In recent years, Apple has made great strides gaining market share, especially at college campuses. Among them, Harvard has reported that the purchase of Mac laptops and desktops have increased 30 percent from the last year alone. Many analysts attribute this increase to the “halo effect” in which students and other consumers purchase more Apple products because of their experience with smaller Apple gadgets such as the iPod and iPhone. In addition, media frenzy has kept Apple’s every move in the eyes of the consumer.

This Friday, Apple with release a new version of their OS X operating system, Leopard. While the new addition does tout some gimmicky features such as iChat video backdrops, it still manages to figure in some more interesting features such as Time Machine and the long awaited finalized version of Boot Camp that allows Macs to run Windows XP and Vista.

As with the release of Apple’s previous OS, Tiger, Apple Stores nationwide are expecting long lines for the second time this year. MacRumors.com is reporting that free t-shirts will be given to the first few customers on October 26th at 6 P.M. when the software goes on sale.

Recently, I’ve fielded a lot of questions of on whether or not students should upgrade to Leopard. As with Windows Vista, I don’t think neither Apple nor developers will drop support of Tiger (the current OS) anytime soon. While the new OS does provide new features and compatibility, if you’re happy with Tiger, stick with it. For Mac users, there will be a time to upgrade, but that time is not necessarily now.

Tech Express will provide a Leopard review after the release.

Apple’s OS X Leopard: $129 Retail, $116 Students.