Mac OS X Leopard: Mobile Innovation Award Winner 2007

There's a reason why Apple is now a solid third in PC sales, and Mac OS X Leopard ($129) could create more distance between the company and its competition. Apple's latest OS is worth the hype because it makes computing simpler for both longtime Mac fans and potential switchers.

 

Time Machine automates backups and lets you find files by seeing exactly how your computer looked on a specific day. Speaking of which, browsing and previewing files is now a snap, thanks to the revamped Cover Flow-enabled Finder and Icon Preview. Our favorite feature is made for multitaskers: Spaces lets you customize your desktop so that you can have one space for e-mail and IM, one for music and multimedia, and maybe one for iPhoto or iMovie.

 

Apple also takes full advantage of controlling both parts of the PC equation: the hardware and the OS. Leopard was developed to exploit the processing power of MacBooks, which now all use Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs. The new Leopard scheduler is efficient at allocating tasks across multiple cores, and the company's breakthrough NSOperationQueue uses current architectures to determine how many operations to run in parallel, so there's no need for developers to hand-code the complexities of multithreading.

 

There are also more than 300 other enhancements that make Leopard the most efficient, user-friendly mainstream OS on the market.