Operating Systems > Mac OS XEssentials

Whether you're writing a report, editing home movies and posting them to YouTube, or managing complex spreadsheets, you want to do it as quickly and easily as possible. But because we all develop our own habits for using a computer -- maybe somebody showed us how to do things a certain way or we've figured them out on our own through trial and error -- we don't always work in the most efficient or organized manner.

Apple patched 40 vulnerabilities in Mac OS X last week -- more than half of them labeled with the company's equivalent of "critical" -- and in the process broke the 250-bug bar for the year.

Even without a strategy to push its computers into corporations, Apple has managed to nearly quadruple its share of the enterprise market in the last 19 months, an analyst said Tuesday.

Apple's operating system market share slipped last month as Microsoft's Windows halted its slide for only the fourth time in the last 12 months, a research company reported.

Apple Inc.'s OS market share has increased by nearly 32% in the last year, according to data collected by an Internet metrics company.

Judging from initial accounts, the next version of the Mac OS X, named Snow Leopard, will be aimed squarely at business and enterprise users, signaling a formal push by Apple to take Windows head on outside the consumer and education markets. "Apple is taking the Mac OS one step closer to the enterprise," says Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter Research.

When Apple shipped Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" in October, Macintosh users were divided about some of the interface changes Apple had made from prior Mac OS X releases. Chief among these love 'em or hate 'em changes were the newly translucent menu bar and the 3-D, shelf-like Dock, as well as the new Stacks feature, which, when you mouse over a folder in the Dock, displays the folder's contents as a column of icons or a rectangular grid.

Reports circulated Wednesday that Apple may demo the next iteration of Mac OS X next week or even release code to developers in preparation for an early-2009 launch.

Enterprise IT shops looking for more options in computer operating systems now have another choice to evaluate -- Apple's Mac OS X Leopard client software and Mac OS X Leopard Server have both been officially certified as meeting the latest Unix 03 standards.

Comparing any Mac OS release with Windows is often like comparing aphids and orangutans. That is particularly true when looking at Apple's Mac OS X Leopard Server and Microsoft's Windows 2003 Server. Although they ultimately provide very similar features -- directory services, file and print services, various Internet services, and so forth -- the two platforms seem to be designed from completely different mind-sets.