Snow Leopard comes too soon

When it comes to find­ing names for ver­sions of  OS X, Mr. Apple is really rais­ing the bar. If i were Mr. Apple i would think twice before call­ing my OS X v10.6 Snow Leop­ard. Snow Leop­ard (Pan­thera uncia ) is a top cat. The ulti­mate in the Fel­i­dae fam­ily ¹. Does Apple imply that his OSX v10.6 is the best ever. Of course, being soft­ware, it can­not be the best ever, it will evolve into a bet­ter v10.7. But what will that be called? I don’t know of any cat bet­ter than the Snow Leop­ard? Does Apple? Along with tech are we also hid­ing a new species under our sleeve?

Apple should have reserved the Snow Leop­ard for a v10.9. He could have filled the inter­me­di­ate ver­sions with names like Clouded Leop­ard, Siber­ian Tiger, etc or other smaller cats like the Linx or Fish­ing Cat.

Mac OS X Ver­sions (source: wikipedia.org)

Also, the fact that Mr. Apple com­pletely avoided the Lions really upsets me. You can­not pos­si­bly con­vince me that he will be nam­ing the v10.9 Lion. No one would think of nam­ing a new prod­uct ver­sion Lion when it’s pre­vi­ous ver­sion is called Snow Leopard.

It is very inter­est­ing to see how Mr. Apple has, up to now, suc­cess­fully named all ver­sions of OS X after a par­tic­u­lar specie of the cat fam­ily. But i am going bonkers think­ing which fam­ily of the ani­mal king­dom will he choose next to name ver­sions his OS 11 (or OS XI). I rec­om­mend choos­ing one of the mon­key families.

Mon­key Fam­i­lies: Will Mr. Apple choose from these for nam­ing his ver­sions of OS11. (source: wikipedia.org)

Whichever fam­ily he ends up choos­ing, it will have at least 10 dis­tinct species. One each for ver­sions .1 to .9. With OS X v10.6 just com­ing out of its cave Mr Apple has ample of time to find his new family.

Updated on AUGUST 31, 2009.

Mac users would like to read this page on ZDNET before upgrad­ing to Snow Leopard.

ZDNET also says “Peo­ple eager to get a copy of the lat­est ver­sion of the Mac oper­at­ing sys­tem, Snow Leop­ard, should be wary of sites offer­ing free copies because they are likely to get some nasty mal­ware instead, accord­ing to antivirus com­pany Trend Micro.”

Which ani­mal fam­ily should OS 11 (or OS XI) be ded­i­cated to?
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