Snow Leopard briefly appears in Apple Store
For a brief time yesterday, it looked like you could order OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard from the Apple site as a part of a bundle called a Mac Boxed Set, but the page was quickly withdrawn from the site.
The short-lived page was apparently an error by Apple Web developers and was not intended to be accessed by the public, although a friend on Plurk was able to go so far as to put it into his shopping cart. The incident does tell us that the Apple Web team is working on the pages that will be necessary to sell Snow Leopard through the online store, making it even more likely that that the new Mac operating system will be available before the September date that had been announced by Apple.
The pages that were put up on the site showed that the products offered, including Snow Leopard, were available to ship within 24 hours. According to a PCWorld story, a call to Apple got confirmation from an Apple salesperson that the pages were actually online (she had to check), though she quickly covered by saying that the product offered would not be available for shipping in the 24-hour time frame stated on the page, since OS X 10.6 was not yet shipping in that timeframe. Neither the salesperson in question or anyone else at Apple was available for comment after the pages were taken down.
Web site snafus like this one have often proven to be harbingers of new products being very close to shipment, both on the Apple site and at the sites of other vendors. Building the Web page for a product, or an announcement page, is often one of the final steps taken before a product actually begins to ship. It was leaked last week that OS X 10.6 had entered the ready-to-ship phase. This Web page incident is meaningful in that it adds a little more credence to the rumor that the new Mac OS will ship a bit earlier than originally anticipated.
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