Now we all know that Snow Leopard appeared last August, but for some of you it still has serious problems, so you’re sticking with Leopard. Some of you are even Tiger holdouts, because Leopard didn’t light your fire.

The other day, I saw a perfectly serious article claiming adoption of 10.6 was not so good and then trying to explain why. But when the article’s statistics demonstrated a roughly 45% adoption rate, despite the fact that millions of Mac users can’t install Snow Leopard, the basic premise was invalidated.

Aside from those of you who have PowerPC-based Macs, and thus can never install Snow Leopard, it is quite true that 10.6 is perceived as fatally flawed in some respects. Some complain of more system crashes, others fret that their applications aren’t compatible yet.

Unfortunately, such issues apply to all personal computer operating system upgrades, from Apple and Microsoft. Early adopters suffer the pain and agony of bugs that weren’t eradicated before shipping. Some of the apps and peripheral drivers you require for your work are suddenly rendered inoperable. So you’re stuck, unless, of course, you stick with what you have.

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In 1998, Apple killed the floppy drive. It took a few years for the rest of the industry to catch up, but the handwriting was clearly on the wall. Of course, anyone who actually lost data on a worn or defective floppy would only cheer the end of that flawed storage scheme.

Segue to 2007. Apple introduces the iPhone without support for Flash. People complain, but iPhones sell at ever-increasing rates. Today, with some 40 million of them around the world, and the iPad on the immediate horizon, Steve Jobs has made it quite clear that Flash is the floppy drive of the 21st century. It’s time for it to go.

Now there have been lots of complaints from the tech media, but you have to wonder whether some of those stories were actually fed by Adobe’s spin machine. Sure, the players are given away free, but you have to pay for the developer tools, and that’s where Adobe earns lots of money. Indeed they bought Macromedia to get Flash and — of course — kill Illustrator’s main competitor, FreeHand.

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Some of you may have read a report the other day that Apple was behind the curve because there were no recent updates to the MacBook Pro lineup. This despite the fact that Intel had recently upgraded its mobile processors. So what’s wrong with Apple? Don’t they want their customers to have the latest and greatest and fastest notebooks?

Of course, the real world doesn’t always work that way. Yes the chips may be available, but there are also complications in the way Apple has configured its recent hardware, using the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M chipset. Now this integrated graphics processor is way faster than anything offered by Intel, but both Intel and NVIDIA are embroiled in a dispute over the latter’s right to produce chipsets that support the new Core i5 and Core i7 mobile processors. Until that’s resolved, Apple can’t use those parts, so they’d have to devise a different solution.

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It is widely believed that Apple will unveil iPhone 4.0 at this summer’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference and ship it shortly thereafter. There’s also a passing level of speculation that they will also deliver preliminary information about the next great reference release for Mac OS X, 10.7, sporting an unknown feline moniker.

The real question, however, is whether there’s a crying need for a successor to Snow Leopard, and therein lies a tale.

Now most of you know that 10.6 arrived last August, several weeks ahead of Apple’s promised delivery timeframe, with the usual amount of fanfare. But much of the advantages of Snow Leopard lie in its potential, rather than any visible improvements. Consider Grand Central Dispatch, which provides built-in tools to allow applications to better support all those recent Macs that are equipped at least two processor cores. Consider the plight of owners of those super-expensive Mac Pros, with eight powerful processor cores and not much to do with them.

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