I’m in the fortunate position of owning two Apple laptops.

One was an upgrade decision, and replaced my previous G4 PowerBook as my main working machine. The other is the result of an unfortunate incident involving water and the PowerBook. In the latter case, the house insurance provided us with a new MacBook Pro, which Best Beloved uses for his hobbies and stuff. I also regard it as my backup machine should the worst happen to the main box.

As things turn out, the main machine has had all the love and attention, and is currently running the latest variant of Mac OS X 10.5.8. It’s a prime candidate for the move to 10.6, now the wrinkles have been ironed out with that release. It’s a bit of a no-brainer, as the “upgrade” cost for Snow Leopard is £25.

I’d quite like to bring both machines up to the same level. I spent a fair bit of time today updating the second-line machine’s OS, and it’s reminded me how old OS X 10.4 Tiger looks. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be possible to simply upgrade Tiger to Snow Leopard. It would have to be a “wipe and install”, which isn’t something I’d be happy to do for a second-line machine.

Now, Apple’s answer to this is to offer what they call the Family Pack. This comprises Snow Leopard, all the iLife apps, and all the iWork apps, licensed to be installed on up to five machines. I would actually quite like to upgrade all the iApps that came installed on the laptops, so this – at least on the surface – seems like a good plan.

Then you spot the price. The Family Pack is a not unreasonable £183. That is, however, quite a big jump from the £25 I had mentally budgeted for. That would also eat up my Aperture 3 upgrade price into the bargain.

I do have a Leopard “upgrade” disc. This is the one that you could acquire from Apple if you bought a new machine with an old OS installed, just before they announced a new OS. I could upgrade the Tiger machine to Leopard, then get the £25 Snow Leopard disc. I wouldn’t then have the iApp goodness, but then I have to wonder whether I really need them anyway. I don’t use iMovie or iDVD much, iWeb never gets used, Garageband is fun to play with occasionally, so only iPhoto would be useful – and as I use Aperture iPhoto is not really essential anyway.

That leaves the iWork package. I’m not sure I really need Pages or Numbers, but Keynote might be useful – especially if Best Beloved gets invited to make more talks. A single user iWork box is £71.

Decisions, decisions.

I think, on balance, Best Beloved is happy to retain Tiger on his machine. At some point we could upgrade it to Leopard, then jump to Snowy. I can get Snowy and run it on my machine, save some cash to get Aperture 3, and then we can consider iWork down the line.

I had kind of convinced myself and BB that we should shell out for the Family Pack. Having now worked it through, I think the cheaper route is the better one.