You’ve heard the claim: Mac users who crave the most powerful models have been waiting on the sidelines until their favorite image editing program, Adobe Photoshop, becomes Universal. At the same time, although a public beta is available now, the final version of the CS3 package won’t be out until spring.

Now it’s perfectly true that the beta version of Photoshop CS3 seems to work pretty well in many respects. Published benchmarks on Mac Pros show stellar performance, faster than any G5 you can point to. But it is a beta, and therefore it’s not suited for production work, and you wouldn’t want to depend on a product of this sort as a tool to make a living.

So it would seem, then, to make perfect sense to wait until spring before you buy a brand, spanking new Mac powerhouse. Maybe that’s true, but perhaps shouldn’t just sit and wait, as many have done, witness the reportedly stagnant sales of the Mac Pro.

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Just before writing this article, I sat back and looked over the material I’ve presented over the past few weeks, and it seems I’ve been very negative; so much so, in fact, that you can rightly assume that all I want to do is rant.

But that’s not so!

In fact, I tend to be a very optimistic sort of person, which you have to be as a long-time Mac user. I remember how many years Apple was marginalized as a niche platform that few cared about. People said they’d go out of business soon, so why was I wasting my time using Macs and writing about them? Why indeed!

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I suppose I shouldn’t be ragging on people who deliver expert opinions, since the name itself is probably an oxymoron. On the other hand, it’s interesting to look over what happened through 2006 when it came to the Apple universe, just to see where folks failed to deliver an expectations.

I suppose the biggest issue was the migration to Intel processors, because it proceeded at a breathtaking speed, much faster than Apple promised, and how often does a tech company fulfill its promises?

This time last year, the expert opinion had it that the very first Mac to attain Intel-inside status would be the Mac mini, but the available chips, the first of the Core Duos, worked best in the iMac and what became the MacBook Pro. In this case and throughout the year, a lot of what you saw was actually dictated by Intel’s production schedule and how quickly they could get chips in sufficient quantities to the marketplace.

In short, you didn’t have to be an expert to come up with an informed opinion.

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I realize some of you readers might consider myself an expert of one sort or another — and some of you even believe I present myself in that fashion. But I don’t really consider myself an expert in anything. Instead, I try to distill, evaluate and present information in a way that most people will understand, either in print or on radio. So call me a communicator, although I can’t say that I’m an expert in that category either.

In any case, in the next couple of weeks, you will read some so-called expert opinions about what Apple should do, will do, can do and shouldn’t do with its new products for 2007. First, there will be more predictions about what might happen at Macworld San Francisco. Alas, with expectations rising to a fever pitch and beyond, whatever Steve Jobs does announce will be a disappointment.

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