While Lion and Mountain line seem to be reliable enough, a number of Mac users prefer to stick with Snow Leopard, 10.6, which was released in 2009. The critics suggest this is the Apple version of Microsoft’s Windows XP dilemma. There’s a perfectly good OS, but the newer versions aren’t so tempting or compelling, for one reason or another.

With Microsoft, you can understand the issues with Windows Vista, where there were some good ideas, but it was saddled with performance problems and driver incompatibilities. It didn’t do near as well as Microsoft hoped, but Windows 7, which didn’t look a whole lot different, fared far better. In a sense, Windows 7 was little more than a glorified service pack for Vista, with a different name so as not to carry the baggage of its predecessor.

It may well be that Microsoft will need to make the appropriate fixes in Windows 9 to remove the stench of Windows 8, but I suppose it’s always possible customers will surprise us all and buy loads of licenses anyway.

When it comes to OS 10.7 and 10.8, Apple has been sharply criticized for making interface changes that, beyond the desire to integrate the look and feel with the iOS, don’t make sense in a practical way. Making scrollbars part time may be sensible on a smartphone, where you need to save screen space, but not on your 27-inch iMac. Reversing the direction of scrolling, which Apple calls “natural,” simply throws a convention that’s lasted for over 25 years on its ear. Again, this is designed to make it work the same as on an iPhone or iPad.

Now with these two interface changes, a couple of checkboxes in System Preferences will restore behavior to the OS X tradition. It’s not such a big deal.

That iChat is called messages, and iCal is called Calendar, for example, shouldn’t be a show stopper either. They are just names, and you may be upset over the so-called skeuomorphic excesses in the Contacts and Calendar interfaces. But they’re just pictures that do not really hurt the functionality of these apps.

However, using grayscale icons in the Finder and iTunes sidebar does hurt. You may have to look twice to see what they represent. Where’s the sense in that?

Well, a few weeks ago, Tim Cook made design guru Jonathan Ive head of Human Interface for Apple. His tastes appear to be diametrically opposed to skeuomorphic. In addition, the release of iTunes 11 was held up for a month for further revisions.

Something has returned!

When you install iTunes 11, the sidebar is hidden. A check of the View menu restores it and, sure enough, the color icons are back in all their glory. But that’s not enough to have delayed the app by a month. Inserting different icons in an app can be done in minutes rather than hours or days. Clearly the iTunes engineering team had a lot of other things to do, but the gesture is nonetheless appreciated.

So I wonder when Apple might restore color to the Finder sidebar. Sure, there are third party solutions, but this is also something that could be accomplished quickly. It doesn’t have to wait for 10.9. Unless you’re color blind, you won’t complain.

On the long haul, however, just how will the possible restoration of interface sanity impact development of OS X, particularly OS 10.9? Will the leather stitching effect vanish from Calendar? Will Apple’s apps become more consistent in the look and the feel?

Clearly, the need for change comes at a time when Microsoft, for better or wise, is at least trying to do something altogether new and different. Windows 8 may not do much of anything to help a PC user’s productivity, but I suppose you can’t attack Microsoft for taking a chance, only the results. While I wouldn’t want Apple to totally revamp OS X and change interface conventions that have been tested and proven since the early 1980s, there’s plenty of room for change. In addition to finding a cool 200 new features with which to entice you to download OS 10.9, Apple needs to take a large look at every nook and cranny and fix all the inconsistencies, and, if possible, consider restoring needed features that were left on the cutting room floor for no obvious reason.

I also hope that Apple doesn’t fall into the touch everywhere syndrome. Touch makes sense on a smartphone or tablet. It makes sense on a Mac’s trackpad, but nowhere else. On the other hand, enhanced voice recognition isn’t such a bad idea, although I can see where it would become highly disturbing in a busy office. But if you must talk to your Mac in your home, I suppose only your spouse, partner or child will care.

A possibly useful alternative to touch, however, is a way for OS X to recognize hand gestures from a distance. This can be done with your Mac’s FaceTime camera, although that would present a problem with a Mac mini or Mac Pro, unless you’re using an Apple display or someone else’s display with a built-in Webcam.

All right, restoring color icons in iTunes 11 is just one small step. But it gives some hope that Apple will, at long last, cut back or eliminate the OS X excesses.

I am not one of those Baby Boomers who longs for the good old days. All right, I don’t use an iPad all that often, but I spend plenty of time with my iPhone, and not for talking to people. I really don’t use a phone all that much anyway. I also do not expect to disassemble appliances, though I had a taste for building radios and assembling audio gear way back when.

But when it comes to a personal computer, I do tend to prefer the way it was done with such classic Macs as the IIci, back in the early 1990s. In those days, it was a snap to pop the cover, and not much work to replace key internal parts. You could do most parts replacements without special tools.

However, Apple has long had a penchant for making Macs impossibly user hostile. I remember the original Quadra 800, for example, which required you to remove the logic board and several delicate cable assemblies before you could swap out RAM. With the original iMac, you had to pull it apart to get at the memory slots, although the process was fairly straightforward.

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In the old days of desktop publishing, the ideal personal computer display had a resolution of 72 dots per inch, which essentially meant that the page you saw on the screen was about the size of the physical version. Of course, color accuracy was another story entirely.

Today, displays are far sharper, at the expense of the document window being noticeably smaller than the printed counterpart, assuming, of course, that there is a print equivalent. In our digital universe, it hardly matters, so long as text is sharp, eminently readable.

But you want to believe that when you see a picture of a new product, be it food or a tech gadget, that the photo has some connection to reality. You may, for example, see a frozen food box at your neighborhood supermarket. Based on the picture you see on that box, the contents seem absolutely delicious, with liberal helpings of the various ingredients that make up the dish. But when you open the box, more often than not, you see some overcooked mush that barely fills half a container. It’s a common trick to entice you to buy something, but I have to wonder why anyone would give those companies a second chance.

When it comes to our tech corner of the world, you know that when you see a photo of a TV set with a brilliant picture, the picture is a composite created in the graphic arts studio. You are not seeing the real TV playing a real show or movie. Getting that set’s picture to look decent in a real world photo isn’t easy; it’s better just to present the mock-up, but you have to hope that the TV maker is giving you a realistic portrayal of the actual product. Of course if you see the set on display for yourself, you can come to your own conclusions.

Now what about all those wonderful handheld computers? Is there any outright deception going on there? Well, Nokia tried to pull a fast one with the Lumia 920. Touting the rear camera’s supposedly superior low-light and image stabilization features, they actually used a professional camera to record the photos for an ad campaign. Of course, it was done in such a clumsy fashion that they were caught. But if the camera was really so good, why the fakery?

Recently, in his McElhearn blog, author Kirk McElhearn, who is also Macworld’s “iTunes Guy,” caught Amazon with their pants down, metaphorically speaking. A fan of the original Amazon Kindle for reading e-books in sunlight, he bought the $119.00 Kindle Paperwhite, which touts a built-in light to increase display brightness. Amazon’s photos show a smooth bright white background, with rich sharp text. The name offers the promise of mimicking the look of real paper, but the unit Kirk received was decidedly unlike that photo. On his Paperwhite, “the lighting is uneven at the bottom of the Kindle, and there is a very large difference in brightness.”

As you see if you follow our link to Kirk’s article, the reality is very much unlike the product Amazon is advertising. While this sort of deception may be routine for a cheap container of frozen food, it is totally unacceptable for a consumer electronics device at any price point. Kirk bought the Paperwhite because he felt his iPad mini wouldn’t produce a satisfactory image in sunlit surroundings. Instead, the Paperwhite was returned: “It’s a good idea, but it’s just a bit cheap and poorly designed. Amazon should really do better with a device like this.”

But that’s only part of the story. Amazon shouldn’t be allowed to get away with false advertising. Sure, if you see one of these in a store, you will know for yourself the limitations. But what about those who buy one online, depending on those descriptive ads to provide useful information about the product’s performance? If all Paperwhites suffer from the same uneven image, customers should return them in droves, with appropriately worded complaints. Maybe Amazon will get the message that this sort of chicanery is absolutely unacceptable.

Sure, it’s perfectly normal for a company to provide, shall we say, exaggerated claims for a product or service. But it’s the degree of deception that counts. Some might say Apple is misrepresenting the capabilities of the Siri voice assistant, pointing out that those TV ads demonstrate a potential in voice recognition accuracy and performance that isn’t realized by non-actors in the real world. Apple’s excuse? Siri remains a beta.

Apple didn’t have so good an excuse with Maps for iOS 6, and I don’t need to discuss the problems, since they were front and center. But iOS 6 is free. Even if you bought an iPhone 5 or recent iPad on which it was preloaded, you paid for the hardware. The OS may have bugs, but they will likely be fixed over time. Even now Maps has become better in a number of significant ways, though there’s much more room for improvement. But if the defect is in the hardware, you con’t fix it with an over-the-air update.

I wonder what sort of excuse Amazon will offer, assuming they ever respond to Kirk’s review — but I doubt they ever will.

Just the other day, Bloomberg reported yet another staffing change at Apple. Seems that Richard Williamson, who supervised the mapping program at Apple, and had worked with the company since the days of NeXT, has recently been shown the door. If true, it would represent even more evidence that Senior Vice President Eddy Cue is working extremely hard to clear up the leadership problems that might have impaired development of Maps for iOS 6. As most of you know, the flawed mapping service, designed by Apple to replace Google Maps, had a very shaky debut.

Despite being represented as an innovative approach to a mapping service by Scott Forstall at the WWDC last June, the promise and the reality were very different. From almost the first day, disappointed iPhone and iPad users reported amazingly stupid flaws in Maps, from visions of melting bridges, to incorrect location displays and, at times, wrong directions when you used the turn-by-turn navigation feature.

Now it’s not as if Google Maps is necessarily perfect. I’ve seen some real foolish mistakes, such as the time when Google underestimated the location of a nearby health food store by more than two miles. But Google’s imperfections were not as glaring as those in Apple’s Maps.

Now if Apple simply called it a public beta, some of the lapses might be forgiven. Holding off release for six months might have had a greater effect, assuming the time was used productively to iron out as many of the serious bugs as possible.

Indeed, Maps is perhaps the worst possible program to yield flaws. All it takes is a screenshot of a serious display or navigation flaw to drive the point home, and when those screenshots pollute the online world, you can see where Apple got real bad publicity early on. Yes, CEO Tim Cook apologized, and it may well be that Forstall’s alleged refusal to add his signature to that document may be one of the reasons why he was relieved of his post as iOS chief. Forget about his supposed abrasive personality. If he did the right thing, or made sure Maps wasn’t so seriously flawed on the day of release, he’d still be iOS chief despite the personality quirks.

The Maps debacle came at a bad time, though it doesn’t seem to have hurt iPhone or iPad sales. But Apple is engaged in a battle royal with Google over mobile platforms, and being second best by a huge margin must have stung. Now according to Bloomberg, in addition to Williamson’s discharge, Cue plans to install a new leadership team for the mapping group, and is supposedly working hard to fix the most serious mapping flaws, particularly the visual and location mistakes, and fine tune the entire service as quickly as possible.

Based on my recent tests, and some published reports, it does appear that Maps has become more reliable, though it still manages to confuse left turns and U-turns when I attempt to navigate to some nearby restaurants here in Arizona. But it’s hard to expect that Apple can, in the space of months, match what Google has done over the years to make its mapping service fairly reliable — and there are still significant flaws here and there. If Apple can deliver a product that provides near-parity in a short time, it will be a miracle, the result of extreme good luck, and no doubt evidence of a crack management and development team that can do the impossible. In this case, the management shakeup will have had a positive result.

Besides, there’s no reason to feel sorry for Forstall and Williamson and other Apple employees who are being discharged. Most likely, they have healthy golden parachutes that will keep them in the 1% bracket for the rest of their lives.

Over at Microsoft, the departure of Windows chief Steve Sinofsky may be due to several factors, and the perceived misfire of Windows 8 may be just one. Some say it was all his abrasive personality, although he maybe just wanted to get a life. He may have also been a serious rival to Steve Ballmer for the CEO spot.

But Microsoft is also reporting that some 40 million Windows 8 upgrades were sold the first few weeks, which seems pretty decent number except when you consider the price was far less than previous versions of Windows. Maybe Microsoft lowered the price (until January 31, 2013) to compete with Apple and cheap OS X upgrades, or maybe it was a fire sale designed to speed up the rate of early upgrades before people woke up and saw what a train wreck Windows 8 really is.

Sinofsky was replaced by Julie Larson-Green, lead programmer for Windows 7 and Windows 8, which doesn’t appear to signify any serious policy changes. That is unless she would have taken a totally different direction had she been at the helm. But it really looks like more of the same at Microsoft, and things probably aren’t going to change unless Windows 8 at the end of the day is a huge failure after the early uptake. Even then, it may require getting a new CEO and replacing other members of the management team to alter Microsoft’s obsessive belief that it’s Windows everywhere now and forever.

In short, I don’t expect to see much of a difference after the corporate musical chairs at Microsoft, but it seems clear that Apple’s reorganized executive team are working hard to make the changes necessary to set things right.