As you might expect, I am already receiving letters from friends and readers wondering when they should upgrade to Mac OS X Lion. A notable example came from someone who publishes books about making money from a home business, and I suppose that is a hard sell these days. Regardless, he had read Apple’s puff pieces about the joys of Lion, and was ready to buy that upgrade as soon as it’s released.

I had to let him down gently.

Yes, he has a speedy broadband connection, a prerequisite unless you can find a nearby Wi-Fi hot spot, a library, or an Apple reseller to download the installer. But his Mac is way, way out of date. Seems he has an early generation Mac mini, a model with a PowerPC chip, whereas Lion requires a 64-bit Intel processor. But it’s not as if he didn’t have the opportunity to get a new computer. A couple of years ago, the hard drive failed, and a local dealer offered him a decent discount on a refurbished Intel model, or he would end up paying roughly half that amount to replace the hard drive; a lot of that price was the installation fee, since he was not about to mess with the innards of a Mac mini.

He chose the inexpensive solution against my suggestion that he replace that computer, and it was a decision that has now come back to haunt him, since the version of Mac OS X he is running now is the last he will ever be able to run, until his Mac is replaced.

At the same time, the sort of work he does isn’t going to be made that much more efficient on a new Mac. Other than email and Internet surfing, he has to process orders for his self-help books, but that doesn’t require any special software. His older version of Microsoft Office is also perfectly suited to his needs. Worse, the upgrade to a new computer — and Lion — will mean that his few PowerPC apps won’t run, since Lion reportedly won’t support the Rosetta translation software. That’s the utility that allowed you to run PowerPC software on an Intel-based Mac.

Now as far as my friend is concerned, he doesn’t have to do a thing until his Mac fails. Apple doesn’t care about him until he buys a new computer, and they will do nothing to help ease the migration to Lion for such customers. Besides, the vast majority of Mac users run Intel hardware anyway, and a hefty portion of that group can upgrade to Lion if they choose to do so. Sure, some don’t have Snow Leopard, and may have to perform a double upgrade (to Snow Leopard 10.6.8, then to Lion), assuming that Apple doesn’t relent and provide a a more favorable upgrade scheme, such as a physical installer DVD. Whether that happens depends on customer demand. If only a small number of users complain, Apple won’t budge.

Now I did get one other interesting letter, from someone who bought one of my computer books 10 years ago, wondering if I planned to write an Lion update. Well, I haven’t written computer books for several years, and I don’t plan on looking for such an opportunity now or ever. That market is well served by a number of excellent authors. I did, however, provide the basic information about Lion to that reader; also the advice that some of the material in that old book is probably still somewhat useful.

As the Lion user base grows, I expect I’ll receive more and more inquiries about upgrades. But you have to regard a $29.99 price for a downloadable installer as largely an accommodation to existing Mac users. Apple really wants you to buy new hardware, which is their primary source of income. Sure, enough copies of Lion will be purchased to more than compensate for the R&D expense. Apple, being way more efficient than Microsoft in such matters, doesn’t have to squander billions of dollars of cash to create every single major OS upgrade.

And even though tech pundits continue to want to put Apple and Microsoft in the same business, they’re not. Apple offers an operating system as part of the whole widget, a full-blown user experience. Microsoft expects third parties to build the hardware, which is good or bad depending on your point of view. That Apple delivers a more elegant, more reliable and predictable user experience is the end result of avoiding model proliferation and making sure that everything works well together. Adding iOS-inspired elements to Lion will also ease the transition from one gadget to the other. You buy Apple, you can depend on a consistent experience, only altered to cater to the exclusive needs of a specific platform.

Microsoft craves Windows everywhere, even on a tablet, without compromise or alteration. But the public has already decided that’s not where they want to go. Unfortunately, Microsoft remains too obtuse to understand.

According to published reports from both the Mac rumor sites and the mainstream media, Apple appears to have essentially wound up development of Mac OS X Lion. This is based on the claim that a Golden Master “seed” of Lion has been made available to registered developers. On the basis of those reports, you can expect to see Lion go on sale within days, or at worst, a couple of weeks.

On the other hand, nothing is certain until release day. Even if a Golden Master truly exists, problems might appear that will force a second or a third revision. Consider what happened with the iOS 4.2 release. A last-minute bug forced a 4.2.1. In saying that, assuming Apple would use a similar numbering scheme, the first official Lion release might actually be 7.0.1 if something goes wrong with that Golden Master. But I do not pretend to have any inside information.

The earliest possible release date is said to be July 6th, although a July 14th date, coinciding with the release of a new MacBook Air and other hardware refreshes, has been bandied about. But some suggest Apple wants to give Lion more time to bake before letting it free to the general public.

By the end of the day, though, is the promise of Lion sufficient to make it a must-have?

That’s a question you can only answer for yourselves, but certainly the price shouldn’t be a deterrent. Now that Apple has decreed that $29 or $30 is the proper cost for a full OS upgrade, you can expect that Lion’s successors will be in the same ballpark. There may also be obstacles that prevent you from buying a copy regardless.

The most significant obstacle might simply be the inability to conveniently download a copy. If your Internet connection is challenged, retrieving a roughly 4GB file may be out of the question. Yes, you can go to an Apple Store with your Mac portable and use their Wi-Fi connection, but can you imagine how that network is going to be slammed during the first days of Lion’s availability? Besides, what if there is no Apple retailer near you?

You also need to be running Mac OS 10.6.8 to use the compatible version of the Mac App Store. How that’s going to impact people with older Mac OS versions remains one of those serious unresolved issues. Would that downloadable installer actually operate if copied to a Mac running, say, Leopard or Tiger? Maybe Apple will just offer a higher-cost combo installer on a DVD to support millions of customers who are otherwise eligible, but cannot download or install Lion.

However, the most important question of all is whether you really need it. Apple’s not necessarily touting speed improvements, but feature improvements and changes. Having automatic saving is good, but that’s already available in third-party alternatives. Being able to save the state or version of a document is also quite useful, if you do the sort of work where it might be of benefit. Sure, it’s also nice to be able to resume your desktop’s app and document layout after a restart, but it’s not a critical must-have feature, is it?

The iOS-inspired features and eye candy might be super cool for some, though I wonder about the value of Launchpad, which mimics the app display on an iPhone or iPad, particularly when you have hundreds of apps installed, as many of you do. It may be better to just download one of the many app launching docks available as shareware, and find something with far more granular controls.

I am, however, impressed by the promise and simplicity of AirDrop, Apple’s elegant file sharing system. File sharing is a concept that is often difficult to explain to many Mac users. What’s not elegant is limiting AirDrop to a Wi-Fi connection, since such hookups are far slower than a standard gigabit Ethernet network. Well, at least the current iterations of Wi-Fi. Future versions promise far greater data transfer speeds, particularly at relatively short ranges, but that promise probably won’t be fulfilled until 2012 or later, and it will nonetheless require new Macs, and new routers to make it so.

With over 250 features to consider, there are other notable improvements worthy of a second glance. Apple appears, for example, to have paid loads of attention to Mail, though the standard interface seems merely an imitation of the one you see in the iPad version. Grouping messages by conversations sort of reminds me of how Gmail is organized. Then again, maybe I’m too retro to appreciate such “advantages,” as I prefer to handle my email the old fashioned way, but that’s just me.

The key here is that many of you may be able to survive quite nicely without Lion for the time being. If getting a copy is difficult, you’ll also have to think carefully about whether the inconvenience is worth the bother, despite the cheap price of admission.

Perhaps, as more and more applications that are fully Lion compliant are released, the upgrade to 10.7 will seem far more compelling, maybe a natural step in the scheme of things. But I’ll have more to say after Lion is available and installed on my Macs. So don’t regard this article as a downright dismissal of the possibilities of Lion. It’s got lots of potential, but it’s all about how well that potential is realized.

This week, the blogosphere is off complaining about Apple again. This time, the target is the $49 introductory price for an Apple Thunderbolt cable, but that’s par for the course.

In case you tuned in late, Thunderbolt is the new ultra high performance peripheral port that debuted on this year’s MacBook Pro refresh, and later on the latest and greatest iMac, where you get two such ports on the larger screen models.

Thunderbolt, dubbed Light Peak by Intel during the development stage, promises data throughput of 10 gigabits per second in each direction. That’s equivalent to PCI Express, the peripheral bus found on the Mac Pro and loads of high-end Windows-based PCs, and it offers the promise of being able to connect all sorts of powerful devices, from extra displays, to RAID drives and audio/video breakout boxes, to even a Mac portable without the need for internal expansion slots.

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Back when Apple released iMovie ’08, iLife customers freaked. Apple changed things drastically, particularly such traditional movie editing features as the timeline. Some things were dropped, thus resulting in an app that many perceived as being less usable than the previous version, iMovie HD.

Well, Apple explained, at the time, that building a new consumer editing app was a work in progress, that many lost features would be restored and new capabilities added over time. However, they made available iMovie HD for those who didn’t want to upgrade.

Well, with iMovie ’11, you don’t hear many of those complaints anymore about what went before. Many people simply became accustomed to the new app, which has had a growing set of new features for each and every version. But iMovie HD never stopped working for those who still want to use it.

Segue to 2011 and the arrival of a major overhaul of Apple’s professional video editing app, Final Cut Pro, dubbed Final Cut X. In keeping with Apple’s philosophy of making apps cheaper, it weighs in as a downloadable version only, requiring 10.6.8 as the minimum OS, and costs just 299.99. Add two integrated apps, Compressor and Motion, and you have a well-stocked movie editing studio for $400. How can you beat that?

In its favor, FCPX, the common acronym, takes advantage of full 64-bit support, and all the great performance enhancements Apple incorporated in Mac OS 10.6. What this means is that you can get your work done faster, and not sit back waiting precious minutes for footage to be rendered. Well that’s unless you prefer to have that extra time to take a breather before beginning your next task.

Well, if you are a regular user of Final Cut Pro 7, the previous version, there’s plenty to howl about. Because FCPX is a wholesale rewrite, a brand new app, features video editors took for granted have changed, or are gone. You cannot even import projects from FCP7 because the architecture is too different to allow for proper translation. Or at least that’s what lead developer Randy Ubillos claims.

Even where critical features were retained, in some cases the interfaces have changed so much users have to relearn some skills.

Now Apple has issued an FAQ explaining what was changed, what’s returning, and what won’t return. While I don’t pretend to have any great amount of video editing expertise — my field is radio broadcasting and I edit interviews, not music or movies — it does seem to me that, over time, the tools that pros need to edit movies and videos will probably be restored; if not now, soon. In an email to one customer, Ubillos said that people who create a project in one version of FCP shouldn’t ordinarily need to convert the project to a new and different version.

That answer really offers a healthy dose of common sense. As a commenter wrote the other day in response to one of my articles, it’s not as if FCP7 suddenly stopped working on the day its successor arrived. What’s more, nobody is forced to upgrade until such time as the new version meets their requirements. If it doesn’t suit their needs, they can stick with the older version, or consider another platform, such as Adobe Premiere, available on both the Mac and Windows, or perhaps an Avid system. In other words, they haven’t been abandoned, or left without the critical tools they need to get work done.

But Apple isn’t the innocent party here. They had the hubris to release FCPX without carefully explaining to existing users about the changes, the improvements and the limitations. More to the point, FCP7 was discontinued then and there. Unless someone has some old stock around, you can’t buy a copy. To Apple it’s history, and that was one huge mistake.

This doesn’t mean they can’t and shouldn’t make major changes to apps, pro and otherwise. Certainly the move from the classic or original Mac OS to Mac OS X, beginning in 2001, was difficult to some Mac users. The first versions of Apple’s industrial-strength operating system were missing key features. You couldn’t even play a CD on the first version, 10.0. Worse, performance was sluggish. It took time for Apple to optimize the code, and to harness the power of faster processors and graphics chips to deliver an appropriately responsive OS.

Today, with the arrival of Lion perhaps days, or at most a few weeks away, you don’t hear complaints about the performance of the latest and greatest versions of Mac OS X. Of course, Macs these days are far more powerful than the ones around in the days of 10.0, and part of that is due to the switch to Intel Inside.

It’s clear Apple’s missteps with FCPX will result in some lost customers. Others will, perhaps while holding their noses, try to make FCPX function within their workflow, or they’ll learn to adapt. Over time, as more features are added and improved, it’ll be very clear whether Apple’s bet on the future was the right one, or whether they should simply have given a shave and haircut to the original FCP.

Now since Apple is reportedly granting refunds to disappointed customers, perhaps they could take one sensible step more, and make FCP7 available again. They should also put it in maintenance mode, so critical bug fixes will continue to be released. It doesn’t have to be forever either. Maybe six months or a year would be sufficient to clean up FCPX.

And perhaps a year from now, the great FCPX controversy will be gone and forgotten. That is, if Apple made the right move with their new video editing architecture.