Notice, gentle reader, that I use the word please, since I don’t want to make this request seem closer to a demand, although I certainly feel strongly about the subject.

Now why should I make this request? Well, in one sense, the 10.6 release is similar to 10.1, in that it cleans up the system and makes it function faster and more reliably. Of course, the original 10.0 was, according to Apple, meant to be a product for early adopters and folks who might be considering the possibility of moving their companies to Mac OS X.

Those of you who tried it at the time realize it was quite messy. Features were missing, including CD burning. It was slow as the blazes, and you had to wonder whether this fancy piece of eye candy was really worth it. Indeed, I kept using Mac OS 9 for my “real” work, other than writing books about Mac OS X of course. Even 10.1 took us only part way there, and I didn’t transition completely to Mac OS X until 10.2 arrived.

But the situation with Leopard is vastly different. Mac OS 10.5 is a fully-realized reference release, in use by millions and millions of Mac users at home or in the office. While I realize some of you still regard it as too buggy, most of you seem to be generally satisfied, although it’s the right of Mac users worldwide to complain loudly when they feel it’s appropriate.

As you probably know, Leopard’s successor, Snow Leopard, is clearly meant as a strong under-the-hood refinement. The visual changes are apt to be extremely minor. You won’t see enhanced support for Microsoft Exchange (it’ll just be there when you need it for your email setup), and even if the Finder migrates from Carbon to Cocoa, the changes won’t necessarily be visible either. That assumes, of course, that there will not be any significant visual changes, and a few will be welcome. But that’s yesterday’s column.

This doesn’t mean that Apple isn’t working, in secret, on a few hundred significant interface alterations, but I really doubt it. For one thing, except for a few highly-competitive issues, developers need to have full access to a forthcoming operating system release in order to test their products, present and future, against it.

Indeed, Snow Leopard seeds have been available to the programming community since last year’s WWDC. While they are provided under strict confidentiality agreements, Apple knows that some folks who don’t believe in contracts will nonetheless rush to a Mac rumor site and spill the beans. The one significant issue to be disclosed so far, beyond what you can read on Apple’s site, is that the prereleases are only designed to run on Intel-based Macs.

Of course it’s also true that the last PowerPC model, the G5, was retired in the summer of 2006, so there’s less incentive to continue to invest in R&D, except for security and critical hardware support issues.

But the main reason I suggest that Apple give away Snow Leopard is because operating systems are strictly a means to sell Mac hardware, from which Apple makes the lion’s share of its profits. Despite the demands of some uninformed media pundits that Apple is missing the boat in refusing to open Mac OS X to PC clones of all kinds, such a boneheaded maneuver would only destroy Apple’s earnings and profits, as anyone with a calculator at hand will realize after examining the financial statements and doing the math for themselves.

Up till now, Apple has sold Mac OS X upgrade kits on the basis of large numbers of visual feature enhancements. Snow Leopard is the catch-up release, where the underpinnings are cleaned up and performance is enhanced. True, that may itself be sufficient reason to pay $129 for the privilege of getting a copy, but it’s not going to seem terribly sexy from a marketing point of view.

On the other hand, telling loyal Mac users that they can get Snow Leopard as a free download, or on a DVD for, say, $9.95 shipping and handling, would be a great publicity ploy.

Compare that, for example, with Microsoft’s approach for Windows 7, which is also presented as mostly a performance and reliability enhancement for the failed Vista release, along with a few interface flourishes. However, Microsoft can’t give up its greedy ways, because they have already announced the usual half dozen confusing variations, and even if pricing is reduced, I doubt it will be by very much.

Of course, Microsoft doesn’t sell computer hardware, other than input devices, so they can’t just give a new operating system away, or can they? After all, 80% of the income generated by Windows comes from the licenses they sell to computer makers. That business plan doesn’t have to change for them to offer upgrade kits to existing PC owners for a relatively cheap price.

Such a thing won’t happen of course. But I can see good reason for Apple to confuse and befuddle Microsoft yet again by providing Snow Leopard free and clear. Isn’t that a terrific idea?

As regular readers know, I’m not one to take Mac troubleshooting sites as seriously as I used to. In one tragic case, one of those sources, which has had a couple of ownership changes, has managed to pretty much lose its hard-won reputation for accuracy.

These days, if they’re not just taking a few random system anomalies and turning them into serious problems of one sort or another, they are mostly regurgitating the material they find at Apple’s own support forums. Unfortunately, those forums are not actually vetted, but just offered as a reasonably open resource for folks to report problems and sometimes even get some answers by regular visitors. Apple doesn’t really make an effort to provide genuine support, though. They mostly provide that service as a place to vent and perhaps locate others who’ve solved the problem you’re having.

In any case, I think the people who conclude that Leopard was one of the buggier Mac OS X releases are just plain wrong. Each and every version has required several maintenance updates before things settled down. Sometimes they even shipped with show-stoppers, such as the tendency to corrupt the directory of a FireWire 800 drive. That was fixed pretty quick, though it sometimes required a firmware update from the drive vendor.

Leopard’s major contender was a Finder bug that might result in lost or corrupted data if something halted the process of moving — rather than just copying — a file from one drive to another. That, too, was fixed really fast, though it’s possible this was an issue of long standing that was only discovered when Leopard came out.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

You know a lot of the media and financial analysts out there write a troubling amount of copy suggesting that Apple is truly missing the boat if they don’t try a particular marketing strategy, or produce a certain product.

While I am not above making a few suggestions myself from time to time, I don’t pretend to really have a thorough background in product development or sales, and thus I would probably be the last person to devise a workable strategy. I can certainly tell you what products I’d like to see, and hope that Apple or another company might find a way to fill that need, but that’s all I can do.

Certainly, the folks who publish their suggestions to Apple are, for the most part, well-meaning and all, but sometimes they come up with suggestions that just don’t make sense, or were tried in the past by Apple and others and failed miserably.

At the top of the list is the oft-repeated demand that Apple unlock Mac OS X and release it for all PCs, so that they can compete head to head with Microsoft on the very same hardware.

They seem to forget that Apple tried a cloning strategy in the mid-1990s. The licensed the Mac OS and reference hardware designs and a few manufacturers signed up and began to sell Macs dressed in low-end PC clothing.

Unfortunately, that particular deal was ill-advised. Rather than expand the market for Macs in the wake of the success of Windows 95, these Mac OS licensees went after Apple’s core markets with a vengeance. Power Computing was perhaps the worst offender. Indeed, not having to sell products in the same quantities as Apple, and spending minimal time designing their rebadged PC cases, they actually beat Apple to the punch in getting out new models with speedier processors.

Well, that was long ago and far away. Steve Jobs returned to Apple and did his best to ditch the cloning program. What the critics don’t realize about Apple is that its structure is not like Microsoft or Dell for that matter. They sell hardware with integrated software, a complete solution. That situation is quite unlike the other PC makers, who have to go to Microsoft for most of their operating system needs; that is, except for the ones who are bundling Linux with their products.

The Mac OS is what makes Apple’s hardware distinctive, in addition to the elegant looks of course. Letting other PC makers bundle Mac OS X might expand Apple’s share, but it would also help gut sales of the hardware, which is where the lion’s share of the profits originate from.

Of course, if the pundits who seem to have forgotten such fine details would just break out their calculators before writing their purple prose, they might sing a different tune. Then again, maybe they just don’t care.

Add to the list of products Apple doesn’t need is a cheap iPhone. Apple doesn’t want to become another Nokia, LG or any of the other mainstream cell phone makers. They only enter product segments where they think they can make a difference, and make great profits of course. Far too many companies believe that they have to fill every conceivable niche, and they might even add a few more for safe keeping. As a result, customers often have to choose from among overlapping products that seem to lack fine distinctions.

Consider the cheap PC box you buy at, say, a Wal-Mart, for $499. It comes with the display, mouse and keyboard, and a basic software selection. I suppose it even works decently enough, but compared to even the Mac mini, it’s probably a load of junk, and Apple has protested time and time again that they cannot compete with such offerings without also delivering mediocrity.

This isn’t to say that the Mac mini is going to disappear or just remain in the lineup without any change. Once you add the display and input devices, even the $599 mini sets you back $700 or $800, although you can use the ones you have, of course. That doesn’t make it overpriced, as some are apt to suggest, but I won’t get into the issue of genuine cost comparisons right now

Apple is also highly likely to avoid requests to turn the Apple TV into just another DVR, one little different from a TiVO or the box your get from your cable or satellite TV provider. Other than TiVO, those products are usually rented or sold at low cost by those providers strictly to get you to order their services, from which they make the real profits. Where’s the value in that? Besides, when was the last time TiVO earned a profit — or the first for that matter?

I’m sure you readers can come up with lots of other products that Apple doesn’t need to build. I suppose you can include a large screen flat panel TV and a host of other gadgets that serve already-saturated markets. As for me, I’ve only just begun.

There’s a published report that four more lawsuits have been filed in the past two weeks complaining about iPhone 3G speeds. Now I realize that this is a difficult economy, and perhaps attorneys aren’t getting enough ambulances to chase, so they’re desperately seeking other types of work.

Forgetting the lawyer jokes, however, I have to wonder if they are paying attention to what they are doing. You see, in order for such an action to succeed, at least from my layman’s point of view, they’d have to demonstrate in court that Apple and AT&T made promises they just couldn’t keep about 3G connection speeds with the second-generation iPhone.

Here’s Apple’s specific promise about performance: “Email attachments and web pages load twice as fast on 3G networks as on 2G EDGE networks.”

But there’s also a footnote that explains just what this really means: “Testing conducted by Apple in May and June 2008 using preproduction 3G/EDGE-capable iPhone units and software and currently shipping EDGE-capable iPhone units and software. Testing was conducted by browsing to http://www.lonelyplanet.com and measured uncached page load performance. All settings were default except: Call Forwarding was turned on; the Wi-Fi feature Ask to Join Networks and Auto-Brightness were turned off. Wi-Fi was enabled but not associated with a network.”

I’m separating the final two sentences, because that’s what has to cause those attorneys grief, assuming they’re really paying attention: “Throughput depends on the cellular network, location, signal strength, 3G/EDGE connectivity, feature configuration, usage, the Internet, and many other factors. Throughput tests are conducted using specific iPhone units; actual results may vary.”

Indeed, based on those significant exceptions to the rule, I’d think that you’d have as much chance winning such a lawsuit as you’d have mounting a successful case against an auto maker because your car didn’t precisely meet the advertised fuel economy, and for the same reasons. Those damned terms and conditions can really put the monkey wrench into attempts to take advantage of a company’s cash hoard, assuming they still have one, of course.

Besides, where Apple has lost or settled legal actions, the lawyers who represented the plaintiffs may end up with millions of dollars in legal fees. But the regular people who win such cases usually end up with discount coupons. So, even if a judge, and the jurists who handle the appeals process, could somehow be persuaded that Apple and AT&T were being somehow deceptive, how would, say, a $25 discount on your next iPhone sooth your shattered nerves?

True, there is perhaps one issue where someone might succeed in a case against Apple, and that’s the allegation that the hardware in the iPhone 3G is somehow defective and that’s why performance levels remain inconsistent. It’s not the location, signal strength or any of the other factors that might prevent you from attaining the expected level of performance, but the fact that Apple selected a defective chipset, and all the firmware updates they’ve released haven’t succeeded in resolving those defects.

However, it has also been reported on a number of occasions that Apple is actually using the same network chipsets as other cell phone makers. So where’s the beef?

As far as I’m concerned, my iPhone 3G can reliably deliver Internet speeds at least twice as fast as the original model. Although connection quality was apt to be flaky when the phone was first released last July, subsequent updates have fixed what appear to be the most significant issues. I get very few disconnects, and even where 3G speeds might descend to the 2G level and back again, the transition is relatively seamless.

It’s also true that AT&T has improved connections in my neighborhood. At one time, signal quality was considered “moderate,” which is their parlance for almost acceptable. However, a few months back, I got a text message from AT&T that a new cell tower had gone online here. True to their word, I noticed that those marginal signals improved to nearly full strength in the most critical areas. It’s hard to lose a call now, and here, at least, any issues I encountered were probably more related to the network than any bugs in Apple’s software. The fixes Apple provided did help, but not as much as setting up another tower.

Now it may well be that you live in a city where 3G is an unfulfilled dream, or just presents itself on rare occasions. If that’s the case — and your iPhone 3G is updated with the latest and greatest from Apple — your complaint is with AT&T or another provider, if you live outside the U.S. Sure, there are probably defective iPhones, and one that’s provably faulty would be replaced by Apple under its limited warranty. But the worst offenders are the wireless carriers for often promising more than they can deliver.

But if you want to sue them, consider that action an exercise in futility. That is, unless you’re a lawyer looking for a huge payday, in which case maybe you’ll have a chance to get some cash out of the deal — in the unlikely event you win your case.