Very much as expected, Apple today announced that the next version of its operating system for the Mactintosh computer called OS X Leopard will go on sale on Friday, October 26 at 6:00 p.m. at Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers.

OS X 10.5 (Leopard), which is the 6th major release of Mac OS X, is packed with more than 300 new features and introduces a brand new desktop with Stacks, a redesigned Finder, Quick Look (a new way to preview files), Spaces and Time Machine, an effortless way to automatically back up everything on a Mac.

Leopard requires a minimum of 512MB of RAM and is designed to run on any Macintosh® computer with an Intel, PowerPC G5 or G4 (867 Mhz or faster) processor. Full system requirements can be found at www.apple.com/macosx/techspecs.