[About half of the questions](https://superuser.com/questions/tagged/mac+osx) of the [tag:mac] can be supposed to be about [tag:osx] (and then I didn't include tags like [tag:osx-lion]), whereas the tag is meant to be about hardware, this evidences that the [tag:mac] tag is *deadly ambiguous*.

When a tag is ambigious the approach is often to get rid of it. So let's suppose that we get rid of [tag:mac] and see how we approach it then. When doing this it would leave quite some questions with tags that don't make clear that we are talking about Macintosh.

This approach does however conform to the fact that we don't have a [tag:pc] tag either. But it will require us to first make sure that any of the [tag:mac] questions that are not about [tag:osx] get a more specific tag like [tag:mac-pro], [tag:mac-mini], [tag:imac]. This however requires the same amount of effort as Oliver's answer...

It looks though that we can automate a part of it, which are those questions tagged [tag:osx] and variants. If we make sure that these simply can get their [tag:mac] tag removed then it's just a matter of asking the developers to do something like `selectQuestionsThatAreTagged('osx').removeTag('mac')` which will cut down the questions we have to go through over time in half.

Renaming the tag from [tag:mac] to [tag:mac-hardware] while we are in the process of giving them more specific tags will at least make sure that no new OS questions roll into that tag.

**To summarize the whole thing, here is what I think is a good approach:**

1. Figure out whether we can remove the [tag:mac] tag from all [tag:osx] questions as well as from variants like [tag:osx-lion], this requires to go through <sub>(read them, not edit them)</sub> a list of 2000+ questions to check that they are not about hardware, otherwise tag these appropriately (giving them [tag:mac-hardware] if the tag is to be kept).

2. Ask a developer to do `selectQuestionsThatAreTagged('osx').removeTag('mac')`  once we are certain that it is safe to disband both tags.

3. Ask a moderator to merge [tag:mac] into [tag:mac-hardware] such that no new non-hardware questions are added to it.

4. Over time, we retag every question from [tag:mac-hardware] in more specific tags like [tag:mac-pro], [tag:mac-mini], [tag:imac], ... to eventually get rid from the [tag:mac-hardware] tag. This makes it consistent with the fact that we don't have a [tag:pc] tag either...