Trying to predict what Apple is going to do is an exercise in total futility. Just as soon as you think you have a handle on their product and marketing strategy, they turn around to upend your assumptions. It has happened often enough that you have to realize it's all part of a plan you may never understand.

Take those "predictable" Mac OS X upgrades. With Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion, you expected to see the birth of a new feline every couple of years, give or take a few months. It was all clockwork, and your expectations had it that the earliest Apple would disclose the particulars about 10.8 would be the 2012 WWDC, or maybe later.

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The very first Mac arrived in 1984 without the ability to upgrade anything. Even opening the case was a chore best left to service technicians when troubles arose. Although the Macs that arrived in the years after Steve Jobs left Appleoften sported relatively easy upgrading, it wasn't always a cake walk.

I remember, for example, the Quadra 800, a precursor to the similarly designed Power Mac 8100. If you wanted to add or replace RAM, you had to separate the chassis from the case, which involved removing lots of screws and separating cable assemblies. The process, while theoretically not difficult, presented the potential hazard of damaging delicate cables and wreaking havoc. Understand that this model, and some of its successors, were minitowers designed for professional content creators who required smooth internal expansion, and Apple fell down on the job big time.

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There's an interesting article at Macworld, from my friend Lex Friedman, which focuses on the rapid growth of Mac OS X in the early years, and how, as the frequency of upgrades has slowed, the changes have been less drastic. Lex assumes, perhaps with a reasonable amount of justification, that things will settle down with the iOS before long.

Now when it comes to Mac OS X, consider that, before Lion arrived, it had been four years since Apple released a major OS upgrade. Yes, Snow Leopard came between Leopard and Lion, but there were few feature enhancements. Mac OS 10.6 was meant as an OS upgrade to deliver new system-level capabilities that would improve performance and reliability. Well, at least when app developers made their software compatible.

Indeed, if you didn't migrate to Snow Leopard, 10.6, you may not have noticed much of a difference, at least until the Mac App Store arrived and gave you an iOS-inspired method to acquire software. Of course, that also became the main destination to upgrading to Lion, so many of you might have been forced to upgrade to Snow Leopard anyway if you craved 10.7. Yes, Apple has a costlier USB stick version, but they really want you to download Lion. And, for now at least, Lion is the only route on the Mac to iCloud.

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With over one week's experience with iCloud under my belt, so to speak, I am somewhat underwhelmed with the way it works. I mean, it's good to see Apple trying over and over again to find the road to success in building some sort of online service portfolio, but previous efforts have been hit and miss, and miss was often the operative term.

As I wrote awhile back, Apple got into the online game back in the 1980s with a service for dealers and repairers known as AppleLink. A consumer-based version was abandoned, but Apple's partner in that venture used it as the basis for America Online. In the 1990s, Apple tried eWorld, using AOL's technology, and gave it up after failing to provide a suitable alternative to AOL. For the 21st century, we went from iTools, to .Mac, MobileMe, and now to iCloud.

Are we there yet?

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