Right after Apple’s new product presentation last week, Apple’s stock continued on its progressively downward spiral. Now in all fairness to Apple and the financial community, it may well be part of a general trend. Things on Wall Street are pretty shaky these days, and most companies are apt to suffer, regardless of their actual financial condition or sales performance.

However, Apple’s new iPod lineup seems surprisingly predictable. The rumor sites had already suggested a return to the tall and slim profile for the iPod nano, and perhaps a few features cribbed from the iPod touch. The latter received the expected modest redesign to bring it more into conformity with the iPhone 3G, and the prices dropped somewhat.

That and the introduction of iTunes 8 didn’t light too many fires, I suppose. The larger question is the fate of the major product transition promised by Apple’s financial executives during the last conference call with the analyst community. That was the one that would supposedly hurt the company’s profit margins.

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The other day I heard from a long-time friend, a former member of a forum I managed on AOL way back when. He has an engineering degree, and worked for many years as the chief sound engineer for a famous singer (now deceased), so he definitely knows his hardware.

He’s also a Mac loyalist, and has earned his stripes by working with Apple’s hardware and software from the earliest days. In all fairness, some of his experiences are stellar, which is why he continues to use Macs. But he’s had his share of problems too, and lately he’s been keeping tags on Leopard’s rough edges.

Rough edges?

Didn’t I say in an earlier column that my experiences with Leopard have been terrific? Indeed I have. And, despite the fact that Apple’s own discussion forums and those Mac troubleshooting sites are littered with hundreds of reports of anomalous behavior, system crashes, and performance issues covering a host of setups, little has been nailed down so far.

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Most of the news about Apple is extremely positive these days. Sales are up, market share is up, and, coming off a record quarter, the holiday season may beat analyst estimates big time.

Of course, we’ll all know come January, but speculation can be fun if not taken to excess.

Certainly, Leopard had a great launch weekend, with some two million copies sold, roughly twice as many as Tiger some 30 months earlier. Of course, in all fairness to the skeptics, the number of actual Mac users was far less in the spring of 2005. Apple wasn’t moving two million boxes a quarter then, not even half that.

I assume that hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of additional Leopard users have joined the club since then, in large part because of the sale of new Macs. So with a burgeoning base, you have to expect that problems will occur here and there. Certainly, the old adage in the tech industry that the first release of anything is apt to be buggy, must apply here as well. Indeed, the 10.5.1 update contained a fairly high amount of bug fixes, including a show-stopper that might cause lost or damaged data when you move a file from one partition to another via the Command-drag process.

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One thing that’s been part and parcel of the Mac OS ever since it was a free download is the lack of an activation code. That means you can freely install it on multiple computers and not face nasty messages from the “mother ship” or finding that your system no longer functions.

Now this doesn’t mean that, from a user license standpoint, you are free to install the Mac OS on all these computers. If you want to be fully compliant, you would consider ordering, say, the family version at $70 more, which makes Mac OS X street legal on up to five computers.

For businesses, there are other license programs so you get the appropriate number of seats to accommodate a company’s needs.

At the same time, however, you aren’t forced to assemble massed license codes and figure out where they are to be used. Of course, in all fairness to Apple, some software companies that depend on individual licensing may deliver a single company license number that will cover a predetermined maximum number of users, and use network checking and online verification to make sure you don’t exceed that number. That at least simplifies the setup process.

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