For all the Mac users out there Apple have put the new Snow Leopard OS on there site for pre-order today and ships on August 28th. Its £25 so not much at all for something that Apple say is ‘refined from installation to shut down’. But what exactly is new? As far as I can see nothing much really, it seems to just be a standard update (in other words it should be free.) Things are all a bit faster now for example waking up the computer from sleep is 2x faster than with Leopard, disk eject, PDF’s, Safari, time machine and finder are all quicker now, but is it enough to actually tell any difference? Is it really worth paying for and installing on my laptop or should I wait till there is a bigger upgrade available? I am massively skint…

The main thing Apple are pushing with the new OS is full 64 bit support. As a casual user and not a computer techie I have no idea what 64 bit is! I thought 64 bit was how they measured games consoles… If anyone could actually explain to me in simple terms if I need this it would be very helpful the Apple info still doesn’t really tell me much.

In my opinion the only really useful thing on this update is the space saving, Snow Leopard is 6GB smaller than Leopard so thats an extra 6GB of hard drive I can reclaim and trust me I need every free megabyte I can get! Maybe they should change there advertising stance for it, Buy Snow Leopard get 6GB of free space!

A full run down of changes can be seen here on the Apple sites

Microsoft has unvieled its new hands-free controller and allowed the public to get its hands on it for the first time. the xbox 360 controller was first shown in June but now the public have been allowed to get there grubby gamer mitts on them. One of the demos to try out was Burnout Paradise and the user controls the car with an imaginary steering wheel and foot movement to control speed. Its all amazingly futuristic and apparently it will help the non gaming community pick up a game and play it easily, without having to figure out all the trillions of buttons modern controllers seem to have.

It sounds very much like a follow on from the Wii style controller and judging from the pictures it will still make you look silly when playing it. Its all up to Sony and the Ps3 to catch up now.

It would be great if they could make a complete portable system for it, you could hook it up and play it when your on holiday camping, and if everyone had mobile broadband you could still play xbox live!

For some more details check out the BBC news site, it tries to explain how it actually works.