Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is expected to sell about 5 million units of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which will be available for download and purchase this Friday August 28.  This figure was estimated by consulting firm Piper Jaffray.

Jaffray estimates that about 40 million people have Mac OS X and 5 million unit sales will add $66 million to Apple’s operating income in the third quarter.  Piper Jaffray wrote these figures in a note entitled Snow Leopard’s Impact Baked Into Street Ests; Aggressive Competition Vs Windows.

“This equates to as much as $0.05 in EPS impact in the quarter, assuming a 30% tax rate, but we believe the Street has largely factored this into its $1.37 EPS estimate for the Sept. quarter,” stated the note.

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is releasing their newest operating system this Friday.  The Mac OS X 10.6 operating system is best known as Snow Leopard.  The price of an upgrade from Mac OS X 10.5 is $29 or $9.95 through Up-To-Date.

Initially Apple was expecting to release the new operating system in September so the software is arriving early.  And it can be pre-ordered right now.  Some of the new features include out-of-the-box Microsoft Exchange Server support and 64-bit support.  The Finder software runs a lot faster and iChat has been improved.

Additional details are available on the Apple.com website.  Apple made the announcement about the new operating system back in June at the WWDC event.

Yesterday at the WWDC event, Apple announced several new products.  Some people were upset because there was nothing game-changing added to the new line of products, rather they were merely updates to already existing products.  But the features that were added to the existing products and the introduction of the new iPhone still comes off as exciting caused by Apple’s signature reality distortion field.  Steve Jobs didn’t even have to be there to pull it off either.

Below is a thorough breakdown of all of Apple’s new products and features announced at WWDC.