Do you recall the scene? Apple VP Phil Schiller jumps onto the stage during a Macworld Expo keynote to stage a bakeoff between a Power Mac and a PC with an Intel processor. Invariably the Mac is faster than an Intel chip of equivalent clock speed; in fact, much faster in most cases. All right, there are some of you out there who don’t believe those benchmarks. Maybe the Macs were souped up, the Wintel boxes crippled. Maybe Apple concocted a set of tests that would only favor the Mac. Maybe.

But in my experience, this sort of nasty speculation is has no factual basis whatever. If you do use the same tests and methods as Apple, and similarly configured hardware (based on the published configurations) you’ll get results that are remarkably similar. I know. I’ve done it a number of times over the past few years.

However, that doesn’t stop the speculation that Apple is considering a move from its main processor supplier, IBM, to Intel. Fueling the speculation is the fact that the NeXTStep operating system, on which Mac OS X is based, did at one time work on Intel or x86 processors. Add to that the fact that IBM has run up against a virtual brick wall in delivering faster processors and particularly a low power G5 for the PowerBook and it all begins to make sense. Or does it?

The latest round of speculation of a pending deal between Apple and Intel comes from none other than The Wall Street Journal, perhaps our most respected newspaper. Of course, neither Apple nor Intel have actually confirmed such discussions are taking place, and if there are discussions, what they are really about. So let’s use our imaginations, along with a healthy dose of logic.

First and foremost the article clearly states that the price of a Mac is higher than a comparably equipped Wintel box, implying that using an Intel processor will bring the price down. Of course, we all know that’s not true. In addition, Apple is already using a lot of industry standard hardware in its computers. From hard drives and optical drives to board level components, the differences between a Mac and a PC are far less than they used to be. Unless Intel gives Apple a killer deal on processors, undercutting IBM’s price by a fair margin, the price you pay for a Mac wouldn’t change very much.

But even assuming Apple could lower prices by a fair margin if it switched to “Intel Inside,” does it make any sense? Does Intel deliver a better product, with superior performance? When it comes to the Power Mac G5, the answer is clearly no, assuming Apple’s latest published benchmarks are essentially correct. So why would Apple want to make a wholesale switch to an inferior product? Because of Intel’s new low-power laptop processors? Is there something really wrong with today’s PowerBook? Just asking.

But let’s pursue this line of reasoning a little further. Even if Apple decided to make the switch, it probably wouldn’t be such a big deal to port Mac OS X over to the x86 processor family. If you can believe the rumors and speculation, Apple has been building x86 compatible operating systems behind closed doors for a number of years. But what about the applications you run on your Mac? Well, you’d have to recompile all of them to run on a different processor, and establish some sort of emulation mode to allow existing software to run until new versions are out.

This would very much echo the transition from 680×0 processors to PowerPC over a decade ago. Do you remember how it was in those early days? Few native PowerPC applications were out, and the emulation mode made your computer run older applications a lot slower than on older generation Macs. It took a few years for things to settle down and PowerPC chips to become powerful enough that emulation slowdowns were no longer a factor.

But it doesn’t stop there. If Apple jumped into the Intel arena, how would it maintain its exclusivity? The new x86 Macs would no doubt be equipped with a boot ROM or BIOS that would be required by Mac OS X to run. But how long would it take competitors to reverse engineer those chips so that Apple’s crown jewels would run on any PC box? A few hours? A day? Didn’t IBM try that sort of thing years ago, and how long did it take for PC clones to take over the market?

Do you remember the brief Mac OS clone era? Apple licensed the Mac OS and logic board designs to other companies, who promptly stuffed them into cheap PC boxes and undercut Apple big time. It nearly put Apple out of business until Steve Jobs pulled the plug, so why trod that well worn ground all over again? And that is precisely what would happen if Apple switched from IBM to Intel? How could it be otherwise?

So we return to the original question: Is Apple really talking to Intel about processors for its personal computers or about something else entirely? Remember that x86 processors aren’t the only products Intel makes. What about an embedded chip for a new generation of iPods or some other digital hub device? Why does it have to be about replacing the G5 with an x86 processor? As Mr. Spock said in that famous SF show so long ago, “That, sir, is illogical!”

Now perhaps all this speculation is true. Maybe Steve Jobs will take the stage at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference next month and announce a deal to phase out the G5 in favor of an Intel alternative. But I just can’t see where such a deal would make any sense. Right now, Apple is on a roll, and its market share is finally beginning to climb out of the doldrums. Why mess up a good thing? Why indeed!

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Three weeks after installing Tiger, I have found it incredibly stable, and, as some have observed, snappier on my Power Mac G5. Despite this rosy picture, a number of applications had to be updated because of compatibility problems of one sort or another. Fortunately, I haven’t had to deal with these issues, but a lot of you have.

If you want to get an idea of the fixes already available, you’ll want to check out the special Tiger compatibility area at Ric Ford’s Macintouch. Over the next few weeks, you can depend on that last expanding by leaps and bounds.

So what’s wrong with this picture? Why do we have to read about a slew of problems with existing software? Does it have to be that way? Well, you see it’s not unusual to encounter problems of this sort when a major operating system upgrade arrives. Anything that touches the guts of the system may be affected more deeply than other software. The biggest examples include system enhancements, maintenance utilities and backup software, and that’s only the beginning. You’ve heard of the issues, no doubt, that affect VPN connections to corporate networks and other connectivity issues. Of course, the 10.4.1 update may have already addressed some of those problems, but others may still exist.

The situation is probably a lot worse with Tiger, because of the high number of under-the-hood changes. When you consider many of those 220 changes, you realize that only programmers will appreciate (or dread) them. On the other hand, none of these changes should have come as a great surprise for developers, since they got a gander at Tiger as early as June of 2004, when early release versions were distributed to attendees and later to a wider to Select and Premier members of Apple’s developer program. As work on Tiger progressed, they were entitled to receive updated versions to continue to check against their products.

And, by the way, I’m not going to talk about developers who violate their confidentiality agreements and talk about those prerelease versions or release copies on the Internet. They know the consequences and deserve Apple’s wrath.

In any case, it would seem logical to assume that Mac software publishers should have received a fairly good indication of the work they had to do early on, right? Surely Tiger compatible versions should have been available for release on April 29th, so why did we still have still have to wait? For example, you won’t see a fully compatible version of Microsoft Virtual PC until summer or even later. Pro Tools 6.9, the latest version of the popular audio application from Digidesign, is still being updated to work with Tiger. That means that if you bought one of those new Power Macs that shipped with Tiger preloaded, you will have to wait a few more weeks before you can deploy your new computer in your recording studio.

So what’s wrong with this picture. If Apple can deliver complete operating systems 12 or 18 months apart, shouldn’t developers of a single application be able to do it a whole lot faster? Are these companies just lazy, deserving of our wrath and perhaps loss of business? Not necessarily.

In the real world, where there are lots of gray areas, the situation isn’t so cut and dry. Yes, a software publisher may know early on the problems that might be encountered with the new system, but they are also chasing a moving target. There is no way to know for certain that the changes they are counting on (or fear) in the new Mac OS will be there in the same form when development is finished, so they could end up with spending time and money making changes that aren’t necessary, or create new and unexpected issues.

The upshot of all this is that it may be very late in the development process before a software publisher can feel confident that they are on the right track. After all, you wouldn’t want to install an update, only to discover that it fixes the wrong problem, or simply doesn’t work.

You may not like it, you may be inconvenienced as a result, but that’s the way it is. Now if you’ve already upgraded to Tiger and had an unexpected surprise, you may be faced with a dilemma. If you need a product that isn’t compatible yet, you may have to consider downgrading to Panther and waiting a while before you give Tiger another try. If you haven’t upgraded yet, you’ll want to check with the publishers of your mission critical software about Tiger compatibility, so you don’t upgrade prematurely. After all, wouldn’t you rather wait than have to confront a buggy product that may cause you even more grief? Life is hard enough as it is.

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Now that the 10.4.1 update has spread across the planet, Mac users are weighing in on what it fixes, what it doesn’t fix, and the new bugs it creates. But in all this there is one large problem, and it appears to stem from Apple’s efforts to make the update as small as possible, at least the one you see in the Software Update preference panel.

Ah, the law of unintended consequences rears its ugly head yet again!

Consequences? Well, when the update first appeared, I noticed that the version that appeared in my son’s 17-inch PowerBook was approximately 19MB in size, yet the one you see at Apple’s support site is listed at 37MB. So what’s wrong here? Are some Mac users being deprived of some of the fixes present in 10.4.1 in the interests of keeping the file size small? Not exactly. The real truth here is that Apple is trying to help you, by delivering a file that strictly supports a specific system setup.

This may not matter with a broadband connection, but for the millions of you out there who still get online via dial-up, it’s a pretty significant factor. But here’s where things get muddled. What if you have more than one Mac, as many of us do? What if they are different models? Now, if your Internet connection is bandwidth starved, you’d rather not have to download that file more than once, but here you might have to. That is true even if you select the option in Software Update to Install and Keep Package; in other words, keep the update file on hand to deploy on other Macs. Why? Because that file won’t install on the wrong Mac, and this isn’t something that’s altogether clear in the meager information that comes with the update. True, there is a Knowledge Base document on the subject, and it is quite forthcoming on the logic behind offering different versions. But how many Mac users read those things?

Here’s a little of what Apple says on the subject: “The sizes of software updates can vary for computers running Mac OS X 10.3.4 or later. This is a feature of Software Update, which automatically detects the best update for your computer.

“Sometimes, Software Update preferences is able to offer a ’smaller-sized Delta’ update than you might expect, or smaller than what you might see on other computers installing the same update. The ’smaller Delta’ updates are offered when some Mac OS X system files can be modified instead of replaced in their entirety….Smaller-sized Software Updates take less time to download and install than regular-sized Delta or Combo updates.”

Suddenly, a time saver creates a brand new problem that you didn’t expect. Surely Apple must know this, or do they feel most Mac users have just one? I also wonder just how many support calls Apple’s highly-rated customer service people have to field on this issue, but that’s a question for which no answer will ever be provided. Even Consumer Reports, which keeps tabs on the quality of technical support among the various computer makers, because those surveys don’t provide details about the most common questions.

Is there a solution? Well, the immediate answer, of course, is to get all of your operating system fixer uppers direct from Apple’s site if you have two or more Macs of different types. You’ll have to endure a much longer download, but what choice is there?

Unfortunately the ultimate solution won’t be at hand until more of you are on broadband networks and maybe that’ll happen in a few years. Meantime, there is another way for Apple to help you, but the option isn’t being offered, and that is an annual operating system subscription program. You pay a fixed fee, and receive all the needed updates on CD shortly after they become available for download. That way, you are never far behind the curve. In fact, waiting may be a blessing in disguise sometimes, because there’s enough time for Mac troubleshooting sites to report if there are any show stoppers that might make you want to skip a particular update.

The subscription would, naturally, include the next version of Mac OS X, whenever that arrives and whatever cat name is selected. I wouldn’t presume to suggest how much you’d want to pay or what such a service is worth. Perhaps it could be offered in two ways, one for .Mac members, and another for the rest of you. Figure on an annual rate of, say, $99 for the standalone service and perhaps $169 for the combo with .Mac. If you assume there will be a major operating system upgrade every 18 months or so, it’s not such a bad deal, because you’re not paying all that much extra to get those regular update CDs.

Now it is true that Apple has the skeleton of such a program in place for business users. If you buy 10 seats (user licenses) or more, you can opt for the Apple Maintenance Program. For a fixed up-front fee, “you will receive every major upgrade release to Mac OS X.” What about the maintenance updates? No, they aren’t included but, in my not-so-humble opinion, they should be.

And I see no reason why small businesses and home users can’t qualify for a full service maintenance program too, one that includes everything, even the tiniest update. Wouldn’t you find it easier that way to cope with this stuff? I could see a little confusion, of course, particularly after you receive a bunch of those CDs and want to sort them out, but if they came in an envelope that’s clearly labeled by date or version number (no fine print please), it won’t be that difficult to manage. Or at least, that’s how it seems from this tiny corner of the universe.

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