After Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard, is Apple on the verge of running out of cat names for OS X releases? There are only a few big cats left — Clouded Leopard, Cougar, and Lion — so before too long they’ll have to draw from the lesser cats: Bobcat, Caracal, Colocolo, Jaguarundi, Kodkod, Lynx, Margay, Ocelot, Oncilla, Serval, and a bunch of species named some variant of “cat” (e.g., Jungle Cat, Leopard Cat, Fishing Cat).

One imagines they’ll adopt a new naming convention before they have to resort to OS X 10.19 Rusty-spotted Cat.

Speaking of naming conventions, I’ve adopted one for my own Macs. (I had to call them something for networking purposes.) Big surprise: each of them has been named after a genus of snakes. I started with harmless snakes in the PowerPC era, and went to venomous species for the Intel changeover; I named laptops after smaller snakes:

• iBook G3, 2001: Clonophis (a small North American snake)
• iMac G4, 2003: Elaphe (rat snakes)
• iMac Core Duo, 2006: Crotalus (rattlesnakes)
• iMac Core 2 Duo, 2009: Lachesis (bushmasters)
• MacBook Pro, 13-inch, 2009: Atropoides (jumping pit vipers)

(Now you know which computers to target when you hack into my network.)