When it takes only a few weeks for Apple to get another maintenance update out the door, you just know there were problems with the original, perhaps serious ones.

Take an issue involving Adobe’s CS3 software, which is an artifact of Mac OS 10.5.3. If you attempt to save or reopen a document on a remote server, you may end up with a corrupted file. How Apple managed to allow that one to get through is anyone’s guess, but I should point out that handling your mission-critical documents in this fashion is not officially sanctioned by Adobe.

I know there have been problems over the years with QuarkXPress files becoming damaged when saved across a network, but I suppose that problem has since been resolved. Or nobody’s talking about it anymore.

Consider the consequences: What if the network server goes offline for some reason while a file is being saved? Most likely, your document is toast. So it’s always a good idea to save the document to your own computer before working on it, then transfer the finished product to the network share when you’re done. I realize that might present an issue when you’re dealing with a collaborative environment, but it will prevent such issues from occurring. And please don’t forget to keep regular backups, just in case.

In any case, Apple did its part with 10.5.4 and repaired its own contribution to the problem. But I still don’t consider this particular production strategy to be as safe as it might be, as I tell a long-time client over and over again. But he doesn’t listen to me either.

In case you’re wondering, 10.5.4 had a total of 19 changes of one sort or another according to Apple’s support document on the subject, plus a couple of dozen or so security fixes. And, no, my friends, the particular flaw that allows a rogue AppleScript to infect the Apple Remote Desktop Agent (ARDAgent) and wreak havoc is still present. Then again, although the chances of getting bitten by this Trojan are minimal unless you are careless about what you download and launch, you’ll still want to read this article from Macworld’s Rob Griffiths on the subject and how to deal with this potential threat.

That, of course, doesn’t stop the “nasty, noisy negativists” in the media from joyfully boasting that that long-rumored malware threat is here at least, that Mac users have had a free ride for far too long. You know my feelings about this silly posture. Every few months, you hear about some new potential security threat, and just a few weeks later, it’s gone and forgotten. Maybe Apple fixes the problem in their software, or maybe it wasn’t significant enough to worry about. But the headline grabbers still get appropriate attention, and, of course, lots of hits.

This isn’t to say, though, that AppleScript exploits are trivial. You see, AppleScript allows you to automate pretty much all of the functions of Mac OS X, including many of your applications and even the Unix core. Automator is the public face of some of those capabilities, unless you want to get into the under-appreciated Script Editor or the command line.

Such power comes with increased responsibility to watch what you’re doing. Even if your scripting is basic, it doesn’t stop others from engaging in various sorts of malicious mischief. In fact, way back in the Classic Mac OS days, there were AppleScript threats from time to time. Not that they did much damage in the real world, of course, but you might as well be forewarned.

Regardless, 10.5.4, despite the relative paucity of fixes, is still of significance to many of you. There are, for example, more fixes to such things as AirPort, Time Machine, iCal, and even Spaces. The latter has been particularly troublesome for some of you, although it mostly works all right for me nowadays.Indeed, Apple had a busy Monday and 10.5.4 was only a part of the picture. The self-same security fixes were rolled into a separate update, known as Security Update 2008-004, designed for Tiger users. In addition, you’ll find a Safari 3.1.2 download, not needed with 10.5.4, which contains that version, and an AirPort and TIme Machine firmware update, taking it to version 7.3.2.

Typical of other Apple updates, the troubleshooting sites will have a veritable field day looking for defects in this slew of downloads. Sometimes, they’ll be right on, and spot a genuine problem. Other times, they’ll take the isolated features of a handful of people and turn them into a major issue that makes those updates unusable.

In the scheme of things, my experiences are surely trivial, since they involve a Mac Pro, a MacBook Pro and a MacBook. In each case, 10.5.4 installed without a hitch. I have two AirPort systems, one a standard “Extreme” with 802.11n and gigabit Ethernet, the other a 1GB TIme Capsule. Airport Utility, which downloads and feeds the firmware upgrade, correctly identified both. But only the Time Capsule update went flawlessly. My AirPort Extreme went offline after a message that the update had failed. I restarted the unit, ran the firmware again, and everything proceeded without a hitch the second time out. So there’s another one for the troubleshooters.

As usual, let us know if you have anything of note to report about these updates, particularly if 10.5.4 addressed the problems you may have had with 10.5.3. Unfortunately, Apple usually fails to document all their fixes when they release these things.

Just today, my copy of the August 2008 issue of Macworld arrived, with a fascinating headline situated above the title: “Mac CLones: Are They Coming Back?”

This would seem a silly proposition, since Steve Jobs ejected the last round of cloners, because their actions were threatening Apple. While the company’s erstwhile executives felt that ceding to the constant demands to open the platform would expand the Mac platform, they encountered the reverse. Aggressive startups, such as Power Computing, went with a vengeance after Apple’s core market with cheaper and faster products.

Indeed, Apple was hemorrhaging lots of red ink when Jobs took over as “interim” CEO in those days, and a lot of the members of the tech press and even Wall Street even felt Apple had gone down for the last count.

However, so many things have changed since then, the most important of which is the fact that Apple’s sales are higher than ever, and Mac market share is increasing at long last, after moving in the opposite direction for so many years.

Yet, when Apple switched to Intel processors, the ugly specter of cloning rose yet again. After all, if a Mac had basically the same hardware as the typical Windows box, certainly it should be possible to install Mac OS X on the latter. To be sure, this task was accomplished rather quickly, as hackers figured a way to induce their vanilla PC hardware to accept a Mac OS installation.

This is not to say the process is easy. For one thing, you have to assemble hardware, such as graphic cards and optical drives, that are similar to the ones Apple uses, so you can be assured of decent compatibility. Running a software update, which is normally a fairly trivial process, can be difficult. If Apple makes the wrong kind of changes, further hacking might be necessary to make the installation take.

In large part, then, the folks who created these unofficial clones were power users who understood the risks they were taking, but were willing to go through the ordeal. Maybe they were just having fun, maybe they thought they could pave the way for a new generation of cloning, maybe Apple would make it official.

The chances of the latter, to me at least, have always seemed slim to none. Apple’s marketing strategy has been demonstrated time and time again to be brimming with success. Macs, iPods, iPhones and whatever else Apple might unleash upon an unsuspecting but eager customer base, are likely going to remain vertically integrated with the hardware and software coming from a single source.

There is absolutely no incentive to change things. Indeed, even if Apple opened up the Mac platform to the low-end market where they don’t play, they will confront much higher development costs to certify additional hardware configurations, and compatibility problems are apt to occur, just as they have with the Windows platform.

But what about a certain Florida-based company, Psystar, that is actually selling fully-assembled clones?

When I first heard about that company a few months ago, it seemed they wouldn’t survive a week, let alone persevere for months and expand their product line. Today, you can buy various versions of their Open Computer and OpenPro Computers, and even get an Xserve clone, known as OpenServ.

So how can that be? We all know that Apple’s user license, for both the client and server versions of Mac OS X, restrict installation to an Apple-built personal computer. We know that Psystar is just assembling its boxes in the same fashion as those late Mac OS clones, from off-the-shelf PC parts. Sure, they are sufficiently selective in their choices, so the systems will work out of the box, assuming you pay them extra for a Mac OS X installation.

Indeed, published tests so far show good compatibility and performance in keeping with the level of hardware that Psystar provides.

But what is Apple doing about all this? Where’s what we all felt was the inevitable lawsuit to shut this operation down before this venture catches on?

Now to be fair, if you add the stuff that’s standard in a typical Mac to the bare bones Psystar box, the price differential is sharply reduced, although the latter still uses faster parts. But that still reduces its value, unless you just like to take chances.

After all, even if Apple doesn’t act right away to stop that company in the courts with an injunction, Psystar’s potential longevity is surely a question mark. Beyond a core segment of people who hope to save some money and are willing to take chances on a supplier that might be here today and gone tomorrow, it’s questionable just how well this venture might succeed.

As far as Apple is concerned, I don’t understand the waiting game. If they don’t protect their intellectual property rights, they stand a chance of suffering in the legal system if they stall much longer.

All right, some people believe that Psystar is actually Apple in a different guise, just testing the cloning waters to see how it flies. Or maybe Apple simply hopes Psystar will just go away, so they can save the multimillion dollar expense of an extended legal action. Or maybe they’ll just surprise us somehow and begin a real cloning initiative.

On the other hand, I think the chances of the latter remain at the low end of zero.

One common objection to Macs might be called the “McDonalds argument,” which posits that, since Windows occupies more than 90% of the world’s personal computers, they have to be the best. The public says so.

While I won’t say McDonalds is necessarily bad as fast food establishments go, the food is a far cry from gourmet level. But Microsoft didn’t necessarily get to the head of the pack by delivering better products. As Bill Gates leaves his full-time job at Microsoft, history shows that he used bait and switch, misleading claims, false promises and other questionable tactics to own the operating system market.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t threats on the horizon that Microsoft’s new leadership will have to confront. In fact, that threat will come, in large part, from Apple.

For years, it was claimed that Macs were not intended to be business computers. They were for home users, perhaps small business, and certainly those ever-eccentric content creators. But no large business would be caught dead buying them in quantity.

That was then, this is now.

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

All right, we know that Snow Leopard will be, for all practical purposes, a wholesale cleanup of Leopard. Most of the surface features, save for Microsoft Exchange support, will be essentially identical to 10.5, although I suppose there might be some refinements here and there.

But the real stuff will happen out of sight, in the guts of the system where the plumbing will be cleaned up, the operating system’s footprint will be reduced, and key performance enhancements will be added. It’ll also support up to 16TB of RAM, which may not mean much to you now, but it might a few years hence.

Indeed, Snow Leopard is laying a foundation that will pave the way for 10.7, 10.8 and beyond, and that is a good thing.

However, I doubt that many of you would want to pay $129 for a copy of a glorified fixer-upper, without the requisite 300 whizzy new features. That psychology, that potential customer resistance, is going to be very difficult to overcome. I mean, you just know that software publishers have traditionally packed loads of new features — sometimes at the expense of good quality control testing — to induce you to buy an upgrade. Microsoft is notorious for this sort of behavior, admitting that their present version of a product isn’t so good, but just wait till the next one is out.

I suppose in the early days of Mac OS X, Apple had to make that sort of claim as well, because 10.0 was barely usable, and 10.1 in fact, was an almost free upgrade. I mean “almost free,” because you could get a free upgrade package from an Apple dealer, but you’d have to pay $19.95 to get a copy shipped to you from the factory.

By the time 10.3 and 10.4 arrived, you could have seen how well Mac OS X had matured, but you still depended on all those glorious new capabilities to induce you to buy the upgrade, assuming you didn’t just wait for the opportunity to buy a new Mac and get the OS upgrade free of charge.

Of course, Apple’s been lucky of late. Windows Vista has been a disaster, although I realize some of you use it with reasonable success. But with customers begging to downgrade to XP, you can see where Microsoft must feel highly embarrassed. Vista’s successor, Windows 7, is now promised for January of 2010, and you can probably expect that date to slip somewhat. That’s the way things are at Microsoft, unless the new management decides to hunker down and get the ship sailing on the straight and narrow and remedy all the festering problems that have made the company stagnant.

In this climate, Apple can well afford to take stock of the progress of its operating system development program, and concentrate on fixing things that don’t deliver lots of wow reactions.

So how should Apple handle the Snow Leopard upgrade?

Well, as a practical matter, it would sure be nice to see them emulate 10.1 in their marketing approach. You’d go to your local Apple dealer and get the upgrade kit free of charge, but it would only work with an existing 10.5 installation. If you needed to install from scratch, you would be forced to buy the full installation package at the standard $129 purchase price.

If you ordered from Apple directly, maybe you’d be asked to pay $9.95.

But what about providing the upgrade as a free download? Sure, maybe it would be a file as large as three gigabytes or more, one that would take hours to download unless you have a speedy broadband connection, but it would be a great alternative, even if it would probably clog Apple’s servers for days on end.

Then again, there may be accounting issues that would make the free alternative impossible, in the same way that Apple has to charge a modest fee for you to get the iPhone 2.0 software for an iPod touch. Such arcane issues are perhaps understandable, at least to those who are more cognizant than I of such matters.

In that event, it would still be possible to make this a relatively cheap upgrade, and a price tag of from $9.95 to $29.95 would make perfect sense. It would be a wonderful gesture on Apple’s part, particularly since their customer base has afforded them huge profits over the years. Certainly, the bean counters would be sufficiently satisfied.

However, if they choose to offer Snow Leopard at the full upgrade price, I think it’s going to be a hard sell. Those promised performance boosts are largely theoretical, unless you perform heavy-duty rendering chores that max out your Mac’s processors. Saving a few hundred megabytes in storage space would be nice, in theory, but I don’t think it’s a compelling feature. Exchange support? Only for business users who require connections with the office email servers.

As usual, Apple isn’t listening to me, but if enough if you make your wishes known, perhaps the summer of 2009 will be a time to celebrate a new Mac operating system at a super cheap price! Or maybe you’ll just buy a new Mac with Snow Leopard preloaded and not worry about it.