$10 Mac OS X Snow Leopard upgrade helps me with complete integration

I’ve got a MacBook Air as my laptop, the machine I lug around when I’m out and about. Currently it’s running Mac OS X 10.5. Currently, it doesn’t have built-in Microsoft Exchange support. With the update to 10.6 coming out this Friday (and only $10 too!), I will finally be able to fully inte­grated both my PC and my Mac.

I currently have a Microsoft Exchange account. I sync my email, contacts, and calendar from my desktop (using Microsoft Outlook) with my iPhone using Exchange. But what happens when I am using my MacBook Air to update my calendar? iCal at the moment doesn’t work with Exchange, so what I’d have to do is use Google Calendar as the middleman. iCal syncs to Google Calendar, which syncs with Outlook (when I run it on my desktop that is), which syncs with Exchange, which syncs with my iPhone. Kind of compli­cated and convoluted.

Now that there is support for Exchange, iCal just syncs directly with Exchange, which then syncs with my iPhone. No need for MobileMe. But wouldn’t it be much easier if I just used MobileMe? There’s a catch: as far as I know, MobileMe doesn’t support sending emails from your own email address with your domain name. Then there’s also the simpli­fi­cation: no need for multiple calendars: I just stick with the one on my Exchange account.

The inte­grated support for Microsoft Exchange is more than worth the price of admission: only $30 (don’t forget to check out if you qualify for the $10 Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 update). The other improve­ments are welcome too: Snow Leopard should be faster and lighter. Hell, it’ll even boot up and shut down faster. I’m already impressed by how quickly it already does that, so I can’t wait to see the improvements.

There are already pirated versions out there, supposedly gold master copies headed for retail presssing, and I could have Snow Leopard on my MacBook Air by tonight if I wanted. But I’d much rather pay for it. And hey, I like this update, not like the iPod Touch 3.0 update.