One thing we can all agree on: However fast your computer is now, you wouldn’t mind if it was just a little faster, maybe even a lot faster.

The promise of Snow Leopard is that Apple will be concentrating mostly on performance and not on loads of new features, some of which are, to be blunt, not always so new or so useful. Indeed, there are unconfirmed published reports that the Finder itself is being recast in Apple’s Cocoa programming language, which holds out the hope that some of its long-standing performance and interface  inconsistencies might be dealt with at the same time.

Of course it’s also reasonably certain that Snow Leopard will be an Intel-only release. If you’re still using a PowerPC Mac, you’ll either want to take the opportunity to seek out a newer model, or stick with Leopard. You see, 10.5 isn’t going away in the wake of Snow Leopard. I expect that Apple will continue to support that system for a year or two at the very least. Or until the sheer numbers of Intel Macs have so eclipsed the PowerPC that it won’t make too much of a difference to them — or it’ll just be time for you to upgrade anyway.

In any case, with lots of you stuck with Leopard as your last latest and greatest Mac OS, no doubt you’ll want to find ways to soup up performance. Indeed that was the subject of a somewhat misleading article from Ryan Faas in Computerworld.

Entitled “Don’t wait for Snow Leopard: 10 ways to slim down and speed up your Mac now,” you start reading with the expectation that the advice will bring your Mac closer to 10.6 in significant ways. Just don’t raise your expectations.

The first five suggestions and the ninth concentrate on putting your Mac’s hard drive on a diet. You see, Snow Leopard is supposed to be slimmer, partly through more efficient coding and eliminating unused bloat from Mac OS X. If it will be Intel-only, PowerPC-related data could be zapped from the system without hurting anything.

If you have an older Mac, of course, you’ll want to get rid of the Intel code. But in either case, there are utilities that will trim an application of unneeded files without changing anything in terms of the way it works on your Mac. You can also remove unused language files and the applications and document files you no longer want.

But that’s just a fairly normal sort of housecleaning you might want to pursue, particularly if your Mac’s hard drive is running out of empty space. I suppose owners of the first-generation MacBook Air, with its miniscule 80GB hard drive — and imagine when that storage capacity was simply huge — would really appreciate such dietary advice.

But none of this will actually speed up your Mac. So Faas devotes four of the remaining five tips to that part of the equation with mixed results. Eliminating login items, the stuff your Mac launches in the final stages of the startup process, might shave a few seconds off boot time. But to what benefit? It doesn’t make your Mac run any applications faster, and if you happen to remove the wrong login application, you might find that software you depend on no longer works. Not all those items are always clearly labeled as to what they actually do or convey of the message of why they’re needed.

Removing unneeded fonts isn’t much of an issue either, unless you’ve install a large number of them, which might impact launch times on some applications. But not so much nowadays with even the cheapest Macs sporting multicore processors. I would also question the wisdom of using a system hack utility such as TinkerTool to remove 3D effects and animation, because the only benefit is to make a slower Mac seem a mite snappier. It’s not a real performance boost.

In fact, the only real suggestion that makes sense to me is the last one, “Increase RAM.” Assuming your Mac has the capacity, additional RAM has the effect of allowing more programs to load into memory and use less hard drive virtual memory or swap space. That indeed can produce a measurable performance improvement. This is one reason why I always suggest to my clients that they max out the RAM on their new Macs right from the starting gate, as step number one towards hitting the ground running.

Indeed, at the and of the day, this entire article can be summarized with two short phrases. Get rid of unneeded files and boost RAM. To that I might add one suggestion not mentioned at all in the article, which is to get a faster hard drive if you can. The ones Apple provides as standard equipment aren’t always top drawer, although they often offer faster ones as a built-to-order option. Either way, a faster drive can also offer more storage capacity, which will also eliminate the need to follow any of those suggestions about trimming applications and trashing unneeded documents.

But none of these steps will really allow your Mac to match the promise of Snow Leopard.

Next…

This question may seem self-contradictory, but I have a point to make. Back in the mid-1990s, there were so many models of Macs to choose from, it was usually near impossible to pick one from the next. Even Apple’s own executives would fail this test.

This was particularly true with the low-end Performa series, the consumer models that Apple’s misguided marketing team believed would somehow expand the Mac market.

Quite often, certain models would go to strictly to certain dealers, which made even less sense, and though I pride myself in having a pretty good memory, I could never figure out what made one Performa different from another, when the actual difference in model designation consisted of one or two numbers that seemed to have little relationship to reality.

Now it’s quite true that a large portion of the consumer electronics industry plays the same irrational product proliferation game. Personal computer makers are particularly guilty. Go and look at Dell’s site, for example, and try to figure out what makes one desktop line different from another. The same holds true for their desktops.

But it’s not just Dell that suffers from the model proliferation disease. HP does it too.

I suppose they believe that having lots of models is actually good for sales. The customer can get precisely what they want, if they can figure out which selection to make, of course. Product gaps are bad. Lots of choices are good. You can’t risk having a customer go to another brand, or just return home disappointed that they weren’t able to find the one they really wanted.

Now I can see where a company can overreact to a marketing scheme that doesn’t work so well. When Steve Jobs took control of the company, he worked hard to discontinue unproductive products and simplify the ones that remained.

But I often wonder if Apple didn’t go much too far in the wrong direction. It starts with asking someone who says they have an iMac, “which one?” That entails a lot of careful calculation to provide a meaningful answer. As you know, there have been many generations of iMacs since the line debuted in 1998, and the distinctions may not always be simple to describe.

But it doesn’t stop there. So you have a Power Mac G4, G5, PowerBook, iBook? From beginning to end, you almost always need to ask for more information and I have to often explain how to figure out a proper response. It starts with the About This Mac window, but may require a few additional tidbits of information. No, I’m not about to suggest you check System Profiler to look at the ROM revision and other arcane data. That is too much.

This oversimplification nightmare continues to the present day. I have, for example, an Early 2008 17-inch MacBook Pro. That’s in contrast to the current slightly revised version known as the Late 2008 17-inch MacBook Pro. But that date scheme doesn’t actually appear anywhere on the computer itself, the manual or the shipping carton. It’s just a “technical” label that appears in support documents to define which one you actually have.

I don’t know about you, but I think that there are far better ways to deal with such matter. Yet even the beleaguered auto industry has difficulties of this sort. Particularly with foreign makes, a motor vehicle will persevere essentially unchanged for two or three years before there’s updated bodywork, or interior changes to entice people to trade in their old cars.

Since Apple is often compared to BMW, the German luxury auto maker, let’s try to separate one of their mid-priced models, a 2007 335i sedan, from a 2008 335i sedan. For all intents and purposes, they look essentially the same. And, no, it’s not that I’m in the market for vehicles that cost upwards of $40,000, but you can see where I’m going.

If you look at the manufacturing information on the body panel, there’s nothing that actually identifies which model year applies. You can, however, guess on the basis of the month of manufacture, assuming that anything dated after a certain period would become the 2008 model compared to the 2007 variation.

Of course, there is the user manual, that large book that nobody ever reads.

For Macs, Apple’s solution is simple, real simple. Put the precise model information in an extra entry in the About This Mac window. You shouldn’t have to double click to locate the serial number, then do some sort of arcane comparison to see which model line it applies to. But that, of course, is how Apple support can identify your Mac.

As I said, sometimes, in the drive to make things simple, it’s far too easy to overcompensate.

The other day I read an article in Macworld observing the 25th anniversary of the Mac, which will actually occur in January of 2009. Several writers suggested that the SE/30, introduced in 1989, was their favorite model — ever.

In production less than two years, the SE/30 was basically an amalgam of the original Mac form factor with a — for its time — powerful 16MHz Motorola 68030 processor. Selling for an exorbitant $6,500, it was basically the all-in-one equivalent of the IIx; in essence of souped up SE. You can see where the obvious name for this product, SE/X, was a little too suggestive.

Now I understand the power of nostalgia, and I can see where pleasant memories may conspire to overpower logic and reason. So maybe an event or a possession that perhaps wasn’t so great at the time assumes greater importance later on.

Before you get the idea that I’m really dismissing the greatness of the SE/30, consider that I do not feel any lure in the original Mac design, even though it was a trendsetter in its time. Its biggest shortcoming was the nine-inch black and white 512 x 342 display. That may be fine and dandy for simple word processing and all, but if you were doing heavy-duty desktop publishing and graphics as I was, it was a serious impediment to productivity.

Indeed, after working with Macs at the office for several years, the first Apple product I brought into my home was a IIcx, outfitted with the venerable 13-inch Apple color display. Now I have to tell you that, though this gave me a lot more desktop space than the all-in-one Macs of the time, it was by no means sufficient for my purposes. In those days, however, a 19-inch color display would routinely set you back around $2,500, and you’d have to pay close to that for a decent accelerated graphics card. I had to save and save again to upgrade.

How times have changed!

The IIcx wasn’t my favorite, however. I actually preferred the IIci at the time, because putting a card in its cache slot gave it a credible dose of steroids. Although the measured performance improvement was relatively minor in the scheme of things, what it did enhance made all functions seem snappier.

Later on, I even added a 68040 accelerator card to the mix, making that IIci near the equivalent of a Quadra in terms of absolute performance.

I realize that the IIci’s native 25MHz 68030 processor is quite paltry by 21st century standards, but it was a powerful beast for its time. Indeed, in some respects, such as application launching, it almost seemed quicker than today’s bloated graphics applications on a dual quad-core Mac Pro loaded to the gills with RAM.

That particular compact design also had its undeniable charm. You see, it weighed less than 14 pounds, yet had room for eight RAM modules and three NuBus expansion card slots, all in its relatively diminutive (for its time) case. In contrast, the Mac Pro, which doesn’t have a whole lot greater capacity, except for hard drives and optical devices, towers above the IIci in more ways that one. It also tips the scales at close to 43 pounds. It’s not a trivial thing to lug around, particularly when my aging back decides to protest.

It is not nostalgia, however, that inspires me to suggest that Apple is missing the boat by not delivering a modern IIci equivalent to fill a gaping hole in the Mac product line.

Yes, folks, here I am again recommending that Apple deliver a midrange Mac that has the essential guts of the iMac without the built-in display. Sure, the iMac has been a great success, and it’s also true that desktop computers just aren’t in vogue these days.

Notice, for example, the fact that Apple was quick to update the note-book lines this fall, but left the iMac and the under-appreciated Mac mini on the back burner.

However, midrange desktops are still ubiquitous on the Windows platform. They offer the combination of decent expandability and more than sufficient power for all but devoted gamers and content creators. A Mac equivalent would perhaps have space for an extra hard drive, another two RAM cards, and perhaps an extra expansion port for additional video hardware or perhaps a second network port.

In the scheme of things, this particular design might perhaps cannibalize sales from the iMac or maybe even the Mac Pro. But a sale is a sale, and I also believe thats potential Mac switchers who can’t find the right computer in Apple’s current product line would just love this model.

The same may very well be true for those of you who still feel a fondness for the IIci and wish Apple would build a true successor.

As we approach the 25th anniversary of the Mac’s debut in January 1984, it’s a sure thing that there were lots and lots of changes during that period. Some might even call them revolutionary, since Apple has never objected to making huge changes when they deemed it appropriate.

In some cases, the changes were mostly indirect. Take the advent of the Apple LaserWriter, containing some weird software known as PostScript, which used sophisticated mathematics to generate printed pages. That, and an application known as PageMaker, allowed you to create fully formatted documents with fancy typefaces and and illustrations on your Mac.

At the time I was also involved, in part, in the process of generating those printed pages, although the method was nowhere near as direct. The handwriting was on the wall, and it didn’t take an awful lot of time for those traditional typesetting studios to either go out of business or move to the burgeoning world of desktop publishing.

Now even with the basic Mac hardware, the world had changed in a big way, and that was only the beginning. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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