I recall writing several articles detailing my original expectations of Leopard, and my sincere hope that Apple, having extra time to finish it up, would grace us all with a more stable release.

Depending on your point of view, they may or may not have succeeded. But it’s my feeling Apple delivered a product that wasn’t much better than Tiger in its early days, when it comes to being feature-complete and reliable. There have even been a surprising number of complaints, some of which are understandable, and some of which may just be due to having older third-party software that is sadly in need of an upgrade.

Since I upgraded a client’s Mac Pro over the weekend, I had still another experience with getting Leopard up and running, and the encounter was no less successful than my previous efforts. But with a number of updates released since late October, I had to run the computer through two stages of software updates before it was ready to roll. That’s to be expected, since the Leopard DVD I had on hand was the original 10.5.0 version.

From the ads I’ve seen, current upgrade kits are now at 10.5.1, and I have to appreciate the fact that my ISP isn’t charging me for downloads in the upper gigabytes, or I’d owe them a ton of money for excessive bandwidth consumption at this point. I think Apple is really missing the boat here not offering an operating system subscription service for consumers, where you can get the updates you need in your snail mailbox every month, or sooner in case of critical updates of one sort or another.

While I realize most of you have broadband and don’t mind periodic 350MB downloads, perhaps more than 40% of the population in the U.S. doesn’t have broadband. In some cases, it’s available but not affordable or just deemed unnecessary. But far too many people in this country live in rural areas where wired broadband just isn’t available, and they may not be situated in a location that’s visible to one of the satellite alternatives.

I’m not about to get into the politics of the lack of sufficient broadband penetration. In many countries around the world, the situation is far, far better. In light of this troubling fact, Apple cannot expect everyone who needs their upgrades to get them easily. Indeed, many of the people who need access the most do not live close to an Apple store or even a third-party Mac showroom where they could download the upgrades they require.

But Apple doesn’t listen to me, and I don’t expect that to change anytime soon.

On the other hand, surveys show that most of you are fully satisfied with Leopard and aren’t having the wacky problems reported over at MacFixIt and other troubleshooting sites. Wacky? Well, when you read lurid accounts of all sorts of crazy symptoms as a result of some sort of Apple update, you wonder what’s really going on.

Of course, I’m not saying these stories are false. I’m sure, with thousands of possible system installations, just about anything can happen and usually does. Unfortunately, it seems that MacFixIt, since being purchased by CNET, takes one or two exceptional complaints and pretends it’s a trend. That sort of irresponsible behavior doesn’t honor the stellar reputation of the site’s founder, Ted Landau, nor does it serve the best interests of Mac users who just want to learn about potential problems and solve the ones they confront.

If you’ve followed my previous commentaries on the subject, and reader comments, it’s clear that some of you have had troubles with Leopard that require further troubleshooting. It may even be true that the rumored 10.5.3 update may be required to fix the remaining problems, assuming it’s not just the usual problem with someone else’s software.

My own experiences with Leopard have been fairly seamless, though. Except for a rare Mail or Safari crash (even with the 3.1.1 update), I have precious little to complain about. I have also kept my ear to the ground and talked extensively with friends and clients about their Leopard experiences, and the reactions are all equally positive. Then again, I routinely urge the people I know to be wary of adding too many third party toys to their systems, particularly if they use them for work rather than play.

At this point, I know you might regard Tiger is perhaps the most stable version of Mac OS X, but don’t forget that 10.4 also had shaky beginnings too, requiring a fair number of updates before things settled down. The last update, 10.4.11, didn’t get a clean bill of health either for some of you. While it’s easy to want to recall past events as being more positive than they really are, I think the jury is really out when it comes to Leopard.

Indeed, between now and the arrival of 10.6, which may not be for at least a year or two, I expect Apple will deliver a number of updates to set things straight with Leopard. At the end of the process, it’ll be fair to do comparisons.

Meantime, maybe someone at Apple will listen to me about developing an upgrade subscription service for consumers who are bandwidth challenged.

In the old days, it seemed a rather formidable task to upgrade from one Mac to another. For one thing, you had to figure out what files to keep and which to transfer to the new model. Even with easy networking, this was a complicated process of manual labor to which I didn’t look forward, even though I’ve done it often for myself and others.

Since Apple came up with its Migration Assistant, the process has become far simpler. All you have to do, basically, is start your new Mac and, a few screens into the Setup Assistant, you are asked whether you want to transfer your old data from another Mac or another drive.

Now up until recently, if you wanted to grab your files from your old Mac, you then had to network via FireWire cable to a Mac capable of FireWire Target Mode. That was fine, except for older models that didn’t have FireWire. However, since the MacBook Air came out — and it doesn’t have FireWire — Apple now allows you to migrate via Ethernet, something that I’ve urged for a number of years.

When the process runs correctly, as it does most of the time, you only need to start the transfer, go off for a long lunch, or an evening’s relaxation with your family and friends, and when you return, all of the data you selected will be safely residing in its new home.

Let me tell you of my recent experiences, so you’ll see what I mean.

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

A normal part of child psychology is that, if the parent asks for something, the response will often be the opposite of what they expect. This is part of the process of establishing the child’s own independent personality. Now I wouldn’t say that Apple’s strategy shows a childlike veneer, but they certainly have long-term marketing goals that may often seem inscrutable.

Consider a certain meeting with financial analysts, where they were asked about whether there would ever be a low-cost Mac to compete with the cheap PC boxes. Apple said they weren’t going to play in that sandbox. Three months later, the Mac mini was introduced.

Now you just know that, when they were talking about entry-level computers, they certainly were aware of what they were planning to build. Of course, it could also be that a final manufacturing decision hadn’t been made, but that appears to be cutting it close. It was likely just some corporate spin to put Apple’s competitors off track.

At $599, the Mac mini continues in the product line, but gets practically no promotion that I know of. Yes, you can buy a $399 PC with a display at your local Wal-Mart, but you can be assured the manufacturer isn’t making a whole lot of money from that purchase. Apple doesn’t believe in selling anything without a guaranteed return, and this is why they continue to prosper while other computer makes have troubles, particularly at the low-end of their consumer product lines.

On several occasions, Steve Jobs was known to talk about the awful user interface of existing mobile phones, while denying Apple wanted to enter the crowded cell phone market. Tech pundits also agreed it would be foolish and clearly unprofitable for Apple to try to go up against established players, such as Nokia and Motorola.

No laughter please.

Now I suspect that, when Jobs was talking so disparagingly about mobile phones, the iPhone was already in development. It’s not something that just came up out of the blue. That it has been so successful right from the beginning indicates to me that a lot of care when into its design, consuming a period of several years. But Jobs was also giving you a precursor of what Apple might be doing, since existing products were so awful in so many ways.

Of course, some of that had to do with the fact that the carriers enforced their own essentially uniform interfaces and feature sets. To them, the cell phone was simply a commodity product designed to entice you into signing up for the standard two-year service contract, where they made their real income, and the profit margins of all the American-based providers, except for Sprint of course, are all quite good. So it’s clear they know how to make money, even if the products and the services they deliver, frankly, are generally mediocre.

With the iPhone, Apple insisted that the carriers graced with the right to carry the product had to provide certain features, such as visual voicemail. I also suspect that AT&T, for example, was admonished by Jobs and other Apple executives to improve customer service and deliver better quality reception. AT&T has been dinged by lots of people because of its various shortcomings over the years.

Why do I have that suspicion? Well, my experience with AT&T has been pretty good, and I’ve actually seen them improve audio quality and reception in the Phoenix area. Maybe that’s due to their ongoing program to enhance existing cell towers and build new ones. I don’t know, but I certainly find them to be superior in most respects to Verizon, and I expected the opposite.

Speaking of the iPhone, didn’t Steve Jobs recently explain why you probably wouldn’t see Flash support on that device anytime soon. The existing technology was too resource intensive, and the mobile version underpowered. Soon thereafter, Adobe said it was working on some sort of iPhone support, then it backtracked almost immediately.

But the cat is out of the bag, and perhaps Adobe is working with Apple on a middle-of-the-road solution to provide most of the important features of Flash with a smaller memory footprint.

Certainly, it’s easy to say that Webmasters ought to just eliminate Flash from their sites. But that’s no easy process in many cases. There are millions of sites out there that have Flash content, ranging from simple navigation menus to full-blown multimedia presentations. Flash is a significant part of their content, and the special features are often used to generate business. They can’t very well give it all up just because of Apple Inc.

But I don’t think they have to. When Apple says no here, as in other situations, they are really telling us they’re working on a better solution. Maybe it’ll come with the release of the iPhone 2.0 update. Maybe it’ll come later. But it would be foolish for Apple not to work hard with Adobe to deliver a workable solution.

Indeed, it’ll probably be one more case where Apple’s “no” really means “yes.”

In recent days, I’ve commented about some issues that have gotten a fair amount of press lately. Like some of the silly arguments in our presidential campaign these days about who is “elite” and who isn’t, I regard some of the most blatant spin that emerges from some tech pundits these days as completely wrongheaded. Some of it may even represent a manufactured controversy of one sort or another, but that’s for you to decide.

Chief among the silly season manifestations is the ongoing complaint that Mac security is lacking and we’re about to be infected with a serious bout of malware any day now. This doesn’t mean it can’t happen or it won’t happen, but I’m not ready to put triple locks on the doors yet. I do, however, have Leopard’s firewall running, and my router’s NAT firewall is doing its thing. I also use OpenDNS rather than my ISP’s own DNS servers, because it’s faster and uses PhishTank technology, for an added level of protection. Of course, I make sure I run regular backups of my Macs. Even this site gets a double daily backup, one of which is in an offsite location for added protection.

All right, so maybe “paranoid” is indeed my middle name.

But none of these protective steps represents anything more than some plain common sense. I still haven’t installed anti-virus software on my Macs, although I use products of that sort when I run Windows Vista on a virtual machine. So far, we haven’t seen any Mac OS X viruses seriously spread to a wide number of users, despite the fears generated by columnists who should know better and a few security companies hoping to sell some product.

Then there are the stories that iPhone sales have somehow stalled, that there were hundreds of thousands of units stuffed in boxes gathering dust in stockrooms. Now that story was quickly shown to be false. All those iPhones were likely sold, but not officially activated through traditional channels because they were unlocked and used with unapproved carriers here and there and everywhere.

In fact, if you check Apple’s site as of the day I am writing this article, there’s still that five to seven day wait to get one. There have been scattered shortages at Apple stores that, according to Apple PR, they are trying to deal with. You should, however, be able to get one at, say, an AT&T factory store, simply because they get less traffic. In fact, that’s where I got mine earlier this year.

There have also been suggestions that Apple is clearing the channel to make way for the next generation model. However, assuming iPhone 2.0 accompanies the 2.0 firmware, it’ll probably won’t happen until June or July. So cutting back production now would seem an ill-timed move. I just think demand is a whole lot higher than Apple anticipated, although we’ll learn more definitive details next week when the latest quarterly financials are released.

Another story that has erupted lately is the report from a Florida company that they’re ready to sell Mac clones, in Apple’s face, and that they can somehow weather the storm and survive the expected legal challenges.

Now, as far as I can see, this Open Computer is little more than a publicity stunt. This unknown company, PsyStar Corporation, was looking to generate interest in their products or services, and this was a sure way to accomplish that goal. Like the fabled Mac OS clones of old, they’re just selling a generic PC box outfitted with standard hardware. In fact, Apple is using a lot of off-the-shelf stuff these days too, in the wake of the switch to Intel processors. But careful circuit design, a few custom features and a pretty case combine to give a Mac sex appeal.

And then there’s the operating system that can only be installed legally on an Apple product. Besides, even if PsyStar was able to delay the inevitable and keep selling their Open Computer for a while longer, would you be willing to buy product from a company without an established reputation for quality and support just to save a small amount of money?

I hope your answer is no, unless you have cash to burn and you’re willing to take chances. Besides, an AppleInsider report is suggesting that PsyStar may be nothing more than a basement or fly-by-night operation. Time will tell.

Then again, the latest attempt at a Mac clone raises questions about whether Apple’s own computers are overpriced. A spokesperson for PsyStar came up with the nonsense that Apple is earning an “80% profit” from Macs, which is absolute nonsense. You can get a gander at the overall margins from Apple’s own financial statements.

Now if PsyStar was talking about MIcrosoft, I’d believe them.

In fact, regular and fair comparisons have shown that a Mac and a name brand PC, when identically equipped, are very very close in price. Sometimes Apple is cheaper; sometimes they’re not. Since Apple doesn’t play in the low-end of the market, where profits are difficult to come by, you will always find a cheaper PC.

Of course, it would be nice if Apple would consider building a mid-range, expandable minitower that lies between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro. But that’s another argument that I’ve voiced far too often already.