Across the world as I write this, tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of copies of Leopard are on their merry way to Mac users. The tech press, and even some mainstream news outlets such as The New York Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, have had the Golden Master versions in their soaking hands for at least a week and have begun to publish reviews.

Regular people, however, unless you were lucky enough to get your copy early (and I’m thinking in terms of a legal copy here), will have to wait for your copy to arrive at your home or office. Or you’ll have to take a shopping trip to the appropriate dealer, or, if you like, attend one of the all-nighters at an Apple Store.

Regardless, before you sit down and install Leopard on your Macs, you’ve got to take a time out and make sure that you are ready for this major upgrade. While a Mac operating system installation is nowhere near as dangerous and troublesome as it can be on the Windows platform, don’t assume it’s seamless. Even if you’ve read that in the paper, or online, don’t take such claims seriously.

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With worldwide Leopard coming out parties, and lots and lots of copies arriving the very first day Mac OS 10.5 is out — and maybe sooner if you can believe some reports — you’d almost expect massive upgrades being performed over a period of several days.

This is a vision that seems real enough, although I have to wonder if some of you are going to be highly disappointed that you didn’t wait and take a breather.

But why should that be, considering Leopard has some 316 new features and enhancements that cover the length and breadth of the operating system, from fancy eye-candy to increased levels of security? Whether you’re a consumer or businessperson, surely there’s plenty to delight in, right?

At the same time, just because something is new and does more things that what it replaces doesn’t mean it’s better. I’ll grant that it just might be, and, in fact, I’m highly optimistic that it is.

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I feel like a broken record (you do remember records, right?) when I keep preaching the backup religion, yet when Apple said that roughly 26% of my fellow Mac users backup anything at all, I had to feel extremely disappointed.

The news that only a fraction of that number routinely used backup software was even more frustrating. Consider how many backup applications are available, ranging from Apple’s own Backup, which comes with your .Mac membership, to my favorite, SuperDuper!

Nor is it a matter of ease of use. Most of these applications have simple setup assistants or configuration panes that take the drudgery out of the process. You don’t even have to be around if you just create a scheduled backup, and make sure your Mac and your backup medium are running at the appointed time. Barring a power outage, you’re good to go.

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When you examine Apple’s financials in even a cursory fashion, you have to consider that, not so long ago, it took almost a year for them to earn $6.22 billion of revenue. Now Apple can do this in a single quarter, and nobody can guess just where this might end up in the next few years.

The basic numbers released Monday afternoon were extremely encouraging, and way more than Apple’s fiscal fourth-quarter guidance and, as usual, ahead of Wall Street estimates.

In all, some 2,164,000 Macs were sold, of which 1,347,000 were laptops, and 817,000 desktops. The new iMac line, according to Apple, is getting great reception, and the company’s inventories are down to three weeks, which is, in the scheme of things. quite low. In all, Mac sales were up 34 percent over the same period last year.

In the iPod world, 10.2 million units were sold, an increase of 17 percent over 2006. Meantime, how many of you actually remember that there’s a new Zune line coming out next month? No raised hands! I thought so.

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