Much excitement for Mac fans around the world with the release of Snow Leopard – Apple’s latest OS X update.
But the question on some people’s lips is not how many bugs and incompatibilities there are, but which big cat will come next when they release?
Apart from the ones named in the title – Tiger, Panther, Leopard and Snow Leopard – Apple have actually used many other fierce felines as codenames for their various OS updates.
10.0 was codenamed Cheetah, while the code for 10.1 was called Puma internally at Apple. Then, following the intense excitement surrounding 10.2 – aka Jaguar – Apple decided that numbers were old news and went full throttle in public with the big cats.
Apparently, Apple previously registered Lynx and Cougar as trademarks, but these have since been allowed to lapse.
So where next? Lion sounds a bit naff, following all the others, while Clouded Leopard is pushing the leopard a bit too far.
Maybe they should stop trying to be so ‘hard’ and go for lizards: Gecko, Chameleon, Gila and Komodo would all be cool additions to the Mac stable.
Of course, this could also be part of a grand plan and the next Apple upgrade will be a totally different OS and start from scratch again. Don’t bet your house on it, but stranger things have happened!
