It's also worth noting that Snow Leopard's predecessor, Leopard, was capable of running 64-bit applications when it shipped two years ago. However, at that time, many of the core applications of Mac OS X weren't written to take advantage of 64-bit operation, and neither were most third-party apps.

Today we're at a midway point between 32-bit and 64-bit computing. What Apple has done in Snow Leopard is to ensure that almost any part of the operating system can run in either 32-bit or 64-bit operation -- and that by default, the vast majority of components run in 64-bit mode.

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