Apple’s MacOS X 10.5 “Leopard” has been out a while now, and I hear about more and more people hitting an installation snag that causes them a lot of grief.

You boot up the Leopard DVD-ROM, start walking through the install process and when it gets to the dialog asking where to install it, there’s nothing. No disk partitions show up at all.

I’ve encountered this on several computers so far. I can’t tell you exactly what causes it. I’ve seen it on both Intel and PowerPC machines.

We tried all the obvious things: reset the PRAM, repair the target disk, repair permissions on the target disk… no luck.

The solution is simple:
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Iain M. Banks has a new Culture novel coming out in February: “Matter”.

I couldn’t tell you today when I first heard of Iain M. Banks (the “M.” is for science fiction; he writes non-science-fiction without the “M.”) or first read one of his books, but I remember clearly that it was “Player of Games” and that I was immediately hooked.

Banks’ Culture resembled the US as I most often thought of it in the 90’s: large, powerful, its tail sometimes unaware of what its head was doing, able to do great damage simply by shrugging, sufficiently aware of itself to have a sense of guilt.

The Culture is almost an anti-Federation: no laws, machine Minds, hedonistic, guilt-ridden. Very gray.

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Macworld is coming up in a couple of days, and although I will be on a plane during the breathlessly awaited keynote, I still have some thoughts on what may be coming up… about 95% of people writing online have thoughts on it, too.

After last year’s fantasy-fulfilling iPhone announcement, expectations are high for this Macworld. It seems very unlikely that Apple will top that, but here’s what I think you may see.

We’ll see hardware refreshes. Now that Apple is using Intel chips, we know a lot more about the release schedule of the processors they’re using, since Intel publishes a processor roadmap and is very vocal about new chips. Intel is in the process of pushing out new CPUs, the “Penryn” line, mobile, desktop and server, and I think we’ll see some new Apple machines using them - specifically new MacBook Pros and likely MacBooks as well, and an iMac speed bump.

The iMacs just had a significant refresh last summer and I can’t see Apple doing any major changes to them beyond giving them new CPUs. The MacBook and MacBook Pro lines, however, haven’t had any significant changes in a while. In fact, Apple followed a very clever strategy when they switched to Intel chips - they didn’t make major changes to the appearance of the machines. An end-generation PowerPC iMac or PowerBook doesn’t look much different from a first generation Intel iMac or MacBook Pro. This was a great way to subtly tell people that they were still the same machines.

The MacBook Pro/Power Book has looked the same for a long time now, and while it’s still a great looking machine, I expect that Apple will update it to bring it more in line with the appearance of the new iMac.

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