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By the time you read this, if Apple is to avoid a catastrophe of Vista proportions, we should be only days away from the release of Mac OS X Leopard.

Days away, in fact, from perhaps the most important operating system update in Apple's history. Forget System 7 and Mac OS X, Leopard could make or break the fortunes of the Mac and those of us who rely on it to make our living.

There are numerous reasons why the release of Leopard is so important for the Mac platform. Firstly, more people are using Macs than at any point in the past 12 years. In the first months of 2007, Apple sold a third more computers than it had in the same quarter the previous year, compared to growth of about 3% in the market as whole. In June, Gartner reported that Apple's share of the computer market was 5%, double that of only a few years ago, and last month, according to NetApplications, 6.7% of all computers connected to the Internet were Macs, double the figure for 2006.

With all those extra users, many of whom that will have switched from Windows, more people are watching and waiting for the latest update than any previous OS X refresh. Many more will have delayed buying a new system until Leopard is released to avoid paying for an upgrade. Add that to the fact that many more people are being exposed to Mac OS X through the iPhone and the iPod touch, and the potential market for Leopard is greater than any previous Mac OS update.

Apple is also a much higher-profile company than it has ever been before in its history. The continuing success of the iPod and the

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launch of the iPhone into the telcom sector have seen to that. With a higher profile comes more coverage; in the press, on TV, and on the internet. And, in Apple's case particularly, many of those commentators are desperate for any excuse to swim against the tide and criticise the company. If Leopard turns out to be a significant disappointment, the snipers will be taking aim before you can say 'headshot'.

For the company, whose fortunes are now far more reliant on the iPod and the iPhone than the Mac, that would be an irritation. But if it slows the rate of Mac sales growth and sends switchers back to Windows, it will be far more serious for we users. The amount of time and money spent on developing new applications and improving existing ones is directly related to the number of potential users, and if that number falls on the Mac, many developers will re-assess their upgrade schedules.

Leopard is also the first release of Mac OS X since Apple made the transition to Intel processors, and so is the first version of Mac OS X that has been specifically designed to take full advantage of Intel Core Duo and Core 2 Duo processors. Now that Mac OS X is running in essentially the same hardware as Vista, it's a great opportunity for Apple to show that it is possible to build a great-looking, powerful, feature-filled operating system without sacrificing speed and useability in the way that Microsoft has done with its Vista operating system.

Leopard will also represent the biggest time gap between versions of Mac OS X, and has already been delayed twice so far this year. To justify that gap, and the delays, Leopard will have to be ready for primetime use from the day it ships. That's more than can be said for many of Apple's recent software releases, which seem to have been updated on an almost daily basis. That won't do for Leopard. It's Apple's flagship Mac software for the next two years and needs to be free from serious bugs from the very first time that it's started up. No-one wants to shell out £89, and more importantly trust their data and future earnings to an operating system that needs daily updates to keep it on the tracks.