If you can believe all those published reports in recent weeks, the keynote address Steve Jobs will deliver next month in San Francisco will be anticlimactic. Nothing he plans to say will come as much of a surprise. The rumors and speculation talks of a brand new iBook and Mac mini, and perhaps version 2.0 of Front Row, which will let you record TV on your Mac. Or at least the Macs that will be shipping with remote controls.

Looking further at these claims, we’ve heard suggestions that the iPod shuffle will be reinvigorated with a new form factor, and some cite the fact that the 1GB model won’t be available until mid-January as evidence of an impending update. Perhaps there will be an iLife ‘06, iWork ‘06, and a few digital lifestyle surprises. Now how can there be a surprise if all the news that fits has appeared already?

Oh well, maybe I should cancel that plane trip to San Francisco and, of course, the hotel reservation. After all the trip is expensive, and I could use that extra money perhaps to buy one of the new computers.

No, wait a minute. It can’t be as simple as that. There are always rumors about the developments at a Macworld Expo in the weeks before the event. Some of those rumors are right on the money, and some aren’t. In addition, Steve Jobs is known to pull a few surprises out of his hat or at least one of his jeans pockets. So even if there is an Intel-based iBook, just what form will it take? Will it resemble the existing model, or become slimmer, slicker? Will it be priced the same, or will it fall into the $799 or $899 range that some expect?

As to the Mac mini, it probably can’t get much smaller, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a few surprises. Will it finally acquire some media center features, as some suggest? Can you be certain whether or not there will be Front Row and that tiny, uncomplicated remote control? These are the questions that none of those commentators can truly answer with any degree of certainty, unless they are getting an advance look direct from Apple.

Then there’s the PowerBook. That’s a huge question mark, because an iBook with the expected dual-core Intel processor would smoke the more expensive model in performance and power efficiency. So can Apple sustain PowerBook sales if it doesn’t deliver a processor and perhaps a design change there too? Will Apple just cut prices to keep the products moving until the new version is available, or take the more practical approach that a sale is a sale and it doesn’t matter if customers pick iBooks instead?

At the same time, there’s no saying that the iMac will not be updated. You might suggest that it’s too soon, that it has already received a very respectable revision that has earned rave reviews, so why would Apple make more changes so soon? Yet the internal workings have already been extensively redesigned, and it wasn’t just to make it a bit thinner and to play musical chairs with parts. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was done to prepare for the eventual switchover to a newly designed logic board with an Intel processor, if not a complete Intel chipset. Such a development would really catch the tech pundits and rumor sites off guard.

The Power Mac? No, I have little doubt Apple is truly going to wait for a while before doing another update. When it comes, there may be a major interior redesign and perhaps a smaller form factor. Clearly the Intel processor Apple selects will run a lot cooler, so you won’t need a bunch of fans, liquid cooling and other complicated air circulation schemes. There may even be room for additional internal drives. Being able to add just one is hardly sufficient for high-end content creators. Besides, Apple will want to boast a huge performance boost, which is not expected in an Intel chip until much later in 2006 or even 2007.

In the iPod world, some suggest a lower priced iPod nano, with 1GB of memory, and perhaps cheaper, cuter versions of the iPod shuffle. I wonder how many would sell for a starting price of $79? I also wouldn’t be surprised to see a more expensive iPod with larger screen for watching videos, and perhaps a line of digital hardware to expand your music and video enjoyment possibilities.

On the software side, having a new version of iLife and iWork would be nice, but they might seem afterthoughts in light of what may happen with Apple’s hardware. At the same time, iWork ‘05 wasn’t quite the AppleWorks replacement that some expected. Maybe the addition of a spreadsheet module, and perhaps some big time feature enhancements and reasonable marketing efforts will change that.

So you see there are certainly enough unanswered questions to keep the excitement in the Steve Jobs keynote. Let the rumors and speculation continue.

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A lot of fuss was raised Monday about the impending end of support for Microsoft’s Mac version of Internet Explorer. However, the application really died a couple of years ago, and I suppose it’s taken a little extra time for some to notice.

Now it wasn’t too many years ago that Microsoft owned the Mac browser market in the same fashion as it continues to dominate the office suite market. Netscape was fat and buggy, and Internet Explorer was relatively lean and slick. When the original Public Beta of Mac OS X appeared in September of 2000, believe it or not, Microsoft was there with a native version. It’s not that Internet Explorer 5 for Mac OS X was terribly different from the similarly numbered version for the Classic Mac OS, except for the support for Aqua interface elements. The core browsing engine was essentially the same, with the possible exception of whatever rendering and security enhancements Microsoft’s Mac programmers managed to roll in.

Of course, this should come as no surprise, since the Windows version, until recently, also remained stagnant. Many feel that the arrival of Mozilla’s Firefox, and its unexpected success, lit a fire in Redmond and encouraged Microsoft to start developing Internet Explorer again ahead of the arrival of its long-delayed operating system, Vista.

To think I once thought the Mac version of this browser was good. At the same time, I had to confront the clear evidence that the Windows version did things a lot faster, even on hardware that was supposedly similar in performance to the Mac I was using at the time. No doubt the folks at Apple also realized that the Mac browsing experience was second rate, and Safari debuted as a public preview on January, 2003.

In introducing Safari, Steve Jobs boasted of its speed, touting comparisons with the other browsers available on the platform. Nearly three years later, Apple is still making the same claim for the version of Safari that ships with Tiger, although its comparison is with the first version of Firefox. Of course that’s debatable, unless you limit the test to application launch speed, where it is clearly superior to most of its significant rivals. As far as page rendering, Java performance and the rest, it depends on what you test.

In any case, Microsoft took the hint and decided to stop developing the Mac version of Internet Explorer five months after Safari’s introduction. One month after support officially ends, the software will no longer be available for download from Microsoft’s Web site. But will anyone care? Unless you have an older Mac, I’m sure most of you haven’t used it in years. In retrospect, it’s not a terribly good browser. Page rendering, compared to the rest of the competition, is perfectly awful, and performance is nothing to write home about.

Believe it or not, Microsoft’s Mac developers actually did release a newer version, as part of the aborted attempt to bring its MSN online service to the Mac. Yes, despite its quirks, MSN contained an updated browser based on Internet Explorer, only Microsoft opted not to release it as a standalone application. But take it from me, you aren’t missing anything.

With the official departure of Internet Explorer from the list of available Mac browsers, you have a wealth of choices. For the most part, however, I have opted to stick with two, and that’s Firefox 1.5 and Safari, although I occasionally launch Opera when I need a change of pace.

I realize many of you have embraced Firefox, and it is a good choice, particularly if you also work under Windows and/or Linux and want a similar online experience. For me, I still return to Safari at the end of the day. I, for one, am not convinced that Firefox is really faster. It’s major new feature, the ability to display cached pages more rapidly when clicking the Back and Forward buttons, is already present in Safari.

Now this doesn’t mean Apple’s browser is perfect. It is still notorious for runaway memory expansion. For example, I have had it open for about a day, and it is now using more than 200MB of RAM, which is, frankly, an absurdly high number. Firefox’s demands on the system seldom swell to more than half that number. Now one of my colleagues has suggested Safari is leaking memory when displaying pages with animated content, and maybe that’s true.

As far as Internet Explorer is concerned, it’s memory footprint is closer to 24MB on similar content, although I haven’t run it through its paces very much lately. Frankly, I’m not inclined to toss it away, and besides I never contacted Microsoft for help in using the application during all the years it was available. I might still launch it on occasion, because there are a handful of sites that don’t display very well in other applications. On the other hand, Microsoft’s own MSN doesn’t render correctly in the Mac version of Internet Explorer, so they were tossing us a hint long before that official announcement of its discontinuance that’s gotten so much attention.

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Years ago, while at the office, I installed a copy of ClickChange, an early Mac OS interface changer. But it didn’t just fiddle with scroll bars and window designs. It would add sounds to specific functions. Of course, it wasn’t the most stable beast in the jungle, and I had more crashes that first day than in the previous month. The following morning, I got rid of it, but felt a slight regret over the fact that I couldn’t tailor my Mac’s look and feel to my oddball tastes.

But the Mac OS itself was supposed to be consistent, enforced, at least by suggestion or admonition, by a document called the Human Interface Guidelines. However, Mac OS X has complicated matters considerably. Now you have three general look and feel motifs, from the standard platinum that most applications adopt, the brushed metal look of the Finder and Safari and now the strangely shaded toolbar icons in the Tiger version of Mail.

All of these window variants function in a similar fashion, except that putting brushed metal at the bottom allows you to drag the object from that location too, in addition to the title bar. So, regardless of the look Apple’s designers have inflicted on you, there’s little you have to discover in the form of new skills.

So why the apparent chaotic approach? Surely Apple knows better than to break its own rules and regulations, right? Well, one commentator, Tera Patricks, writing at mac360.com, suggests that it’s deliberate, that Steve Jobs is the “sly fox” who is waiting for Microsoft to crib some elements of the Mac user interface for Windows Vista. Then, with the release of Mac OS 10.5 Leopard, we’ll see a brand new, unified interface and Microsoft will simply fall on its face.

I suppose as theories go, they’re a dime a dozen, but I don’t really think this one earns that much. The real answer, however, comes in a single sentence, where Ms. Patricks clearly got a handle on the problem, although she doesn’t realize it: “To be fair, the average Mac user probably doesn’t care.”

Aha! Now you’re talking my language. Where is it written that every single component of a graphical user interface must meet a single design standard? Why can’t Apple give each application, or category of applications, its own unique color scheme, so long as it operates in essentially the same fashion as other applications? Of course, with that exception for the brushed metal bars at the bottom of a window. Tell me: Do all the rooms in your home have the same color furniture, walls, carpets, appliances? Are there no differences anywhere?

Well, I’m not about to criticize anyone’s personal approach to interior decorating. The point is that if regular folks don’t complain because Apple has opted to deviate from its interface standards here and there, why should it matter? It’s not as if the operating system developers at Apple don’t know what they’re doing, or that Steve Jobs is somehow oblivious to the differences.

You might wish that Apple will discover the “error” of its ways in time for Leopard. But I doubt that it’s going to suddenly reverse direction without any compelling reason to do so. Yes, there are things I’d like to see changed, and the ability to drag any window from all boundaries, regardless of the stylistic liberties, is way at the top of the list. A Finder window is the best example of an object that offers this sort of behavior.

If anything, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple providing even additional interface designs to offer you a little variety. I realize some of you have longed for a built-in theme changer, in the fashion of some of those shareware utilities, such as ShapeShifter. The closest you get is a Graphite option in the Appearance preference panel, which tames some of Mac OS X’s excesses, but, in my view, goes a little too far.

Of course, now that I’ve expressed my support for variety, I’m sure some of you will insist I haven’t a clue. All I can say is that you check the shareware offerings and you’ll find stuff that’ll revert the brushed metal look on some applications to platinum. But like any system add-on, approach such things with extreme caution, and don’t pile one atop another. You may get the look you prefer, at the expense of system stability. Or just sit back and stop worrying about it. It’s really not that important in the scheme of things.

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