Why is that? Well, while Snow Leopard has had much work done under the hood, there aren't a whole lot of user-facing new features--and that's what sells operating systems at a $129 price point. Instead, this time for 30 bucks you get "enhancements and refinements" (Apple's words).

Still, even though you might have to dig for them, it looks like a few nice tweaks are on the way with Snow Leopard. Here are the ones I'm most looking forward to.

• Faster bootup and shutdown times, and half the disk footprint of Leopard, which will save you about six gigabytes of disk space.
• Signal strength indicators in the Airport menu (so you can choose the Wi-Fi network with the best signal).
• A split pane terminal, so you can run jobs side by side (like tail a log in one pane while running a script in another, so you can see what's going on in each simultaneously).
• Date in the menu bar. (I use a hack to get this right now; happy to hear that won't be necessary anymore.)
• Safari 4. While the beta was crashy (at least for Windows), it is leaner, meaner, and a bit more flashy than Firefox or Chrome.
• Video editing and screen recording (for screencasts!) in Quicktime.
• Microsoft Exchange support--good for all those (poor) folks using Exchange.
• 64-bit computing, which means you can get more memory into your system.

Here's the full list of Snow Leopard "refinements and enhancements."

* Oh yeah, there was also something about some new phone and laptops, too. Or something.