Apple has a thing for relatively small, sexy form factors with complicated internal designs. Sometimes they are difficult to assemble, and sometimes the promise of elegance isn’t fulfilled. Perhaps the Power Mac G4 Cube was a prime example of the obsessive focus on a cool design to the exclusion of practicality. It was also overpriced and failed to fill any significant gaps in the Mac lineup. It was mostly about form above function.

At the time of its release, I wrote of it as a potential museum piece, and it was discontinued after a big price cut failed to move product. So you’d think that Apple learned a hard lesson, and maybe they have, but there are concerns about a certain forthcoming product.

Coming some time later this year is a totally redesigned Mac Pro. Apple certainly promised big things with their professional Mac workstation, and all sorts of speculation arose as to what they’d do. The end result essentially confirms some early speculation, while setting a new standard for how a personal computer should look. Apple has not lost the penchant to surprise and sometimes amaze and even anger people.

So to Apple, the tower design, dating back to the earliest days of the PC era, is history. Tubes are in, well at least that’s how Apple has approached the Mac Pro, which seems designed to occupy as little space as possible, yet retain and improve on the performance of its predecessor.

But the early chatter of the forthcoming product is mixed. Predictably, some adore the smaller form factor, which occupies one-eighth the volume of the original, which was a pain to transport from place to place. Certainly Apple made smart choices in picking state-of-the-art graphic chips, and high performance busses all around. Having six Thunderbolt 2 ports will certainly make it relatively easy to add stuff. As a new update to the standard, however, don’t expect much in the way of peripherals for now. It’s hard enough to find stuff that supports the original version of Thunderbolt.

However, the other shoe drops with the curious decision to eliminate most of the expandability capabilities of the Mac Pro. Some content creators are already howling about the changes. What about their collections of peripheral cards and storage devices? What about the lack of an internal optical drive? What do to?

Apple’s response would be to buy an expansion chassis, and use them as before. With Thunderbolt, all of these peripherals can work on any reasonably current Mac, although the Mac Pro let’s everything run to its maximum potential speed.

But it’s also true that many existing Mac Pro users never upgrade anything beyond RAM and perhaps the hard drives. But since the latter can be outfitted externally, maybe it’s not such a huge loss. The larger concern is the graphics. Sure, Apple is getting state of the art FirePro chips from AMD, but some would prefer NVIDIA’s CUDA parallel processing architecture, which promises better rendering performance with apps that support the technology. So will Apple offer NVIDIA graphics for those who need them, or make it possible to replace the onboard chips with such alternatives?

That the Mac Pro may still be weeks or months from release also means that Apple still has the time to make some changes, although one doesn’t expect them to be substantial. The prototypes were shown to developers to, Apple hopes, reassure them that Apple takes professional content creators seriously and will deliver a product that will, in the end, be enthusiastically embraced by them.

But Apple isn’t afraid to upset the cart from time to time, sometimes in a very inconvenient way. Clearly the company is stung by claims that the passing of Steve Jobs destroyed their creative center. Marketing VP Phil Schiller presumably felt that as an affront, so in response to the audience’s loud applause upon the introduction of the new Mac Pro form factor, he quietly dropped the phrase, “can’t innovate anymore my ass!”

It sounded spontaneous, but Apple is never spontaneous. The phrase was no doubt carefully rehearsed, and meant to be uttered at that very moment. Indeed, just about every second of the WWDC keynote was carefully rehearsed in the fashion of a play. Each member of the executive team knew their parts, and there was nary a stumble, except for one game developer, Anki,  who had a bit of trouble getting their toy cars running in proper fashion to display nifty artificial intelligence capabilities. That’s what happens with prelease products, and once things got going, the audience was suitably impressed.

At the end of the day, Apple is taking a calculated risk with the Mac Pro. Content creators who felt betrayed with the huge changes wrought in Final Cut Pro X are being asked yet again to trust Apple to deliver the computing solution they need to get their work done. The key to the Mac Pro’s success is a rich selection of Thunderbolt peripherals to replace the internal expansion choices. Apple clearly doesn’t want the Mac Pro to become the next Cube.

Ahead of the WWDC, I had the feeling some members of the media were treating it as a sporting event. Will Apple win the public mindset, lose, or, as many expected, end up in a draw? After Apple’s stock has taken a huge dive — and that happens every few years — is Apple finally able to prove to skeptical media and tech pundits that they still have something left to deliver?

Ahead of the WWDC, Apple CEO Tim Cook dropped some vague hints about the company’s “grand vision” for your living room, and the refusal to dismiss the possibilities of cheaper iPhones, or larger iPhone screens some day. Apple took the intense interest in the keynote to heart and opted to stream the event live on the company’s Web site and through a special Apple Events channel on an Apple TV; the latter just happened to show up today without need of a special update. Curious how things work with you’ve got an always-on connection.

I didn’t look to see if there was a backdoor feed to the NSA.

As usual, Wall Street had a mixed reaction. Apple’s stock price had declined at the end of the roughly two-hour event. And I have to tell you that I was only surprised once, when it was announced that the next OS X would no longer be named after cats, but after a place names in California. Coming this fall will be OS X Mavericks, also known as OS 10.9, which contains a several features already hinted at by the rumor sites.

Key among the new features are the tabbed Finder, tagging, and improved full-screen support on multiple displays. There are also a number of fancy new technologies designed to boost performance, and make more efficient use of processors and RAM, not to mention battery life on Mac note-books. Predictably, real-life effects in such apps as Calendar, Contacts and Game Center are gone and not forgotten. Apple made light of how they made the OS more environmentally friendly by banishing skeuomorphisms. Safari also receives a major performance and usability upgrade.

However, aside from a new desktop background that fits the Mavericks concept, Apple doesn’t seem to have made huge changes in the OS X theme, at least compared to OS 10.8 Mountain Lion. This relatively conservative approach may, in part, stem from the desire to retain the traditional Mac look and feel. Or maybe Jonathan Ive and crew didn’t have enough time to fabricate a new look and feel for this release. There were published reports that Apple moved some OS engineers off Mavericks to complete the iOS 7 makeover.

OS X Mavericks will appear some time this fall, and no pricing was announced. So once again, I’m going to suggest that Apple should make the next version of OS X free of charge. Can they? Time will tell.

When it comes to the Mac Pro, I didn’t see any photos of leaked prototypes that managed to capture the new, cylindrical design. While some might gripe that all expansion, other than RAM, will be external, and there will be no internal optical drive, a half dozen Thunderbolt 2 ports means that there will be no performance questions about needing a separate expansion chassis for peripheral cards and extra drives. You can bet the PCI Express-based Flash storage will be far more expensive than regular Flash media. Apple was also smart to add a pair of top-of-the-line AMD graphics processors as standard equipment, thereby eliminating one potential option to customize. They claim support for up to three 4K video images. Shipping is promised for later this year and, yes, the Mac Pro will be “assembled” in the USA.

Although some looked to Windows Phone as a harbinger of what Apple might do with iOS 7, the end result is decidedly different. Yes, the icons are flatter, the text, employing Helvetica Neue Ultra Light, crisper, easier to read. But the graphics tricks are imposing. By using layers and translucency, Apple has given iOS 7 a decided 3D feel, as app icons float above a wallpaper backdrop. A parallax trick changes the perspective as you tilt or twist your iOS device. Nifty!

There are loads of new features demonstrated at the WWDC, with others that’ll no doubt be fleshed out over the next three months. I was particularly impressed with Control Center, a convenient scheme to make basic system changes when swiping upward, even within the lock screen. You can turn Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on or off to save battery life, adjust the brightness of the display, and make other changes in a way that can’t happen by mistake in your pocket. This is where Google’s decision to put such settings in Android’s Notification Manager fails. I’ve seen how easy it is for a wayward tap to cut me off a Wi-Fi network. And, by the way, the new version of Siri uses, in part, Microsoft’s Bing search engine to do its thing. Take that Google!

Those who complained about multitasking in the iOS will be pleased to see that all apps are now supported, but in an intelligent fashion that gives priority to the apps you use most often in order to preserve battery life. In comparison, Android is just plain brain-dead about multitasking! I still hope Apple will add multiple window capability to the iPad, but the new scheme that reveals running app preview screens when you press the Home button twice is an adequate, if not complete, alternative.

But third-party developers might be concerned about all this iOS 7 joy. Some apps, including Instagram, may be made all or completely obsolete because of the changes Apple wrought.

On the hardware front, a squared-off cylinder AirPort Extreme and Time Machine offers support for a draft version of 802.11ac Wi-Fi, promising up to three times the speed of the 802.11n standard. But you will, of course, need new computing hardware that supports this technology, such as the refreshed MacBook Air, which incorporate Intel’s Haswell chipset. While there were predictions of a new MacBook Pro with Retina display lineup\, it appears that time has not yet come. There are also reports that the iMac will get a similar refresh sometime this summer.

And yes there will be an iRadio in our future, ad driven and available via iTunes on a Mac, PC and on your iOS device. But it’ll be called iTunes Radio, maybe because of trademark considerations. Those who pay $24.99 each year for iTunes Match get an ad-free version. Contrast that to Pandora’s $36 annual price.

So much for a few highlights. Check Apple’s site for all the goodies, and I’ll have much more to say in the days to come.

I don’t mind taking a minor risk from time to time. Several times a week, I post a commentary that I believe at least a few people want to read, and I’ve done so since 1999. I’ve attended a number of Apple keynotes at the WWDC, the Macworld Expo, during the years in which Apple was present, and loads of special media events.

However, that experience doesn’t necessarily qualify me to guess what Apple is going to do. I’ve observed enough surprises over the years. In saying that, though, stories about Apple sometimes leak more often than leaks about the NSA’s domestic spying activities. Some of those rumors may by made up jobs, while others might come from supply chain sources.

Yet it’s also quite possible that Apple is responsible for some of the stories about possible future products and services. An Apple executive can deliver the news on background to a mainstream news outlet, on the condition that there be no direct quotes or attribution to any person. Watch for words and phrases about “sources close to Apple” and so on and so forth for evidence of a deliberate disclosure.

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As an expectant audience of journalists, developers and fans of Apple Inc. await the announcements from the WWDC on June 10, some of the chatter revolves around new Macs. What kind of Macs? Well, with reports of diminishing stocks of the MacBook Air, that would surely a candidate. Other reports mentions a MacBook Pro with Retina display refresh, though it may be postponed for a while, and what about the aging Mac Pro, long in need of serious upgrades?

But one thing is certain about most of the expected Mac upgrades, and that is the loss of the optical drive. Yes, you can still get an optical drive on some legacy MacBook Pros, 13-inch and 15-inch, but one industry analyst suggested that they are on the way out. Indeed, Apple might not install the latest Intel Haswell chips on them, but keep them in the lineup until sales have diminished enough to drop them.

The iMac lost the optical drive last year, but the only purpose it appeared to serve was to allow Apple to make the edges very thin. Since there was no room for an optical drive, it was removed, except that the design change doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. You only notice the iMac is thinner when you stare at the edges, which is not the normal way of doing business. I haven’t looked at the edges of my 2009 iMac since I moved to a new home last year. Besides, the 2012 iMac is more difficult to service, and an easy way to upgrade RAM was dropped from the 21.5-inch version. Where’s the value in any of those decisions?

What’s more, Apple lost out on hundreds of thousands of possible Mac sales last year because the new iMac was afflicted with early production delays. Was it really worth the effort?

So now there’s the Mac Pro, with one report suggesting the next version will ship without any room for internal expansion beyond RAM, and it won’t have an optical drive. You’ll have to depend on Thunderbolt and USB 3.0. Does Apple have any customer research to indicate that users of the Mac Pro have no need for optical drives? There’s even a second bay if you want to install two on the current model. Is that destined to become history?

Of course, Apple avoided Blu-ray altogether, although you can still get one as an external drive. Steve Jobs once called the licensing “a bag of hurt,” and maybe he was right. But does that mean customers should be inconvenienced anyway?

Yes, I realize that more and more Mac users don’t need optical drives, and so perhaps the long-term trends indicate that physical media is passé. But not today. Some software is still available on physical media, and its a sure thing older versions are in a number of cases. What if you need to reinstall everything from scratch? And don’t content creators sometimes generate DVDs of their files?

Apple’s argument is that, if you still need an optical drive, buy an external SuperDrive. It’s $79, and appears to be identical to the ones that used to be installed on a Mac note-book or iMac. So, other than the extra expenditure, the inconvenience may be minor, though it forces you to carry an extra appendage in your carrying bag if you have a MacBook Air or MacBook Pro with Retina Display — or a Mac mini for that matter.

I suppose it can also be argued that, for the majority who don’t need an optical drive, the money you spend on a new Mac gets you more value in other ways, such as better performance, slimmer designs, and all that sort of thing. Why pay for something you probably don’t need?

In the scheme of things, Apple is just thinking ahead. They decreed that you didn’t need a floppy drive in 1998 when the original iMac appeared. However, the early iMacs didn’t even include a CD burner, so the lack of a floppy didn’t make a whole lot of sense — at least not then. It took a few years before the external floppy drives that many purchased sat unused.

So will that happen in the next two or three years with optical drives? What about just using the drive so you can watch a rented movie on your Mac? Oh, that’s right, there’s no Blu-ray drive either. Just stick with iTunes, Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Instant Video. All right, maybe you have to pay extra for a beefier data plan when you’re on the road, but you won’t have to fret with all those discs. Not near an Internet connection? That’s just too bad.

Now my son’s very troubled 2008 black MacBook is on its last legs. He has loads of CDs and DVDs, and wouldn’t want to lose the internal optical drive. There’s still an entry-level 13-inch MacBook that would fill his requirements should he decide to buy one. Perhaps he should hurry. That model may be on the endangered note-books list.