From the very first day the Mac appeared, the critics said it wasn’t a serious personal computer. The graphical user interface meant it was just a plaything for the rich and restless, and that you couldn’t get any serious work done on it. That was the function of the real computer, the one that you manipulated with text commands.

Of course, that argument didn’t sit very well when Microsoft adopted many of the same interface niceties. Maybe it was a pale imitation of the original, but the basic concepts, requiring keyboard and mouse, were still present and accounted for.

Yet even when so-called business computers came with point-and-click interfaces, somehow the Mac was still relegated to the category of a toy. It didn’t matter that graphic artists embraced Macs for such chores as desktop publishing, digital artwork and movie special effects. You see, a real business computer was supposed to be used for spreadsheets, and databases and that sort of thing. Sure there was Mac software available that could carry out those functions as well, but Apple did an extremely poor job of making its products affordable for companies that needed to order them by the hundreds or thousands.

That and other strategic missteps left a bad taste in the mouths of even devoted Mac users who, by the mid-1990s, deserted the platform in droves, along with some software publishers. Yes, the Mac wasn’t in a good way when Steve Jobs took control of the company he co-founded a decade ago.

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

When Steve Jobs said at the WWDC last year that some Leopard features were being held back to keep Microsoft from starting their copying machines so early, it was really hard to take seriously. It was all a bunch of marketing hooey, the soft of stuff that’s designed just to increase the public’s appetite about a new product.

Indeed, Jobs is a master at salesmanship, so I figured there’d be a whole lot more at this year’s WWDC, particularly since developers were supposedly going home with feature-complete Leopard betas. I also felt that pretty much everything that could be said about Leopard’s new features would be listed at Apple’s site in short order.

To be sure, there’s lots of information to be found there, but if you add it all up, do you come up with the more than 300 new features touted by Apple?

Now you have to bear in mind that Apple is grouping those features under broad categories, such as the new Finder, iChat, Mail, Spaces, Time Machine and so forth and so on. Each one of those applications is apt to have a dozen or two new capabilities to call their own. So it’s quite possible that if you add everything up, and accept even the slightest change as a brand new feature, you will find yourself exceeding that 300 number, although they aren’t listed as basic bulleted points.

No, I haven’t gone that far, and I don’t intend to. I’m sure that, when Leopard ships, you will indeed find that Apple’s claims will be met or surpassed, but I’m also convinced you haven’t heard everything yet.

I’m not assuming that developers don’t have all of Leopard’s goodies in hand. No doubt a few of them, who don’t have the good sense to obey the confidentiality agreements they signed with Apple, will reveal whatever strikes them as new or different.

It’s also possible that some of the new features are indeed present and accounted for, but not activated as part of the graphical interface, so they are not readily visible. In fact, it would surprise me to learn that we know all about Leopard there is to know, except for the usual tips and tricks that Mac writers will present in their articles and books.

Remember, for example, the iPhone. Just this week, Jobs revealed that the screen would be made of glass instead of plastic, and that battery life is significantly longer than originally claimed.

As Leopard moves towards its final release this fall, it wouldn’t surprise me to read about new features that haven’t been disclosed so far. Maybe they are present in those developer betas, unknown unless one pours deep into the innards of the operating system or discovers them by accident.

Or maybe, just maybe, there aren’t there at all. It would be just as easy for Jobs to claim, say a month or two from now, that Apple’s developers had time to roll in a few more features that perhaps were originally earmarked for Leopard’s successor. But, as a gift to the Mac community, here they are now.

Does that sound sensible to you? It sure makes sense to me. But let’s not go too far here. Remember that Tiger’s full feature set was disclosed early on, and the final release was precisely what was presented; nothing more, nothing less.

Certainly, developers don’t want to be surprised at the last minute, because it could saddle them with extra work to make their apps compatible with Leopard. But if Apple confines those surprise features to things that won’t impair compatibility with third party products, maybe it’ll be all right.

Then again, you can’t predict what outside developers are going to do with their products, so perhaps anything that changes their assumptions about what Leopard’s going to be like can have a negative impact.

Understand, dear readers, that I do not have any secret information to offer. I am not speaking with developers about Leopard, nor do I want or expect them to offer me any information they aren’t allowed to reveal. While I am certainly highly curious over what Leopard is going to mean as far as my Mac computing experience is concerned, I can surely wait for it to be fully baked. In fact, I expect to buy a copy on the day it’s available.

However, the 10.4.10 update for Tiger is working quite nicely. Yes, there are a few of those early-release bugs that seem to crop up whenever there’s a maintenance release. Some are reporting audio issues, others poor connectivity with wireless networks and even some application launch failures. It’s quite possible that these apparent bugs are limited to very specific installations, but that may not be known for a few days.

So if 10.4.10 is awaiting you in the Software Update preference panel, there’s no harm in letting it sit there for a few more days until you know for sure everything is in good shape. But I’ve had no troubles at all, so I’m busy contemplating the possibilities of further revelations about Leopard. There may not be any, but this is surely a way to get some rumor sites to start their gossip machines rolling.

Is this the final Tiger update, or are more to come between now and October? That’s the question that some of you might be pondering as the dust settles on the tenth maintenance release for 10.4. According, to Apple, this particular release addresses a small set of problems that include: RAW camera support, mounting and unmounting external USB devices, support for third party software applications and, of course, security updates. Separate versions appeared Wednesday afternoon in the Software Update panels of PowerPC and Intel Macs, and there’s a variation for Mac OS X Server. Although the early chatter on Mac troubleshooting forums has been mostly positive, you’ll want to observe the usual cautions when you apply this update, which include quitting all open applications before installing and making sure that all Apple applications are put in their default locations, in the Applications folder. But the overriding question is whether Apple will now begin work on 10.4.11 or return to wrapping up Leopard.

It’s always easy to portray a company’s product plans as having some hidden, sinister meaning. Certainly, we’ve all done it for years with Microsoft, and certainly their behavior has justified many of the most insidious conspiracy theories.

Lots of people also have their suspicions about Apple. After all, Steve Jobs can create that legendary “reality distortion field” with nearly every public pronouncement. Once you’re subjected to his spell, all bets are off. The most mundane product becomes the next great thing, a surefire success. How could it be otherwise?

Among all the possible things you might have expected from last week’s WWDC, Safari for Windows probably rated at or near the bottom of the list. I know it wasn’t on my radar, although, once it happened, it seemed like a perfectly sensible and natural decision.

However, things have changed since then, and now Apple’s motives are being examined from surprisingly varying levels. Take the statements by a certain Mozilla executive that Apple envisioned a browser “duopoly” in which they would share the market with their arch-rival, Microsoft.

I suppose the fact that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates seemed so friendly in that recent public gathering fueled the belief in some quarters that they might talk privately about what strategy to use against each other and their common enemies, whatever they might be.

Obviously, Microsoft can’t be too happy about the rise of Mozilla and the impact of Firefox around the world. Although Firefox’s market share reportedly eroded some in the past month, it is certainly surprisingly successful considering the obstacles. The question is, however, does Microsoft really suffer all that much if its browser has less than 80% of the market? Well, I suppose it leaves fewer customers for their search engine, and the advertising dollars they hope to earn. Maybe that has something to do with it, although nothing stops an Internet Explorer user from switching to Google, Yahoo or any other search engine, even if they have to jump a few hoops to make it happen.

In the larger scheme of things, however, opening up the browser market with more competition means that Microsoft’s own proprietary standards will suffer. These days, there are still far too many sites out there that require Internet Explorer to render properly. With Firefox and now Safari on the march on both the Mac and PC platforms, it will make more and more sense to embrace open Web standards.

That has to benefit Apple, since Safari uses an open source rendering engine — WebKit — and they claim to want to support industry standards better than any other browser on the planet. Of course, the folks at Mozilla are making the very same promise.

So the combination of Firefox and Safari ought to be a good thing, since Microsoft ends up being the loser, or at least its efforts to enforce its own standards and dominate everything in its path.

In fact, some sort of secret pact between Apple and Microsoft to blow Firefox out of the water doesn’t make any sense at all. Duopoly my eye! It would seem far more logical to believe that Safari serves several purposes, none of which benefit Microsoft.

First, of course, is the iPhone. By delivering a Windows version of Safari, Apple encourages more developers to build Web-based applications that would play nicely with the iPhone and, in fact, with just a regular Mac or PC.

Some of the critics of Safari 3 have pointed out that it is a little too Mac-like in its interface, and that it ignores some Windows conventions, such as being able to resize a browser window from any corner. Indeed, even the preferences panel comes across as a close copy of the Mac version.

Now it is surely true that Apple is also using Safari to deliver a sampling of the Mac to the Windows audience, the better to encourage switching. At the same time, it’s also possible they haven’t had enough time to shed the remaining Mac conventions from Safari, and it will behave more like a native Windows application over time.

You see, one of the things the critics forget is that Safari 3 is a public beta, for both Mac and PC users. There are apt to be plenty of bugs to iron out over time, and it’s wrong to expect perfection from the get-go. In fact, if you read the information posted at Apple’s site on the subject, you’ll see that there are a number of features, listed as part of 13 bullet points, which have yet to be added. They include such basics as placing headers and footers on a printed page.

So it’s time to lower your expectations. Safari 3 is one large work in progress, and lots of changes are going to come, and it’s likely there will be some surprises along the way, because that’s how Apple works. More to the point, Safari for Windows is clearly designed to benefit Apple, not Microsoft, not Mozilla, not Opera or anyone else. How could you expect otherwise?