Over the years, I've tended to acquire Macs on two-year cycles, since that's usually how long it takes for the newest model to be substantially faster and more productive than the older machine. The intermediate updates, each year, tend to be far more incremental, although Apple's upmarket approach version of the iMac, which debuted in late 2009, was a far more significant upgrade. Indeed, the high-end quad-core Intel i7 on an iMac gave a Mac Pro a run for its money.

Although my financial situation had begun to seriously suffer from the recession in 2009, I had the credit line to sustain the purchase of a fairly well equipped and customized 27-inch iMac, with the 2.8GHz Intel i7 and 8GB of RAM. Even better, I sold my Mac Pro and a 30-inch display for enough to actually zero the credit card invoice, and leave me a few hundred dollars change with which to pay other bills. This was a tremendous deal.

After reading the reviews about the new iMac, particularly the benchmarks, it was clear that very few apps would afford the Mac Pro a performance advantage. Sure, I could add more memory to the Mac Pro, and fill the internal PCI slots with some intriguing expansion possibilities, but none of those extras fit into my workflow. But I still felt I was taking a bit of a chance, even though it was one that, in the end, cost me nothing.

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So a survey is published this week claiming that growth of Mac OS X Lion is unaccountably stagnating. A marketing firm, known as Chitika, has released the survey, which alleges that growth in Apple's new OS, after an initial spurt, has slowed down seriously. If true, you'd think Apple has a problem, but are these figures to be believed?

Let's just say, the results raise loads of questions.

Consider that, each and every month, Apple is selling more than 1.5 million new Macs. Since late July, every one of those Macs, other than a small number of units remaining in stock, were preloaded with 10.7 Lion. Most of these models cannot be downgraded. So where does Chitika get its figures? Unfortunately, when you examine their site, you'll find precious little information about test methodology, though I did learn the company had to settle with the FTC last year over complaints about online ad targeting. Seems there were complaints about the opt-out process, involving people who didn't want to receive such material.

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If you've read the blogs, online news sites, or even your daily paper, you might believe that Apple builds nothing but iPhones and iPads. The media wonders whether the iPhone 4S, with the same exterior as the iPhone 4, will succeed despite being a minor upgrade, even though the nature of the upgrade is quite substantial in the scheme of things when you crack open the case and check inside.

But the real story is what's happening to the Mac while all this is playing out.

In last week's media event, Apple CEO Tim Cook reminded us that some six million copies of Lion have been downloaded since late July, approximately 10% of the current Mac user base. He did not mention just how many new Macs were sold with Lion preloaded. But even if you take the conservative approach and assume the number is between two and three million, allowing for an unknown number of older stocks of Macs still available as of Lion's shipping date, it's a pretty good number.

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There's a quiet branding change in Apple's promotion of Lion. While the press releases and even the new About This Mac window still refer to 10.7 as Mac OS X, Apple begun to move towards the OS X label instead; yes, without the word Mac. Compare that to the way the iPhone OS became iOS as different devices used that OS.

For now, OS X is still strictly for Macs. Unless Apple, after 27 years, opts for a different name for their personal computers, I suppose Mac will still be used to identify the hardware. But you wonder whether OS X is just market speak, or heralds an effort from Apple to build new generations of computing devices that will use the same operating system, but won't, strictly speaking, be Macs.

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