Apple's secrecy has encouraged much speculation about the company's plans.
What does the year hold for computer operating systems - Windows, Mac OS and Linux? In the Windows world, not much - the next release, Windows 8, probably won't surface before 2012.
It's never too soon to start marketing, however. Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas a month ago that the next Windows release would run on system-on-a-chip processors such as the one that powers Apple's iPad.
That will be important, no doubt, as Microsoft works out how to get a slice of the tablet action dominated by Apple and, to a lesser extent, devices based on Google's Android operating system. But it doesn't shed any light on the future of the world's dominant PC operating system.
For the growing population of Apple Mac users, a Mac OS X upgrade is promised in the US summer. The present version is called Snow Leopard and, continuing the big-cat theme, Mac OS X Lion will be released in the wild with a range of features borrowed from iOS, the operating system used by Apple's iPhone and iPad.
One of those features, the Mac App Store, is available as an interim Snow Leopard upgrade. After the success of the iTunes App Store, which was first used with the iPhone and has supplied 10 billion downloads, the Mac App Store makes programs for Apple's notebook and desktop computers available by the same means.
Mac Store Opening day on January 7 saw about a million downloads, according to Apple boss Steve Jobs, one of the most popular being the Chopper 2 game, from Wellington developer David Frampton. The Mac Rumors website reports 30,000 copies of Chopper 2 were sold at US99c a pop, 70 per cent of which the developer pockets.
Lion will also get Launchpad, an iPad-like one-click way of displaying all of a Mac's applications; also like the iPad, applications will be displayed full-screen, with switching from one to another done by a swipe of a trackpad; and with another swipe, Mission Control will provide a new way of seeing everything that is running on the Mac.
If Microsoft is prone to leaks about forthcoming products - unofficial word of Windows 8 began trickling out in the middle of last year - Apple is secretive in the extreme. Filling the information void are a variety of websites willing to speculate on the tiniest clue about Apple's plans.
In that vein, one site asks whether Lion will be the end of the line for Mac OS X - what cat, after all, can trump the king of the jungle?
Google tries to set itself apart from both Microsoft's saturation marketing and Apple's obsessive market control by being the fresh, open face of the technology industry. Tries is the operative word: Google's "Don't be evil" motto has lost credibility since the company quietly harvested Wi-Fi data from users around the world, and after boss Eric Schmidt, who resigns in April, suggested teens who'd revealed too much about themselves on social networking sites need merely change their names.
And when it wants to, it can clam up. In the middle of 2009 it revealed plans for a Linux-based operating system, Chrome OS, to be available by the end of last year.
Chrome OS would be "built and optimised for the web", Google said, appealing to the many users who spend all their computing time in a web browser. Chrome OS would "make computers faster, much simpler and fundamentally more secure", and would run on iPad-like chips.
Sounds good. But where is it? After failing to appear before the end of the year, speculation turned to an early-2011 release.
Google is being vague about when it will materialise, saying Chrome notebooks from Acer and Samsung will be for sale in the first half of the year. A spokesperson said last month "we're not holding interviews with anyone about Chrome OS right now".
A Google blog entry in December said development was at a stage where user feedback would be sought through a pilot programme in the US that would be extended to other countries "once we get the necessary certifications".
"The data from our test pilots is key to building something wonderful. We look forward to working together to make computers better," said the blog posting, attributed to engineering and product management bosses Linus Upson and Sundar Pichai.
In a year that offers little other operating system excitement, that's something to look forward to. Not that it hasn't been promised before.
Anthony Doesburg is an Auckland technology journalist
