Understand that the official word on Tiger originally came at Apple’s annual developer conclave, WWDC, in June 2004. Despite that long lead time, only now has a PC-oriented mail order house decided to sue over trademark infringement. This is no April fool’s joke either, but a real action filed by TigerDirect.com.

TigerDirect? Well, some of you have received the company’s mail order catalogs over the years, and so you might know that it sells both computer hardware and software. No Macs, by the way. As a result, TigerDirect is asking the United States District Court for the District of Florida to grant an injunction halting sales of Mac OS 10.4.

Now don’t despair. A hearing on the matter won’t occur till next week, so you can still get your copy of Tiger. What’s strange to me is that TigerDirect waited until the absolute last minute to file this action. I would not be so presumptuous as to regard this as more of a publicity stunt than a legitimate legal action. No doubt company really feels that you and I will be confused over the PC boxes and other products sold by TigerDirect and Apple’s newest operating system.

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No, Microsoft haters, don’t begin that loud applause just yet. Whatever problems Microsoft is confronting these days, the company isn’t going away any time soon, or that matter for the foreseeable future. It is huge, well entrenched, and, frankly, people are just plain accustomed to using Windows, Office and all the rest. But there are troubling signs, and comparing the recent performance of Apple and Microsoft speaks volumes.

With Apple releasing it’s fourth major upgrade to Mac OS X, ahead of schedule once again, you have to wonder what it is doing right and what Microsoft is doing wrong. The last major upgrade to Windows came out in 2001, not long after Mac OS X 10.1 appeared. Sure, there have been updates to Windows XP, but they are just maintenance updates, such as SP2, which improves security from perfectly awful to mediocre.

Oh yes, there is that 64-bit version, and Microsoft loves to boast about the support for the new, speedier chips from the Dark Side. You do recall, though, that Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, released in October, 2003, also had 64-bit support to help fuel the Power Mac G5 and the iMac G5. Well, better late than never.

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I really pity the person or persons who posted news about updated Power Macs Tuesday at Amazon’s site. It’s bad enough, from Apple’s viewpoint, that the rumor sites sometimes get stories about new hardware right. But when a respected commerce site begins to take orders for that unannounced hardware a wee bit too early, heads are apt to roll.

While the original listing got zapped real fast, it was there long enough for folks to get the basics about a minor Power Mac G5 speed bump. The newest models, which will have Tiger preloaded, top out with a dual processor 2.7GHz model. The listing, considering the source, was entirely accurate, and the official announcement was made Wednesday morning. You can check the specs yourself at Apple’s site. In short, all the dual processor variants have 16X dual layer SuperDrives and larger hard drives, which now have maximum capacities of 250GB.

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The short answer is no, but I should explain myself. I have written several articles on this topic. Each time I believe someone is listening and that maybe, just maybe, I’ll see a smaller number of stories that indulge in myth-making about how expensive Macs really are.

Then I open a copy of, say, Consumer Reports, to cite a notorious example, and it’s “deja vu all over again,” to quote a famous athlete with a penchant for offbeat conversation. Take the May 2005 issue, which includes a short article entitled “Mini and Shuffle: Apple Goes Budget.”

The title is all right, so far as it goes, until the uninformed testing people at CR drop the ball again, claiming that if you had to add a USB keyboard, mouse and monitor, “those essentials and upgrades such as added RAM can hike the Mini’s price past $1,000.”

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