“Come see what’s new for the Mac…including a sneak peek of the next major version of Mac OS X,” the invitation to the event reads.

The event’s to be held at Apple’s (AAPL) town hall and we’ll be covering it live at 10 am PT next Wednesday.

Here’s hoping for a new MacBook Air and new versions of iWork and iLife, which are due for an update.

And it costs about a quarter as much to make it.

According to iSuppli, the bill of materials for the latest iteration of Apple’s $99 “hobby” is $64, significantly less than the $237 it cost the company to build the 2007 model.* That’s quite a disparity, one evidently driven as much by an adjustment of product vision as build (dumping that costly hard drive obviously didn’t hurt either). Where the original Apple TV was built like a small desktop PC, its successor is built more like an iPad, with a few of the same components; the two devices have an A4 processor in common, as well as Wi-Fi/Bluetooth and power management chips.

That evolution has given consumers a much-improved device with a pitch-perfect design (though it does have some serious shortcomings in the content department), and it’s given Apple (AAPL) better margins.

“Compared to the first-generation Apple TV, the new model offers a dramatically improved ratio of hardware cost to retail price,” iSuppli noted in its teardown analysis. “The initial version of the Apple TV appeared to be a near give-away or subsidized product for Apple, sold at prices that weren’t much more than the underlying hardware costs. With the second-generation version of the hardware, the Apple TV’s price is about 35 percent above its BOM and manufacturing cost.”

*The standard iSuppli caveats apply here. The company’s estimate accounts for hardware and manufacturing costs ONLY–R&D, software, licensing costs, etc. are not considered.

Overall, I believe Snow Leopard will help keep the Mac an appealing choice for computer buyers, and I can recommend it to existing Mac owners seeking more speed and disk space, or wanting to more easily use Exchange. But I don’t consider Snow Leopard a must-have upgrade for average consumers. It’s more of a nice-to-have upgrade. If you’re happy with Leopard, there’s no reason to rush out and get Snow Leopard.

– Walt Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal

The changes here are modest, and the performance gains look promising but beyond the built in apps, just a promise. If you’re looking for more bells and whistles, you can hold off on this upgrade for at least awhile. But my thought is that Snow Leopard’s biggest feature is that it doesn’t have any new features, but that what is already there has been refined, one step closer to perfection. They just better roll out some new features next time, because the invisible refinement upgrade only works once every few decades.

– Brian Lam, Gizmodo

Here’s the thing about Snow Leopard, the single inescapable fact that hung over our heads as we ran our tests and took our screenshots and made our graphs: it’s $30. $30! If you’re a Leopard user you have virtually no reason to skip over 10.6, unless you’ve somehow built a mission-critical production workflow around an InputManager hack (in which case, well, have fun with 10.5 for the rest of your life). Sure, maybe wait a few weeks for things like Growl and MenuMeters to be updated, and if your livelihood depends on QuickTime you might want to hold off, but for everyone else the sheer amount of little tweaks and added functionality in 10.6 more than justifies skipping that last round of drinks at the bar–hell, we’re guessing Exchange support alone has made the sale for a lot of people.

– Joshua Topolsky, Engadget

Snow Leopard is Apple’s lowest-priced OS update in eight years. Granted, it’s a collection of feature tweaks and upgrades, as well as under-the-hood modifications that might not pay off for users immediately. But the price of upgrading is so low that I’ve really got to recommend it for all but the most casual, low-impact Mac users. If you’ve got a 32-bit Intel Mac (that is, one powered by a Core Solo or Core Duo processor), the benefit of this upgrade will be a little less. But for most Mac users, especially the kind of person who reads a Web site devoted to the subject, the assorted benefits of Snow Leopard outweigh the price tag. I’d pay $30 just for the improved volume ejection, the ability to create services with Automator, and the improvements to the Dock and Exposé–though I admit I’d pay slightly more to not have the misguided QuickTime Player X as a part of the package. If you’re a user who connects to an Exchange server every day, upgrading to Snow Leopard really is a no-brainer. For everyone else, maybe it’s not quite a no-brainer-but it’s awfully close. Snow Leopard is a great value, and any serious Mac user should upgrade now.

– Jason Snell, Macworld

Impressive and important, it’s an update that will revitalize your existing Mac even though you’ll be stumped for a quick five-minute demo that convinces the people around you that much of anything has changed at all.

– Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun Times

In my experience, Mac OS X was already a superior operating system to Windows. With Exchange and other technologies, Snow Leopard adds bite, especially for business. But as upgrades go, this one is relatively tame.

– Ed Baig, USA Today

If you’re already running Leopard, paying the $30 for Snow Leopard is a no-brainer. You’ll feel the leap forward in speed polish, and you’ll keep experiencing those ‘oh, that’s nice’ moments for weeks to come. If you’re running something earlier, the decision isn’t as clear cut; you’ll have to pay $170 and get Snow Leopard with Apple’s creative-software suites–whether you want them or not. Either way, the big story here isn’t really Snow Leopard. It’s the radical concept of a software update that’s smaller, faster and better–instead of bigger, slower and more bloated. May the rest of the industry take the hint.

– David Pogue, New York Times

And if the OS should fail to meet that quality bar and its release date slips? Well, hey, Vista taught us that lunar new year is the new Christmas, right? As Brad Goldberg, general manager with Microsoft’s Windows Client Product Management team, said in 2006, when the company revealed that Windows Vista wouldn’t hit the consumer market in 2006, but in January 2007: “January has emerged as almost a second Christmas, with gift cards, sales, etc. It’s a new trend.”

And if the OS should fail to meet that quality bar and its release date slips? Well, hey, Vista taught us that lunar new year is the new Christmas, right? As Brad Goldberg, general manager with Microsoft’s Windows Client Product Management team, said in 2006, when the company revealed that Windows Vista wouldn’t hit the consumer market in 2006, but in January 2007: “January has emerged as almost a second Christmas, with gift cards, sales, etc. It’s a new trend.”