The multitude of reviews of Apple's latest operating system upgrade, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard which is due to be released tomorrow, began rolling in last night with the arrival of Walt Mossberg's review, but Gizmodo rightly points out that Mossberg is steering his reader's towards activities of questionable legality by providing them with a seemingly innocent tip in the midst of his review:

"And, for owners of Intel-based Macs who are still using the older Tiger version of the Mac OS, Apple is officially making Snow Leopard available only in a “boxed set” that includes other software and costs $169. The reasoning is that these folks never paid the $129 back in 2007 to upgrade to Leopard. But here’s a tip: Apple concedes that the $29 Snow Leopard upgrade will work properly on these Tiger-equipped Macs, so you can save the extra $140."

Of course, just because the $29 version of Snow Leopard will work doesn't mean it's necessarily legal to buy and use. As with all software, you are buying a license to use the software rather than the software itself, and according to the EULA (End User License Agreement) license, people who are upgrading from Tiger to Snow Leopard don't have the right to use the $29 upgrade version.

Overall, the vast majority of the reviews are positive, but they're all available below should you want to read through them all. Just be aware that some applications won't work nicely with the new OS, while others like Adobe's CS3 will still function, but won't be supported by Adobe.

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