Now we all know that Snow Leopard appeared last August, but for some of you it still has serious problems, so you’re sticking with Leopard. Some of you are even Tiger holdouts, because Leopard didn’t light your fire.

The other day, I saw a perfectly serious article claiming adoption of 10.6 was not so good and then trying to explain why. But when the article’s statistics demonstrated a roughly 45% adoption rate, despite the fact that millions of Mac users can’t install Snow Leopard, the basic premise was invalidated.

Aside from those of you who have PowerPC-based Macs, and thus can never install Snow Leopard, it is quite true that 10.6 is perceived as fatally flawed in some respects. Some complain of more system crashes, others fret that their applications aren’t compatible yet.

Unfortunately, such issues apply to all personal computer operating system upgrades, from Apple and Microsoft. Early adopters suffer the pain and agony of bugs that weren’t eradicated before shipping. Some of the apps and peripheral drivers you require for your work are suddenly rendered inoperable. So you’re stuck, unless, of course, you stick with what you have.

At the end of the day, nobody forces you to install a new OS. If the one you have gets the job done, there’s no harm in staying with it. The same is true, of course, for the latest and greatest versions of the productivity apps you use. It’s clear to me that such publishers as Adobe and Microsoft are finding it more and more difficult to add useful features and not make their products buggier and more and more bloated.

Does it make sense, for example, that Word 2008 takes longer to launch on the most powerful Intel-based Mac than version 5.1 did on a mainstream Mac built 20 years ago?

All right, it’s fair to say that today’s version of Word is being asked to perform a whole lot more functions than that legendary version from the old days. But has Microsoft done anything to make their products work more efficiently, the better to take advantage of faster hardware? Or do they use the speedier processors as an excuse for lazy programming? I think the answer is painfully obvious in most cases.

Now returning to the operating system equation, it’s fair to say that it usually takes a few updates for things to settle down. Even though Mac OS X ushered in an era of enhanced stability, almost every version shipped with a show-stopper or two. A few had the potential of causing lost data. Consider the Leopard bug where a file moved, rather than copied, to another drive or network share, might become corrupted. Or the infamous Snow Leopard problem where switching from your Guest Account to your regular one would result in the latter being deleted by mistake.

I like to think Snow Leopard is working quite nicely at the present time. It is on every Mac on which I’ve installed it. I didn’t suffer from the initial bugs, and I think that the 10.6.2 update fixed the worst ills. There are rumors that a 10.6.3 is in our near future, and I wouldn’t doubt that there’s probably a 10.6.4 under construction as well. Something as complicated as a computer OS is always a work in progress and you can complain all you want that Apple rushes these things out too quickly. That conclusion is probably true to some extent, but even if Snow Leopard came out a few weeks later, it doesn’t guarantee all the significant issues would have been eradicated.

The real question is whether the upgrade makes sense for you. Visible new features in Snow Leopard are few. If you crave enhanced support for Microsoft Exchange email servers, and can’t tolerate Entourage as an email client, the enhanced support in Address Book, iCal and Mail ought to help serve most of you. The few missing Exchange features may be addressed in Outlook 2011 for the Mac, due towards the end of the year. But if Microsoft doesn’t fix the known instabilities in Entourage, it may not be worth the bother.

The under-the-hood fixes in Snow Leopard were supposed to deliver added performance and enhanced stability. The Cocoa Finder is surely not as prone to forget positioning or hang when you access folders with loads of files or experience a disconnect from a network share. But it’s not quite all it could be.

Worse, few developers have taken advantage of the highly touted features, such as Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL, which are designed to allow apps to take better advantage of multicore processors and speedier graphic cards. For the time being, Snow Leopard may seem a tad snappier than Leopard on the same hardware, but the real improvements remain unrealized. I don’t know when that’ll change. Maybe Steve Jobs will exhort developers to get with the program at the next WWDC, but the programming issues remain complicated. It won’t happen overnight.

Yes, I look forward to seeing what Apple can conjure up for 10.7, the operating system where you hope they’ll return to feature improvements. But Snow Leopard is here and now, and I hope Apple won’t stop trying to make it work better, assuming third-party developers demonstrate real progress towards making their products take advantage of the most compelling new features.

It’s nothing new. When the iPod first came out, bloggers and so-called tech pundits were busy complaining about the features it didn’t have, such as a built-in radio, or perhaps a working kitchen sink. None of that hurt actual sales of the product, of course, since it became a runaway best-seller and sales only began to flatten and dip over the past year after the market matured and smartphones began to take over.

Apple gave the naysayers six months to complain about the iPhone’s notable lapses. That was the period between the product launch and original shipping date. Even though it sold more than anyone expected, the initial lack of a proper method to build apps for the gadget, aside from Web-based ones of course, had to be the killer shortcoming. The lack of cut, copy and paste and multitasking played second fiddle.

A year later, the App Store was unveiled.

In less than two years, the App Store has been an amazing success. Before loads of apps were pulled for reasons that may or may not make sense, the roster was 140,000 strong, and over three billion copies have been downloaded according to Apple’s most recent figures, released several weeks ago. It’s probably moving towards four billion now.

We just know that multitasking must be important, since so many people complain about it, except for most of the owners of the product who just want things to work properly. They don’t care about the underlying technology.

Apple’s approach is best summarized in a recent analysis of the Google Nexus One from Macworld’s Jason Snell. Predictably Jason found some of the features of the Nexus One work better than the iPhone, but on the whole, the iPhone is the better product for regular people. Those more technically inclined who lust after extensive — if difficult — customization choices, might prefer the Nexus One, in the same way that they might prefer Windows to the Mac.

As you know, from Day One, Apple presented the Macintosh as “the computer for the rest of us.” So the appliance-like nature of the iPhone and other Apple product initiatives was always predictable. That is Apple’s vision. For better or worse, at least they have a vision.

The complaints have begun anew with the iPad. Understand that only a small number of reporters have actually touched one, and then for only a brief time at the end of Apple’s media event in which the iPad was introduced. While it’s a sure thing certain prestigious members of the media have them on hand now for long-term testing, the rest of us will have to wait until sometime after April 3rd to get ahold of one.

That hasn’t stopped some from suggesting that the iPad is pathetically underpowered and lacks significant features that are absolutely destined to make it an abject failure. A few even claimed it was grossly overpriced, even though the cost spectrum was actually far less than most media analysts predicted. In fact, it’s only slightly more expensive than many netbooks, which means that loads of potential customers for those tiny, stripped PC note-books are ripe for the picking.

Once again, the vast majority of these complaints are purely academic. They’ve surely read the specs, and I hope they’ve read some of the articles from people who actually handled an iPad for a few minutes. But they’ve never touched one even for a second. How do they presume to understand the look and feel without a hands-on encounter?

I don’t think I’m that smart, and I doubt they are either.

Now I should say that I remain highly skeptical as to whether I’m going to buy an iPad. It’s not just the question of finances, but whether I actually have a need for one, beyond just being able to deliver accurate commentaries on the subject.

But I will say this: I was also skeptical about ever needing an iPhone. I had been using a simple Motorola RAZR when I got a review sample from Apple. After the two-week evaluation period, I asked Apple for an extension because of a software upgrade. That was mostly an excuse, because I soon realized the iPhone had become absolutely indispensable to my lifestyle and working life.

In fact, on the day that I returned that iPhone to Apple I went to the nearest AT&T factory store and bought one for myself. I don’t think many of you would disagree with me when I say that Apple understands how to build products that become cultural icons, easily embraced by people with many skill sets.

When the iPad is released, I will go over to the local Apple Store, a 10-minute drive from here. I will spend as much face time with one that I can get and then decide whether it is something that I need to have.

I am not going to prejudge my decision. There are lots of pros and cons that I need not explain, since they are obvious to anyone who already has an iPhone and at least a couple of Macs around.

It’s a sure thing, though, that a sufficiently inflammatory anti-Apple article is certain to generate enough click-throughs to make the effort worth it for online publishers who allow facts to play second fiddle to fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Some people want you to believe that Apple is a dictatorship, with Steve Jobs micromanaging everything and relying on his temperamental personality to make critical corporate decisions. Good or bad, it means that, were Jobs to bow out, the company would be on the skids in an extremely short time.

There may be something in this description of Jobs’ mercurial personality. Certainly he can be blunt and unpredictable, but it’s also fair to say that Apple is a fairly big company, with over 30,000 people depending on them for their paychecks. Does a one-man-band really work in that environment?

What the critics fail to realize is that Apple has lots of brilliant people, starting with Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook. As you may have seen when Steve Jobs took six months off, during which time he got a liver transplant, Apple did surprisingly well despite the worst economic slowdown in decades. It seemed the company hardly missed a beat, and it strains credibility that Jobs would, while still on the mend from major surgery, somehow keep his hands on every spoke in the wheel.

When you look at Apple’s balance sheet, you see they have done a load of things properly. There is no corporate debt, and they have nearly $40 billion in the bank, more even than Microsoft. Earnings and profits keep increasing, and Apple is now number five among all companies on the planet when it comes to market cap. There’s even the possibility they’ll match Microsoft some time during the coming year.

So does that strike you as a company managed by a lunatic whose sole grasp on reality is the one he creates for himself?

Yes, we all know about the legendary “reality distortion field,” but all that really means is that Steve Jobs is a brilliant marketing person. He knows how to sell Apple’s gadgets, how to convince people that they are the greatest products ever.

More to the point, Jobs knows how to hire good people and allow them a reasonable degree of freedom to express their creativity. Perhaps he does have a handle on everything they do, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because he runs a tight ship. But he doesn’t do product design or software and hardware engineering. He does, however, have great instincts about what people like and do not like. Unlike most tech companies, Apple has a vision.

I also believe that the recent serious illnesses have given Jobs a clear picture of his own mortality. He fully understands that he will have to step down sooner or later, because of the state of his health, his declining interest in the job, or some combination of both. While Apple is not going to release names, I am quite convinced that they have one or more candidates in mind. Perhaps they are grooming someone behind the scenes to take over when the time arrives, whether due to an emergency or a long-term succession plan.

The feeling is that Tim Cook might have first digs at becoming CEO. It’s not that has hasn’t done the job, since he took over briefly when Jobs was first treated for pancreatic cancer and again during last year’s sick leave. Among all potential contenders, he would seem to be best suited, even if he doesn’t possess what some call star power. Maybe he can grow into it, or simply choose other spokespeople to handle the special press events.

The larger question is how will Apple continue to build trendsetters without Jobs at the helm. The assumption here is that he originated the iPhone, the iPod and lots of other products that have taken the industry by storm. Sure he may have given the green light to such concepts, but I do not for a moment believe that he originated most of them.

Consider the iPod, for example, which is credited to a large degree with Apple’s resurgence. As history shows, the idea didn’t originate with Apple, but with Tony Fadell, a former employee of General Magic and Phillips. But Fadell didn’t fare well trying to convince industry players to pay attention to his concept of a tiny MP3 player equipped with a hard drive. Apple’s executives understood Fadell’s vision and brought him onboard.

As you probably know, iTunes is the successor to a third-party music playing app, SoundJam. The main author, Jeff Robbin, is now a vice president of consumer applications at Apple, and the lead software designer for iTunes.

The key is whether other executives at Apple have the vision to take inventions from both inside and outside the company, and realize their potential. One of the purposes of Apple’s huge war chest, other than to fund the company during a serious sales downturn, is to allow them to acquire small companies and technology that would enhance their portfolio. That’s why they bought PA Semi, whose expertise was reportedly used to create the Apple A4 processor used in the iPad.

In short, assuming Apple has put a proper CEO succession plan in place, and when you consider the fact that the current executives are in lock step with the vision of Steve Jobs, I see the company prospering for a good long time.

Apple can’t stay out of the news, not that they’d want to. So in the past couple of weeks, you learned that all the known problems with the 27-inch iMac have been fixed, the iPad ships on April 3rd in the USA, and later that month in other countries and, by the way, Apple is suing a rival smartphone maker, HTC.

Of course it’s the latter story that’s kept the bloggers spouting, if you forgive the pun, patent nonsense, trying to prejudge a lawsuit that involves a number of arcane patent-related issues, the fine details of intellectual property, and complicated legal determinations at which we can only guess.

In fact, most of the reports I’ve read rarely delve into the actual issues that will be litigated. They are far too concerned with the reasons why Steve Jobs would order Apple’s lawyers to seek redress. Where’s the sense in that, they say? At the same time, you don’t read near as much about Nokia’s motives for its complaint against Apple involving royalties for various technologies.

It would seem as if it’s all right for Nokia to go after the big bad Apple, but not for Apple to step up and defend its intellectual property in the proper fashion.

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