All right, we know that Snow Leopard will be, for all practical purposes, a wholesale cleanup of Leopard. Most of the surface features, save for Microsoft Exchange support, will be essentially identical to 10.5, although I suppose there might be some refinements here and there.

But the real stuff will happen out of sight, in the guts of the system where the plumbing will be cleaned up, the operating system’s footprint will be reduced, and key performance enhancements will be added. It’ll also support up to 16TB of RAM, which may not mean much to you now, but it might a few years hence.

Indeed, Snow Leopard is laying a foundation that will pave the way for 10.7, 10.8 and beyond, and that is a good thing.

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When Apple held it’s quarterly financial conference with analysts earlier this month, its executives said they’d have trouble filling all the orders for the new MacBook Pro before the end of the present quarter. Independent reports, from American Technology Research and other industry analysts, suggested strong sales for both the new iMac and MacBook Pro. And then there’s, of course, Amazon, where the new iMac and forthcoming MacBook Pro sit at or near the top of the list.

Still another report, one that didn’t cite any source, said that Intel-based iMac sales were lagging. A few online commentators went with it, trying to explain just what might have gone wrong with Apple’s sudden move to Intel chips, months ahead of schedule.

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In recent days, you’ve read preliminary reports about the performance of the new MacIntels. It makes sense for the iMac, since it is really shipping and some actually own one. The picture gets somewhat murky with the MacBook Pro, since it isn’t available yet. The only units seen are preproduction units and it’s always possible things will be altered somewhat by the time the actual product reaches your favorite Apple dealer.

There’s also another obstacle. Most of the applications traditionally used for testing haven’t been converted to Universal form, so they will run native on both PowerPC and Intel processors. When you test older apps on a MacIntel, at best you can measure the speed of Apple’s Rosetta emulation technology, not the potential of the new models.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped people from posting tests of one sort or another. In order to get MacBook Pro scores, a few persuaded the Apple people at the Macworld Expo to allow them to have some extended face time with the new laptops to run a few tests. As an academic exercise, I wouldn’t take them too seriously, although it’s nice to know that the Apple people were patient enough to allow those tests to run.

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Is there any single development that cemented Apple’s decision to dump IBM and cast its lot with Intel? Well, one factor may have been the iMac G5, which is probably Apple’s best-selling desktop. You’ve probably heard the statistics and the numbers don’t vary very much. Although Apple has a stellar rating for product reliability, at least twice as many first generation versions of the current iMac have catastrophic suffered hardware failures.

The statistics are not the sole province of one Mac Web site. Even Popular Science magazine, which uses Macs in its editorial department, reported serious troubles, usually related to overheating. It’s not that Apple has ignored the problem. If your first-generation iMac G5 suffers from certain specified video or power supply issues, it’ll be repaired up to two years from the day you bought it. And if your iMac’s original warranty is now coming to an end, I suggest you run, not walk, to your local Apple dealer and shell out $169 for an AppleCare policy, which protects you for three years.

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