps MP3s that can be seamlessly loaded into your existing iTunes library.

Both ThinkSecret and LoopRumors are reporting that the October 26th date for Leopard has been "confirmed" and most likely at a 6 p.m. launch event on that day.

There's been no confirmation that Leopard has yet gone Gold Master, but a Gold Master candidate was released internally last week. We have heard unconfirmed tidbits that the official announcement could come as early as tomorrow (possible Tuesday announcement also noted by Appleinsider)

Electronista details Intel's demo of a mobile quad-core processor at their Developer Forum in Taiwan. The mobile quad-core processor was a version of the upcoming Penryn architecture and is expected to ship in the second half of 2008.

The CPU required larger-than-normal cooling equipment given the rough state of the processor, but was stable despite its 847 million transistors and a typical peak usage of 45 watts versus the 35 of today's Core 2 Duo processors, the Intel executive said.

The processor will also be introduced alongside the new "Motevina" platform which will replace the current Santa Rosa chipset. This new chipset will boost the bus-speed to 1066MHz (up from 800MHz), provide improved integrated graphics, 800MHz DDR2 and DDR3 support. Due to the power requirements, the processor would first see use in desktops and larger laptops, but improved cooling systems will help the transition.

Penryn represents a full class of processors from mobile to server. The first of the Penryn processors (server class) are expected to ship in November, and could be used in future Mac Pros. The first of the Penryn mobile processors are not due until January 2008 and are expected to power the next generation MacBook Pros.

AppleInsider continues with their Leopard series with a look at Mac OS X Leopard's Mail 3.0.

In Leopard, Mail 3.0 (below) gets its biggest leap forward yet. Its window follows the unified Leopard window appearance, with squared off window corners that look like more like iTunes. As with earlier releases, many of its new enhancements come from integration with other new or improved services in Mac OS X.

The new Mail client introduces ToDo lists an Notes which are expected to eventually sync with the iPhone. Apple also reintroduces Data Detectors:

Emails in Mail that contain a date, phone number, or a contact (such within an email signature) are tagged with a drop down menu. Click on it and select "Create New Contact," and Data Detectors will scrape together as much as it can from the email: the name, mailing address, email address, phone and fax numbers, and copy them into a contact entry ready for your editing (below).

Apple also details many of the new Mail features on their website and provides a QuickTime movie demonstration.

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard is rumored to be released on October 26th, with Gold Master expected to be declared this week.

Hitachi claims to have made a breakthrough in increasing hard drive capacities. By successfully shrinking the read head using nanotechnology, Hitachi claims that they expect to quadruple the current capacity of hard disks by 2011.

Researchers at Hitachi have successfully reduced existing recording heads by more than a factor of two to achieve new heads in the 30-50 nanometer (nm) range, which is up to 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair (approx. 70-100 microns). Called current perpendicular-to-the-plane giant magneto-resistive*1 (CPP-GMR) heads, Hitachi's new technology is expected to be implemented in shipping products in 2009 and reach its full potential in 2011.

In essence, 4 Terabyte (TB) desktop (3.5") drives and 1 TB laptop (2.5") drives can be expected.

While not specifically mentioned in the release, Hitachi also produces 1.8" drives currently found in Apple's iPod Classic, and we expect similar gains to be expected in those form factors as well. Recent advancements were also announced by Toshiba that can be expected by 2009.

Raw Data: Press Release

Amidst the growing excitement over the upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) release, we've overlooked news of Apple's ongoing progress with a final update to Mac OS X 10.4.

Apple has continued with frequent seeds of Mac OS X 10.4.11 to developers. The most recent seed was released to developers last week on October 9th, bringing the development seeds up to builds 8S2161/8S161 for Intel/PowerPC.

The latest updates provide additional bug fixes to Webkit for Dashboard, but there remain some issues with existing Widgets.

Apple has also been hard at work on the final version of Mac OS X Leopard which reached Gold Master candidate last week and should reach Gold Master this week.