If you’ve been following all the chatter about the next iPhone, the iPhone 5, the new iPhone, or whatever it’s to be called, you may wonder if Apple has any surprises left. After all, it appears that nearly every possible detail has already been disclosed, from the basic features, to the design.

Consider what we appear to “know” about the forthcoming iPhone upgrade. It will probably sport a display with a roughly four-inch diagonal measurement, with the increases being vertical rather than horizontal. Perhaps some of the “open” space above and below will be reduced, so the case won’t be as tall as it might otherwise be. But since the width will apparently remain unchanged, it will still be comfortable to hold in one hand.

How do we know this? Well, look at all those published photos of alleged prototype cases, and consider the fact that, under the iOS 6 beta, it is reportedly possible to increase the screen height appropriately on the developer tools emulator, and have an additional row of icons magically appear. This would appear to indicate that iOS 6 was designed with a new iPhone form factor in mind.

Other changes, and this one appears to be a given, is the addition of support for LTE networks. Supposedly the newer chips are more power efficient, so Apple won’t be forced to supply a substantially larger battery just to accommodate LTE. One alleged prototype battery appears to present only a slight increase in power reserves, but I suppose it’s also possible for Apple to exact more power efficiencies from other components. Or maybe that battery has no connection with the real thing.

There’s a report that Apple expects to make the new iPhone thinner, in part, because they will switch to in-cell LCD technology. This will mean a display that combines the standard LCD panel with the touch screen. Putting it all in one part may also reduce power requirements, but that’s highly speculative.

The traditional dock connector may be changed with a new 9-pin design that can be connected in either direction. No scurrying for tiny icons on the connection cable in the night (it’s barely visible in the daytime) to plug it in correctly. If this happens, Apple may include an adapter plug to allow existing iPhone accessories to remain compatible, though newly designed parts will come out soon enough, I suppose. There may also be a newly designed SIM card.

What you’ve read so far, and a few other goodies, are all gleaned from loads of online reports that have only appeared with greater frequency as we approach the reported September 12 intro date for the so-called iPhone 5. They all seem credible enough, though you have to wonder how so much information has escaped Apple’s highly envied security controls. Are they deliberately allowing all of this information to leak to increase demand for the product?

When these reports appear in the mainstream press, you have to think that Apple is fully aware of what’s going on and is just looking the other way. After all, we’ll soon know the answers.

The problem is that almost anything Apple introduces next month may seem an afterthought in light of all of these published rumors. If the iPhone 5 is mostly or substantially the same as predicted, though, a lot of potential buyers will be surprised, because they just aren’t paying attention to the sort of inside baseball in which the online community engages. It’s way under their radar, since they have better things to do.

If the predictions are correct, the iPhone 5 will be a pretty sizable upgrade, and I haven’t begun to consider more powerful CPU and graphics hardware. So it is conceivable there will be a decent performance boost too, maybe even better than the improvement between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s, which I regard as merely modest.

But the real question is whether Apple can still deliver any surprises for the iPhone. The big announcement last year was the arrival of Siri, even though, as a beta, it had its share of quirks. The invisible lady may deliver accurate results for some of you, but I realize Apple has been on the receiving end of one or more lawsuits claiming that Siri is a failure.

Yes, Siri’s voice recognition repertoire is expanded for iOS 6. Will it exit the beta stage? Will it become more accurate? I suppose we’ll know soon enough once lots of people have a chance to give it a try.

The larger question is whether Apple can find some more features to flesh out the iPhone 5, features that actually raise the bar. Apple doesn’t just add things because an Android phone has it. It may not get the misguided editors at Consumer Reports to give the iPhone a higher rating, but the question would be whether there are smartphone features that Apple could add that make sense.

Not being a product designer, I will leave that open for discussion. But I always like surprises.

So I’ve been spending a fair amount of time reading the initial chatter about Mountain Lion. While it appears to be a mostly solid release, there are those inevitable growing pains that Apple will have to address in the first couple of maintenance updates.

Chief among these is battery life. A fair number of early adopters are reporting significant reductions on a number of Mac note-books. Apple is reportedly investigating the problem, which means they are taking it seriously enough to be considering a solution.

Now power management is not something easily handled, and it may require a lot of field testing to see why these problems are happening, and what sort of solutions are needed. It’s also not the first time Apple has run into such difficulties after an OS update. Last fall, in the days after iOS 5 arrived, users of the iPhone 4 and 4S reported subpar battery life. It required two updates to pretty much set things right, though I gather there may be a small number of users who are still complaining.

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When Windows 8 ships this fall, you can bet that Microsoft will tout the interface formerly known as Metro to the skies. Look at the wonderful, colorful tiles. See how they run across the screen, endlessly. Forget about pointing and clicking; just tap here and there and everywhere and you’ll experience the joys of Windows 8.

What Microsoft won’t tell you is that the way touch works differs depending on which end of the display you tap. They won’t tell you that even shutting down your PC will involve multiple steps that aren’t, at first glance, obvious. Sure, the Start menu may have been a questionable name for a function that also includes restarting or shutting down your PC, but at least the interface was crystal clear as to what you could accomplish. You didn’t need a cheat sheet or a good memory.

And what happens when you click-through the interface formerly known as Metro, only to discover a toned down version of the traditional Windows desktop? All right, there are icons in the tray, but no Start menu there either. And how to do return to the tiled interface anyway? Click on the lower left corner of the screen, a hot spot that brings up a tiny popup menu labeled Start. In Windows 8, the desktop is just another app that you can move in and out of, once you find the secret handshake; make that hot spot. Yes, so intuitive.

What will probably confound many users of Windows 8 is the schizophrenic interface. One app uses the interface formerly known as Metro, while the next runs in an almost traditional Windows environment. Having fun?

True Apple dealt with two operating systems early on with the first versions of Mac OS X. You had a Classic environment, a separate document window where you could run many of your older Mac apps with decent performance in an emulator. Only the line of demarcation wasn’t hidden in a hot corner. Classic, as I said, ran as just another app that you could leave or enter with a click. It wasn’t hidden away.

Unfortunately, in trying to seem flashy and sexy, Microsoft cannot understand consistency, or the need to make things easy to discover by their user base. Most businesses will probably avoid Windows 8 like the plague, and tech pundits who usually praise Microsoft now seem almost to want to bury them.

More seriously, Mountain Lion, despite those 200 new features, is regarded as a minor system update by some. That’s because most of the fundamentals of the tried and true Mac user interface are still there. Sure, there are curious changes that may or may not have logic to them. Consider the loss of Web Sharing. All right, I don’t think many of you used this feature, which dates back to the very first version of OS X, and allows you to run an Apache web server on your Mac.

Maybe Apple felt that there would be less to support, but the command line tools that let you activate and configure Web Sharing are still there. I suppose they could disappear with OS 10.9, or maybe Apple will get the message.

They did, after all, restore Save As in the face of customers who said that the Duplicae function that’s part of the Auto Save feature, which debuted in Lion, was an unsatisfactory solution. Yes, I suppose Mountain Line’s Save As feature is still not quite the same as the Save As that we all know and love. But it’s also possible for Apple to make a few more changes even before Mountain Lion’s successor appears.

I have to tell you, though, that Mountain Lion’s entire Modern Document Model can sometimes be inscrutable. Tech writer Matt Neuburg has a piece at TidBITS where he attempts to sort things out in a way that makes sense. However, I came away feeling that Apple had somehow become temporarily possessed by a team of Microsoft engineers when enhancing Auto Save. The interactions between two options related to document handling in the General preference panel seem to vary illogically depending on which combination you engage. You almost wish Apple would have left well enough alone.

At least you can rest assured that most third-party apps have yet to add support for Auto Save and other key Lion and Mountain Lion features. But I would hope the more confusing elements of this feature will be revised before a new version of OS X arrives. I suppose that depends on how many of you are complaining about it. Obviously, Apple listens, which is why a variation of Save As has been restored.

For the most part, however, Mountain Lion appears to be a surprisingly stable release. There are issues to be resolved, such as the reports that some of you are suffering from substandard battery life on your Mac note-book. But with published reports that Apple is soon to begin testing an 10.8.1 update to fix that and other issues, you have to think they are not going to abandon suffering Mac users.

But with all its imperfections, Mountain Lion is a lot nicer place to be than the interface formerly known as Metro.

As Microsoft develops Office 2013 for Windows, there is no news as yet about a successor to Office 2011 for the Mac. A year after Lion appeared, Mac Office still doesn’t fully support the new features, and now we’re in the Mountain Lion era. At best, you will find full screen support in some apps, such as Word 2011. But that’s as far as it goes.

This flies in the face of Microsoft’s original promise, made a year ago, where support was promised for Auto Save and Version. Consider a story in PCMag.com. The author’s conclusion, based on conversations with Microsoft is that, “When they may come to Office for Mac, however, remains uncertain at best.”

Very uncertain. So uncertain that Microsoft isn’t talking about that promise a year out. But the media usually doesn’t call Microsoft out on broken promises, so they will continue to be made. Compare that to what Apple represents about a new product or service. More often than not, the promise is fulfilled. Sure, there are legitimate arguments to be made about whether things are truly better. iCloud, for example, remains highly flaky, with occasional email outages, and a notorious inability for contacts to be reliably synced from OS X to iOS and back again.

Auto Save can also be controversial. To some, it was a step backwards, even though having the OS automatically save your documents — at least on apps updated for the new OS — is a good thing. But the loss of the Save As feature in Lion — since restored in Mountain Lion — was roundly criticized.

But that takes us way beyond the scope of this article, which is whether we really need Microsoft Office on the Mac platform anymore. Yes, I grant that, if you work at a company that requires Office, there’s no real choice. You might look at other apps that promise compatibility, but you’ll soon see the two-way path isn’t always reliable.

Take Pages, from the iWork suite from Apple. At $20 from the Mac App Store, it’s a real bargain. Pages is quite a useful word processor, with adequate desktop publishing capabilities. It’s easy to use, and, as you might expect, fully complaint with key Mountain Lion features.

Despite the lower price, you may find Pages less satisfactory. For some reason, it takes fully twice as long to launch as Word 2011 on my late 2009 iMac. Fidelity with Word documents is mixed. Text transfer is seamless, fonts and layouts less so, and there is the ability to track document changes required by publishers. It may work, or it may be less accurate.

If you are moving your entire workflow to Pages, however, it may prove satisfactory except for documents that need to retain 100% formatting compatibility with the original Word versions.

When it comes to Excel users, those who rely on the most sophisticated features may not find them in Numbers, so the switchover will remain a non-starter. The same may be true in moving from PowerPoint to Keynote.

There are other alternatives, such as the open source OpenOffice, and a number of really flexible standalone word processors that may prove more useful if you can cope with possible document compatibility concerns when importing from Word. Nisus Writer (Express or Pro) and Mellel offer a number of unique features that cater to different segments of the market. A quick online search, or just browsing through the Mac App Store, will reveal some useful Word alternatives.

When it comes to email, I’ve never been able to live consistently within Outlook 2011. Sure, it may offer better compatibility with Microsoft Exchange than Apple Mail, but the cost is a bloated app with those annoying ribbons and lethargic performance. One notable change brought by installing Lion or Mountain Lion is the inability to import accounts from Mail. With all their resources, Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit still hasn’t figured out how to accomplish that task. The ability to sync your Outlook contact information with iCloud never seems to work, although there is actually a preference for Sync Services. But I haven’t found a way to bring up any of my accounts to sync, nor does Outlook recognize the data from Mountain Lion’s Contacts app.

After using Outlook for a couple of hours, you may find yourself longing for Mail, which is sleeker, faster, and an all-around superior app.

Certainly, Microsoft appears to be running out of ways to make Office more compelling. The most notable change in Office 2013 for Windows is half-hearted support for touch. But it appears to be limited to expanding the ribbons to improve your aim if you choose to activate those functions with your fingers. What a waste!

Past swapping Outlook for Entourage, and simplifying a few features along the way, the value of Office 2011 over Office 2008 is questionable. Other than expanding the ribbon and making some minor performance improvements, the feature list in Office 2011 isn’t terribly extensive. And don’t bother to give me the checklist. I know all about it, and there’s nothing that interests me. Indeed, removing some functions from the menu bar and placing them in the ribbon is a step back in my opinion.

At least Mac users don’t have to contend with those dreadful tiles from the interface formerly known as Metro. But if Microsoft has their way, that, too, might change if there is ever a successor to Office 2011.