7486 I'm not an early adopter by nature and temperament, and consequently I'm inclined to hang onto older, proven technologies until I'm convinced that the next wave, so to speak, really is an advance or improvement. For example, my car and truck were built in 1998 and 1994 respectively. I still use a land line telephone, and have a the VHF video recorder. My 35 millimeter camera, which is 35 years old this year, still gets some use (although less and less all the time), and I have a small-by-todays-standards 20-inch television with a CRT and connected to just a broadcast reception antenna. My newest computer is a 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook - a model that debuted in September, 2003, and I have a couple of even older Pismo PowerBooks in regular service.

However, I'm not - indications perhaps to the contrary - a hidebound reactionary Luddite. I've got nothing against technological advance, indeed the I embrace it in many instances, when it, in my estimation represents actual improvement over what it's displacing and is economically sound and justifiable. I am not a fan on change for change's sake, and am inclined to like things I own better go longer I keep them. My car and truck, for instance, do everything I need them to do, are reasonably reliable, and are paid for long since, so there's no compelling reason to trade up, objectively speaking. I didn't switch to OS X as my production OS until late 2003, when I deemed its feature and efficiency advantages as finally outweighing OS 9's superior speed and responsiveness.

On the other hand, the dynamics are substantially different with computers. A 20-year-old car can be perfectly satisfactory transportation with essentially no compromises. My 18-year-old Toyota Camry gets really good fuel mileage and has been a rock of dependability over the ten years we've owned it. A 1990 Mac SE is not remotely adequate for anything more than basic word processing today, provided you can find a printer and consumables that will work with it, and the day is fast approaching when Power PC Macs like my PowerBook will hit an acceleration curve on their descent into obsolescence. Indeed, that day may be coming sooner than many had expected, if rumors making the rounds this week about Mac OS 10.6, which also may debut much sooner than anyone expected, have any validity.

The general gist of the scuttlebutt is speculation about Apple possibly previewing Mac OS 10.6 - provisionally dubbed "Snow Leopard," at the Worldwide Developer's Conference next week, with an early seed released to developers and a public release to come as soon as next January's Macworld Expo.

Others in the Mac Web conversation protest that it's much too soon for a Mac OS refresh, and in the normal scheme of things, it would seem impossibly soon, being as we're barely more than seven months into the OS 10.5 era and January 9 coming 15 months or so after the Leopard release, but what makes these rumors seem plausible is the projected modest scope of the rumored version 10.5 refreshment, which would not see any major new features added, but rather concentrate on speed. stability, and security hence the "Snow Leopard" nomenclature which doesn't represent a complete break from the Leopard theme.

The timeline is also not that outlandish from a historical perspective. While OS 10.4 Tiger had a two and one half year tenure as the shipping Mac OS version, that was unprecedented, and the more customary interval between major Mac OS X upgrades has been much shorter.

The Mac OS X public beta was released September 13, 2000, and version 10.0 Cheetah came along just over six months later on March 24, 2001. OS 10.1 Puma arrived six months after that on September 29, 2001, and OS 10.2 Jaguar less than 11 months later on August 13, 2002, with OS 10.3 Panther making its debut 14 months and a bit after that on October 24, 2003, roughly 18 months before OS 10.4 Tiger first growled in the public square on April 29, 2005, some 30 months before OS 10.5 Leopard rolled out on October 26, 2007, so the average interval between OS X milestone releases has actually been just over 12 months, or if we exclude the first two public "development" releases (the beta and Cheetah), the average has been 15 months, which just happens to be the span between Leopard and "Snow Leopard" if the latter actually were to arrive as speculated at Macworld Expo 2009.

The rumoristas also contend that the OS 10.6 release will drop support for Power PC Macs. If true, this would relegate all PPC machines to has-been, low-end status less than three years after the last ones sold new, if a public release date of 2009 January 2009 were to hold up.

Apple has clearly lost interest in Power PC. Leopard works sort of OK on my old G4, but it's an indifferent performer in many respects, and I'm inclined to suspect that Apple is taking a "that's good enough" strands as far as refining and polishing OS X Leopard performance on Power PC machines. I love the Spaces feature and Time Machine and a host of other improvements like the updated spellchecker and Spotlight, and version 10.5.3 is another incremental improvement, but compared with OS 10.4.11, Leopard is still a buggy beast, and email performance, at least over dial-up, which I am stuck with for the foreseeable future, remains in the toilet - slow and cranky - compared with smooth and slick OS 10.4 Tiger on the same equipment and connection.

Consequently, I would be delighted if the next OS X version concentrates primarily on polishing the speed, and reliability of what's already there in Leopard rather than piling on a whole slew of new stuff, even if it means upgrading my system to a MacIntel machine, which it's probably time to do anyway.

One point that did not receive much attention in the first around of 10.6 rumors was the issue of whether Mac users would be willing to pay for another OS upgrade so soon after Leopard, but counter-speculation suggests said the probability is at 10.6 would be a free update for MacIntel users only, which, if true, would make eminent good sense. There is historical precedent; Mac OS 10.1 back in 2001 was a free update for OS 10.0 users.

While Apple wouldn't make any money directly from a free 10.6 upgrade, it might be calculated as a loss leader, with the termination of Power PC support freeing up engineering capacity and allowing the developers to get down to business working on OS 10.7 without the distraction of maintaining Power PC compatibility, and getting it to release status much faster that would have been the case with sustained Power PC support, which would pay revenue dividends down the road, and provide more incentive for Power PC holdouts like me to upgrade their hardware to Apple's financial advantage.

That strategy would put Power PC users on notice in a relatively gentle way but that Leopard will be the last Power PC compatible Mac OS version, without shutting them out of contemporary functionality for some time yet. Most of the complaints about Leopard stability have tended to come from high-end users who are unlikely to still be running Power PC hardware anyway. Consumer users and the all-important and rapidly-growing switcher cohort same to be quite happy with Leopard, and of course many Power PC Mac users have decided to stick with Tiger 10.4, which unless you have one of the really late model G4 or G5 Power PCs is probably a sensible choice. As I've noted above, Leopard;s performance on my 1.33 GHz G4 is nothing to get up in the night and write home about, although I've become too addicted to Spaces and Time Machine to go back.

As for those who ponied up for the last G5 Power Macs and iMacs back in early-mid 2006, it was certainly no secret at the time that Apple Power PCs were lame ducks, so they really have no complaint. Leopard will continue to work on their machines, and will be supported by Apple for the foreseeable future, I would expect at least until 2010 with periodic security updates and perhaps longer than that. Virtually everyone who is serious about staying current in the computer world, or at least reasonably so, should have an Intel Mac by then.

Speaking personally, I have found running Leopard the most compelling reason to date for finally leaving Power PC behind. Prior to Leopard's release last fall, I just couldn't make a rational case for buying a new system on the basis of objective need. Now I can, and I am all but certain that I will have a MacIntel by the end of the year, and probably sooner than that. I've been holding back with the idea of waiting to see what materializes with the next Mac book refreshments and possibly redesign when Intel finally gets the Montevina CPU platform out the door. Whatever, I should be Intel-equipped by the time OS 10.6, whatever form it takes in the real world, is released, and that will be fine with me.

Charles W. Moore

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