The best thing about a sour economy are the price wars that benefit consumers, and in this case Amazon has dropped the price of 10.6 Snow Leopard 14% to $24.99, this is both good and bad news. Good news because Mac users can save 14% over Apple’s retail price, bad news because it’s $0.01 under the ‘free shipping for orders over $25′ limit – doh! You can always pad your order with something random like A Christmas Carol for $1, or better yet pick up a useful companion book like Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual. The price was also dropped 10% on the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack for 5 users down to $43.99. Sweet!

Update:Amazon has adjusted the price to $25, so it now qualifies for free shipping again.

The UK’s Register Hardware has a nice multipage preview of Snow Leopard, pointing out some changes, refinements, and new features. As many others have stated there’s no single new feature that is outstandingly groundbreaking about 10.6, it’s just heavily refined and quite a bit faster than Leopard. As always, you can pre-order Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard from Amazon.com for $29 which ships August 28th.

Read the Register Hardwares first look at Snow Leopard
RegisterHardware: Snow Leopard preview

It’s official, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will be available this Friday, August 28. Confirmed by Apple’s online store, the August 28 ship date is right in line with some earlier predictions. Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is basically a finely tuned and optimized version of Mac OS X, it is noticeably faster than 10.5 and is a very worthwhile upgrade to all Mac users, especially given the price. You can pre-order Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard from Amazon.com for $29 and it will ship free to you as soon as Amazon has it in stock. Other options for purchase are the Mac Box Set for $169 which includes 10.6 Snow Leopard, iWork, and iLife, and the Mac OS X Snow Leopard Family Pack for up to 5 users.

The Mac Rumor mill is churning out all sorts of juicy tidbits on Apple’s latest operating system update, known as Snow Leopard. MacRumors has said that 10.6 build 10a432 has gone Golden Master, and Daring Fireball has a short cryptic post saying that 10.6 Snow Leopard will be available as early as Friday, August 28! Also of interest is AppleInsider’s suggestion that OS X 10.6′s disc art will feature a Snow Leopard, literally (shown in accompanying image). And according to ArsTechnica, the install process for 10.6 has been dramatically improved over past versions as well, making for a more simplified, slimmer, and substantially faster upgrade.

Snow Leopard is coming to Mac users at a surprisingly cheap price, you can pre-order Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard from Amazon.com for $29 and it will ship for free as soon as it arrives. Mac users rejoice, a fantastic system update awaits us all very soon!

Creating your own cheap Mac Hackintosh out of a PC Netbook is pretty popular right now, so I compiled a list of various how-to guides mostly for myself but figured I would share it with our readers as well. The guides rank from reasonably easy (Dell Mini 9) to an arduous hack, and it’s technically against Apple’s OS X EULA agreement, so whether or not it’s worth proceeding with making one of these frankenstein Macs is entirely up to you.

Gizmodo: How to Hackintosh a Dell Mini 9

MyDellMini: Fool proof no hassle Dell Mini 10v Hackintosh guide

MSiWind Forums: How to Install Mac OS X on an MSI Wind

InsanelyMac: Install OS X on an Acer Aspire One

Stuart Shelton: How to install Mac OS X on a Samsung NC10

S10Lenovo: Install Mac OS X on a Lenovo S10

MyHPMini: Install Mac OS X on an HP Mini 1000

Enik: Install Mac OS X 10.5.6 on an EEE 1000h

It’s worth mentioning that BoingBoing has a pretty good OSX/Netbook compatibility chart but much of the info looks out of date (from December of 2008) so it’s worth doing some of your own due diligence before relying 100% on the chart.

Update: A reader has sent this in, saying that these files work for installing Snow Leopard on a Dell Mini 10v but we have not been able to test it… this link was pulled from the MyDellMini Forums. Not for novice users, proceed with caution!