Opinion: What’s in a name?

In case you’ve just dropped in from a nearby plutoid, Apple has been naming its operating system releases after big scary pussy cats for several years, with the latest incarnation known as Leopard.

It’s always been good fun guessing which cat will grace the next box cover, and a Macintosh-using colleague even agreed that the current release is a little “spotty” and, unlike the previous release known as Tiger, hasn’t yet “earned its stripes”. Don’t dial the pun police -- I’ll stop now.

Apparently, he’s not the only one who’s noticed that the Mac OS X variety of leopard isn’t quite as speedy as the variety of leopard which chases antelopes. In fact, at the risk of incurring the wrath of Mac Fanbois across the entire Internet, Leopard is not only slower than Tiger, it’s now slower than WinXP.

There, I’ve said it. But before you blitz the comments box below, Apple’s own boss of software admitted as much in the press release for the forthcoming version. He’s telling the world there will be scant new features with most of the coding effort spent to “enhance the performance of OS X”, and we’ll also have to wait a whole year before it arrives.

One of the very few new features will be integration with Microsoft’s Exchange server, so somebody important in the world of enterprise IT must have decided to use a Macintosh. Can’t say I’ve noticed all that many VPs wandering about with Apple logos on their briefcases, but maybe Bill Gates has switched sides now he’s no longer officially on the payroll at Microsoft.

Then again, maybe Apple is expecting the corporate world to go as loopy as the rest of us over its iPhone and if that happens integration with Exchange might suddenly matter a tad more than it does now.

There are also persistent rumours that the best Apple code monkeys were diverted from OS X to the 3G iPhone project, and now the thing is released they can get back to fixing the lame Leopard. Oh, nearly forgot, the fixed up version of Leopard is going to be called Snow Leopard. Uhuh. Snow Jobs might have been more appropriate.