New operating system from Apple arrives on store shelves but check your system specs before you buy.

The long-awaited Mac OS X Leopard has finally arrived, officially bringing in the era of Windows plus Mac OS X on the one Apple computer. And while the new Apple operating system brings in more than 300 new features according to the company, Leopard has some fairly decent requirements of its own.

Leopard requires an Intel, PowerMac G5 or PowerMac G4 processor but if you plan on trying it with a G4 chip, it needs to be clocking in at more than 867MHz.

Your system needs 512MB of memory, a DVD drive to install the operating system and a hard drive with at least 9GB of space.

If you’re wanting to have a crack at dual-booting with Windows, you need to have a copy of either Windows Vista or Windows XP Service Pack 2 and it only works with Macs featuring an Intel processor.

One surprising requirement is the need for at least a 1.6GHz processor for Leopard’s DVD Player. Sure, improved deinterlacing is a welcome feature but requiring 1.6GHz of processing power simply to deinterlace DVD-resolution video seems unreasonably steep.

From a more technical viewpoint however, what is impressive is Apple’s inclusion of a range of developers tools on the installation DVD – JavaScript, PHP, Ruby on Rails are also supported as well as the GCC compiler and Xcode 3 integrated development environment (IDE) to build Mac OS X applications. It also includes Python, Perl and SQLite for database application development.

It’s definitely one area where Apple has certainly delivered far more value than Microsoft has ever done with Windows. While Microsoft has begun offering free versions of its Express-class application development tools in the last 12 months or so and provides significant resource information on line at its developers website, it isn’t quite the same thing as having everything ready to go on an installation disc.

The official arrival of Boot Camp, Apple’s tool that allows Intel-based Macs to run either Mac OS X or one of the latest versions of Windows, may end up being an anti-climax to those already using Boot Camp Beta – all that is needed according to Apple is an update of some driver software. Otherwise, operation would appear to be as already is.

For those who haven’t tried the beta, there is no longer any need to download device drivers from the web or burn a CD. According to Apple, you simply load the Leopard installation DVD back into the drive and everything (apart from your Windows operating system of course) is loaded from there.

Choosing the operating system remains as before as well – you hold down the Apple Options key when booting and select which operating system you wish to run.

Apple has reported a surge in Mac computers sales in its most recent quarterly financial results, swept along by the success and hype surrounding the iPod and iPhone products.

Mac OS X Leopard’s timing is impeccable as whatever hype existed for Windows Vista has all but dissipated and consumers appear ready to look at alternatives. Apple has already said that it hopes to have plenty of its recently-launched iPods in Christmas stockings this year. It will also be quietly hoping to have more than a few Mac computers out and about as well.

Mac OS X Leopard will simply help add to the weight of reasons for consumers to think of jumping the Windows ship and file onboard Mac OS instead.