You have to appreciate Apple’s point of view with Snow Leopard. After releasing reference upgrades for Mac OS X with two or three hundred new features — some of which you may not have even wanted — it was time to fix the plumbing to pave the way for the future.

Or at least that’s what Apple expects you to believe.

The question, of course, is whether a feature-bare operating system release will be worth the same $129 that Apple charges for the one that’s usually filled to the gills with fancy new stuff. Over the years, customers have been trained to expect something new and different with new software upgrades — particularly paid ones — even if some of the new stuff weighs the system down as far as performance is concerned, or creates problems where none existed before.

Indeed, with Leopard, Apple boasted over 300 new features. But not everyone appreciates the changes. Macworld’s Rob Griffiths, for example, has his personal top ten rant list, things where Apple clearly fell down on the job. This is not to say that he’s reverted to Tiger. On the whole he prefers Leopard, even though some of its better ideas are, to him, actually worse.

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There’s a key figure that’s touted at every recent quarterly meeting with financial analysts, and it may give a clue why Apple’s sales are soaring. You see, some 50% of the people buying Macs at an Apple Store are new to the platform.

Some, no doubt, are buying their first personal computer. Others are evidently migrating from Windows. Regardless, it signals a rapidly growing user base; that is, if the figures are to be believed. You see, those analysts usually tend to ask arcane accounting-related or softball questions. They seldom try to probe or even follow up a particularly intriguing response, so we can only guess at Apple’s survey methodology.

Now, it may just be their registration database. Are the new owners already there? Then again, if that’s a component of these surveys, what about customers who have simply moved? What about the newly-married, where one spouse assumes the other’s last name?

For the sake of argument, however, and lacking evidence to the contrary, I’m going to assume those statistics are fundamentally correct. It goes to show that, if Macs are displayed and demonstrated in a properly-controlled sales environment, people will buy them.

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Appearing only a few months after Apple claimed it wouldn’t enter the low-cost PC segment, the Mac mini has been an unheralded hero to many of you. It is used for everything from serving up Web pages to point-of-sale and front office applications, but Apple continues to pretend it doesn’t exist.

The visual appeal is striking. Some call it half a cube, since its square shape is reminiscent of the failed, overpriced Mac that appeared with great flourish some years back. Debuting at $499 for the entry-level model (it’s now $599), it was a perfectly afforddable way for Windows switchers to move to the Mac and keep their existing monitors and input devices.

All right, a Mac mini isn’t terribly powerful at computing tasks. Today’s version features an older-generation Intel Core 2 Duo processor rated at either 1.83 or 2GHz. Graphics are provided by the pokey Intel GMA 950 graphics processor, which shares 64MB of system RAM. To be fair, that’s enough for display of the high definition movies you download from iTunes, but when it comes to games, don’t even think about it.

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In the 1980s, Bill Gates told Apple’s CEO at the time, John Sculley (the former soft drink executive), that he should license the Mac OS. As far as Gates was concerned, Apple would own the market.

Well, what really happened was that Sculley, in his infinite stupidity, actually licensed some of the Mac OS to Microsoft, and that gave them a wedge to build Windows and, along with clever marketing, bait and switch and smoke and mirrors, allowed Gates and company to become the world’s largest software maker.

Apple finally relented and began to license Mac OS clone computers in the mid-1990s. They hoped to expand the market for the company into segments they couldn’t hope to reach all by themselves. However, the ill-considered program allowed other companies to go after Apple’s core markets with a vengeance, with faster and cheaper hardware.

That and other foolish decisions nearly did the company in, and you can well understand why Steve Jobs killed cloning with the finesse of a master slasher shortly after he took over as “interim” CEO. A leaner, meaner Apple became a major success, and most of you know the rest of the story.

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