As Gerald Ratner will testify, standing on stage and panning your own products isn’t a particularly effective sales strategy. Yet when Steve Jobs announced last night that he was “going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device”, it wasn’t a million miles away from the “total crap” quip that cost Ratner his job and, very nearly, his company.

Does Apple really want or even need full-fat Mac OS X? The evidence increasingly suggests not. In four short years, iOS has acquired a 16.8% share of the smartphone market, according to Gartner: almost double the 9.3% market share Apple’s spent 10 years building with Mac OS X.  On tablets, iOS and the iPad accounted for 80% of all sales in the first quarter of 2011, according to Context. iOS is mainstream: Mac OS X isn’t and likely never will be.

Over the past couple of months, there have been continual rumours that Apple is testing the iPad’s A5 processor in its MacBook range, suggesting Apple believes iOS could stretch further than smartphones and tablets.

The only part of Apple’s portfolio where iOS doesn’t make sense is in the high-end

Indeed, recent developments in Mac OS X itself have borrowed heavily from iOS, not least touch gestures and, crucially, the Mac App Store. Even the new version of the operating system itself is a download-only “app”, available exclusively from the Mac App Store.

You can see why a transition to iOS is appealing to Apple. Why would Jobs want to keep giving software companies a free ride on Mac OS X, when it could migrate MacBooks to iOS, mandate software purchases via the App Store only, and take a 30% cut of the revenue?

The only part of Apple’s portfolio where iOS doesn’t make sense is in the high-end. Yet, Apple’s already discontinued its Xserve range of servers and the company barely speaks of its corporate customers these days: it’s almost exclusively fixated on the consumer market.

Could Apple eventually phase out Mac OS X? I suspect it’s already doing so.

Here’s something that’s crept up on us at PC Pro towers: Windows 7 has overtaken Windows XP as the operating system most used by visitors to our website (click graph to enlarge).

The graph above runs from January 2008 until the end of last month – Windows 7 actually surpassed XP for the first time in December, we just hadn’t noticed it before (we’ve been busy, OK?).

The growth of Windows 7 has been quite extraordinary. In a little over 18 months, it’s gone from nowhere to the most used operating system. Compare that to Windows Vista, which didn’t even come close to toppling Windows XP, never getting any higher than 27% of the PC Pro audience.

It’s also worth noting the gradual incline of Mac OS X, which was used by 4.8% of our visitors at the beginning of 2008, and has since more than doubled that to 12.3% last month.

And what of Linux OSes? Our stats software only allows us to plot four trend lines at a time, hence the omission of Linux from the graph. Yet, it’s surpassed our Apple-flavoured friend in terms of growth, accounting for a mere 2.4% of visitors in January 2008, and 6.7% in February 2011.

That’s nigh on a fifth of the PC Pro readership using a non-Windows OS. Times really are changing.

Update at 5pm:

A couple of the commenters below asked for the figures on iOS and Android. It appears our regular stats software doesn’t discriminate between Mac OS X on the desktop and iPhone/iPad/iPods. Likewise, the Linux figure was indeed bolstered by Android users.

Google analytics provides a much more detailed breakdown of operating systems, although there’s a slight variation in the figures because of differences in the way the two analytics packages count users.

Here’s the top ten for visitors to PC Pro for February 2011, as provided by Google Analytics:

1. Windows 83.08%

2. Macintosh 7.31%

3. Linux 3.09%

4. iPhone 2.96%

5. Android 1.68%

6. iPad 0.91%

7. Unrecorded 0.51%

8. iPod 0.22%

9. BlackBerry 0.09%

10. Symbian 0.04%

It wasn’t mentioned on the 10 o’clock news. It barely got a mention in the newspapers. Many non-Apple interest web sites didn’t mention it. When I went to the flagship Apple Store in Regents Street on Friday lunch time, there weren’t queues round the block (though there were a few inside). It seems that Apple have managed to launch a new product without all the usual fuss.

However, I am sure that everyone who reads this article will know that Snow Leopard is the update to Mac OS X that was released last week. Obviously as a keen Mac user, I did go and buy it on the day it launched and I did install it on my MacBook over the weekend but was it worth the £25 I paid for it?

Before answering that question, what did I get for my £25? Apart from a DVD in a box not much to mention. Having spent an hour watching it installing I did notice a number of differences. Firstly, the upgrade liberated 9GB of space on my hard drive. In these days of terabyte hard drives that is not much – but to me with a MacBook Air with an 80GB hard drive that doubled my free space. Secondly, it does do various things more quickly. I did not use a stopwatch to do ‘before’ and ‘after’ timings but I have noticed that many of the standard applications are more responsive and the machine is quicker to wake from sleep. The Time Machine backup system does seem to be a lot faster. Thirdly there are a number of places where the interface has been tidied up. A few of the displays are neater and present information in a better way.

Some fuss has been made of changes ‘under the bonnet’. The main change that will get people chattering is that Snow Leopard is a 64-bit operating system – kind of. On every Mac (except for an Xserve), Snow Leopard boots a 32-bit kernel which can run 32 and 64-bit applications. If you want to boot your Mac into 64-bit mode then you can hold down the 6 and 4 keys at boot time to see what happens. If you have any third party drivers that are not 64-bit compatible then you may have some problems. Apple have shipped all but three of the standard applications as 64-bit versions but you will have to wait for other vendors to catch up. There does seem to be some speed advantages in running 64-bit applications – it is claimed that Safari is twice as fast in one benchmark – so may be some of the speed differences I have seen have come from 64-bit applications.

In terms of compatibility problems, I had one problem which was with the software for my Vodafone 3G dongle. Bizarrely I found the most recent software from Vodafone UK did not work but a slightly older version which was mentioned here did work. One other application (Chicken of the VNC) seems slightly more fragile than usual but everything else is fine.

Other changes such as Exchange support and improved QuickTime have not affected me as I don’t use Exchange at work (we use Google Apps) and the only time I use the QuickTime application is when someone says it has changed and I have a look at it. As such, I had a look at it this time and it has changed.

Snow Leopard really is a stepping stone from Mac OS X 10.5 to 10.7. All the internal changes for a 64-bit system are to tell everyone that the next version is going to be 64-bit only. Certain new APIs are only available to 64-bit applications and Apple has said strongly to developers with this version that ‘we have done it and therefore you should’.

So was it worth £25? Yes – for me the speed improvements and the freeing up of disk space. In Windows terminology it is more than a Service Pack (which are free upgrades) and more like an ‘R2′ release (like Windows Server 2003 R2) which are not free. For PC users, it is a bit of side show before the main event.

Update: 4th September 2009

I just thought I would add a quick update to this post. Firstly, I have had no problems with the upgrade over the last four days. There was other thing that did not work (the GPGMail plugin and the author has said he can’t fix it which is a shame).

Secondly, thanks for the comments. I do agree with most of them as they agree with me! On disk space, it turns out that some disk space was reclaimed by leaving out old PowerPC code — Snow Leopard is Intel only. As for the printer drivers, it has not affected me and I don’t understand the policy of the printer manufacturers. A very old LaserJet 5 in my office is supported and by the sound of it, a relatively new Deskjet is not — though it might be with drivers from 10.5. On the other hand, it seems it can be cheaper to buy a new ink jet printer than cartridges for an old one!

Thirdly there was a lot of tweaks I did not mention and some of them do grow on you. It is also worthy of note that apart from the Microsoft Exchange improvements there are better links to Google Apps for Address Book and Calendars.