A large tech company has to offer a free email service to be relevant these days, I suppose, particularly if they delve in search. Build a pretty site, add lots of features, and offer the accounts free. Sure, there will be targeted ads polluting the site to generate some revenue for the company, but I suppose most of you have come to accept that. Well, at least if you get your Hotmail/Live Mail, Gmail, or Yahoo! email online.

I haven’t included Apple’s former MobileMe service in the mix, since it’s no longer available, although those mac.com and me.com addresses — soon to be supplemented with icloud.com — are still working under iCloud. But free email is not the major part of iCloud, and Apple doesn’t inflict advertising on you.

Now Microsoft’s original email service, Hotmail, was dogged with a nasty reputation as a spam magnet. The reputation was well deserved at first, but, to its credit, Microsoft has doubled down on improving spam protection. But the same is also true for Yahoo! and Gmail.

Microsoft, however, has a penchant for renaming under-performing services in the hopes that rebranding and a little interface refinement will add up to more users. So Live search become Bing, with mixed results. Microsoft took an over $6 billion write-down in the last quarter because the online advertising agency they bought to compete with Google failed to deliver the goods. Bing has simply cannibalized more market share from Yahoo!, which uses the Bing search engine. Google continues to control two-thirds of the search market.

This week, Hotmail became Outlook. Certainly the name Outlook has a good reputation, since it’s the name of business email clients for the Mac and PC, so you are presented with the veneer of an industrial grade service with a neat, if cluttered, look and feel. The rebranding also means that, if you hurry, you can get an outlook.com email alias to match the one you used for hotmail.com or live.com. Yes, I grabbed my name, and spent a while navigating the new service to see if it is at all worthwhile.

Outlook has one leg up on Gmail, because the latter remains crowded and geeky. There are loads of features, some of which are barely understandable, some of which are still in beta. Some of you are still confused by Gmail’s peculiar setup, which uses labels instead of folders. If that seems a distinction without a difference, it basically means that the message isn’t technically being moved anywhere. It just gets a different label applied to separate it from other messages for easier organization. There’s also an All Mail category that puts everything in one place, and that can also be a major source of confusion.

Despite the oddities, Gmail remains extremely popular. According to a November 2011 Comscore report, the service had 260 million users, but Google reported 425 million Gmail users as of June of this year, perhaps because of the popularity of the Android Mobile platform. Last year’s Comscore survey pegged Hotmail, then, as the most popular free email service, with 350 million users, followed by Yahoo!, with 310 million.

Armed with those stats, I can see where Microsoft, feeling it had indeed fallen behind the curve, decided to rebrand Hotmail as Outlook, in hopes that the service would be taken more seriously.

When you compare the three, you’ll find they all appear to deliver pretty credible service, and spam protection is really quite good. User settings for Outlook and Yahoo! are fairly basic, with similar features. You can, for example, create new message folders, filter email, or retrieve messages from other services.

But if you want to forward email from one of these services to another account, you’ll find that Yahoo! puts up a roadblock. You’ll need to upgrade to Yahoo! Mail Plus, at $19.99 for the year. This premium service removes the targeted ads, and also gives you forwarding capabilities, and the ability to “POP-out,” which means accessing your Yahoo! from a regular email client, such as Apple Mail and, for that matter, Microsoft Outlook for the Mac and Windows.

However, there is one area where Outlook and Yahoo! mail fall down on the job, and that’s providing support for IMAP email. Now I’ve long recommended IMAP as the best way to set up your account on a regular email client. With IMAP, messages are stored on the server, meaning that you can retrieve the same messages on any desktop or mobile computer and know everything will be in sync. The Sent messages in Apple Mail will also find themselves in the Sent folders on an iPhone, or even an Android phone.

It’s true the setup for IMAP isn’t quite seamless. You usually have to manually map the email client’s standard local folders (Sent,  Drafts, Junk and Trash) to the corresponding ones on the server. Desktop email clients seldom do those setups automatically, which adds one level of confusion to the usual account setup process. In passing, I find that Mail for the iOS tends to get these settings correct without much manual intervention.

Among the top three free email services, only Gmail supports IMAP. Curiously, of all the reviews of Outlook that I’ve read so far — and most praise it to the skies — the lack of IMAP support isn’t being mentioned. These reviewers must assume you’ll only retrieve Outlook email from a browser, and that full support for regular email clients doesn’t make a difference. But it does.

The lack of IMAP support means that, while I will keep my outlook.com email address, I’m not going to use it very often. Microsoft probably doesn’t realize why that feature is missing, or what they have to do to add it to the service. But the same is true for Yahoo!

And, yes, Apple’s free iCloud email does support IMAP, and the online interface is simple and snappy, reminiscent of Apple Mail on your Mac. As for Outlook, Microsoft should be proud they signed up one million users in the first 24 hours, which is less than the number of people who downloaded OS X Mountain Lion during the same period.

Every so often, I come across an article that seems sufficiently off the rails that it deserves a comment, or perhaps a chuckle. But I never provide the links, because the writer of such nonsense generally doesn’t deserve the hits, although I won’t assume that’s the reason some of these questionable claims are posted.

Take one blogger who suggests he’s scared of “Apple OS updates,” meaning OS X, because he lives in fear that Apple regularly removes features he depends on from release to release. Since no examples are offered, I’ll try to speculate.

With Lion and Mountain Lion, Apple did kill Rosetta, the PowerPC translation software that allowed you to run older apps that were never made compatible with Intel processors. This sort of thing is not new for Apple. There was a PowerPC transition in the mid-90s that also required emulation software for older apps. We got through both in fairly decent shape.

Otherwise, just what features did Apple remove? Could it be the Save As feature as part of Auto Save in Lion? Well, that lapse of good judgement only made a difference if you used one of Apple’s apps or another program compiled to support Lion’s new APIs. The Duplicate command was an adequate, if clunky, replacement. Apple got the message, and restored the feature in Mountain Lion, though it requires an “Option” in addition to Command-Shift-S to invoke Save As. I think that’s a minor inconvenience in the scheme of things.

True, there are such things as “natural scrolling” and part-time scroll bars that irritate some of you, but both are conveniently reverted to OS X norms with simple System Preferences checkboxes. And you never have to use Launchpad or Mission Control. So where’s the beef?

As most of you who have used Lion and Mountain Lion realize, you don’t need to feel slighted by the iOS-inspired eye candy and renamed apps. Messages operates essentially the same as iChat, with a few look and feel alterations. Certainly Contacts is not such a drastic change from Address Book.

Yes, facts are such irritating things, particularly when they are in conflict with someone’s agenda. That’s too often the case with some of those Apple naysayers. Not that there aren’t lots of legitimate ways to criticize Apple for making some very foolish decisions. I do not, for example, see the wisdom in removing Rosetta from OS X. Surely there was more than sufficient reason to keep it running, particularly since it really wasn’t a resource hog, nor am I aware of OS X being less stable as a result.

But I’m not through with that ill-informed article.

It seems the blogger in question brings up an alleged “year after year” delay in delivering System 6 for Macs way back when. Well, maybe his memory is a tad imperfect, but I have to wonder about his assertion that “year after year, it didn’t ship. It got bigger and more confusing.” He goes on to complain that “Apple told developers not to ship anything until System 6 came out,” which, he asserts, resulted in fewer apps being produced.

There’s more, but I won’t quote the rest. Instead, I’ll put some facts on the table, using the “History of Mac OS” Wikipedia entry to buttress my own fading memory of those heady days. Those of you who have used Macs since the 1980s will probably agree with Wikipedia’s version of history.

Now as you recall, the first Mac shipped with System 1.0 in January, 1984. By April 1987, System 2.0 arrived, although the System file was given a system 4.0 label. Are you with me so far?

In October 1987, Apple jumped to System 5.0. The key new feature was MultiFinder, which introduced cooperative multitasking, the ability to run more than one app at a time. The initial system 6.0 release arrived in April, 1988. But this is only a brief summary, since there were a number of interim releases, coming at a fairly steady pace. After several System 6 updates, System 7.0 arrived on May 13, 1991.

This timetable, which essentially confirms my recollection of the era, doesn’t leave room for a “year after year” delay of System 6. I suppose it’s possible the blogger meant System 7, a huge upgrade to the Mac OS that included the first iteration of support for 32-bit addressing, allowing you to install more RAM in your 32-bit clean computer, and the first refinement or smoothing of the Mac user interface.

Now maybe I’m losing something in the translation. Maybe the blogger wasn’t talking about System 6 at all, but about Copland, Apple’s failed effort, in the 1990s, to build an industrial grade operating system. From the ashes of Copland, Apple brought a few of the interface elements and other refinements to System 8. Apple also bought NeXT, Inc. from Steve Jobs, and the rest is history.

But it’s not the history presented by a certain blogger who not only seems clueless about the changes in OS 10.7 and 10.8, but about the fundamentals of the Mac OS over the years. I also suppose it’s always possible the blogger will, upon realizing his mistakes, just edit or alter the incorrect remarks. We’ll see.

Unfortunately, articles of that sort sometimes receive lots of traffic, and are quoted widely without critical comment. Before long, too many readers get a wrong-headed view of what’s really going on. As I said, constructive criticism about Apple is a good thing, but making up stories doesn’t help anyone, except those looking for bigger hit counts.

Last year, it was early October before Apple staged a media event to roll out the iPhone 4s. Sales the previous quarter were not as high as industry and financial analysts expected, in part because many potential customers were perceived as staying on the sidelines for the refreshed model. That, in fact, is one explanation given for fewer than expected iPhone sales. Indeed, a recent survey showed more customers expect to buy the next iPhone than expected to buy the previous version before that model was launched.

So, depending on whose story you believe, either a lot of people waited on the sidelines for a rumored iPhone 5, or didn’t. But it was certainly true that the economic crisis in Europe weighed heavily on purchasing decisions for a lot of people, and it wasn’t just smartphones. Auto makers are also reporting problems moving iron in that market, and they are clearly not alone.

Now this past weekend, there were yet more rumors about an iPhone 5, including one photo of a prototype supposedly assembled from leaked parts. I don’t pretend to know the reality of that photo. It may have been based on prototype parts that will not make it into the final design.

There are also unconfirmed reports that the next iPhone — whatever it is to be called — is already in production. But that doesn’t take a stretch. Even if a new iPhone isn’t announced until October, you’d probably want to grant Apple sufficient time to ramp up the production lines, so they’d have a decent amount of product to ship on the first weekend, so all those millions of eager customers can get one.

But the real question is whether Apple really wants to wait until October, and possibly suffer another sagging quarter, or get the next iPhone into the marketplace as early as possible, and therein lies the latest group of rumors.

First, there was a story that pegged the next iPhone’s intro at Tuesday, September 25. That might make sense based on Apple’s promise to deliver iOS 6 by fall. But that doesn’t mean Apple can’t beat the deadline and emerge as a hero. So there is yet another report that pegs Wednesday, September 12, three days after my birthday, for an Apple media event. And obviously isn’t a birthday present for me.

The latter date actually makes sense, since AllThingsD, owned by the Wall Street Journal, is reporting that their sources have confirmed that timeframe for some sort of Apple event, although they are not saying for sure that the occasion will be used to launch a new iPhone. But if that happens, though, and the new model ships by September 14, it would give Apple plenty of time to move five to ten million units into the hands of customers, and thus really boost revenue for the September quarter.

As far as the design of the iPhone 5 is concerned, the guessing has it that it will sport a four-inch display and the same width, and thus use a widescreen aspect ratio. How existing iOS apps will be impacted probably depends on how the scaling is done. But there may be a black border at the top and bottom of existing apps until they are optimized for the new platform. Or maybe the latest iOS developer tools will somehow manage some of this scaling in the background and make the transition seem less awkward.

The other design element that appears a certainty is support for LTE. Apple may use the larger case to store a bigger battery, since LTE chips are notorious for less efficient power consumption. Or perhaps the LTE chips that Apple will select won’t have such prodigious power requirements. Or maybe it will be a combination of both. It does appear the new sized case will sport a different design as well, although that recent iPhone 5 mockup doesn’t seem altogether sleek.

There are other question marks about the introduction of the next iPhone. Will Apple also introduce a new iPod touch with a similar form factor? What about rumors of an iPad mini? Would Apple announce “one more thing,” and thus unveil a 7.85-inch scaled down iPad with Smart Cover and all the rest of the goodies? Apple could use such a product’s 4:3 aspect ratio as an argument against the 7-inch tablets that tend to be widescreen affairs. You wouldn’t need sandpaper with more screen real estate. Otherwise, the main arguments in favor of the tinier iPad would be easier portability, the ability to hold the unit in one hand comfortably, and a selling price between $249 and $299.

It appears reasonably certain that a smaller iPad, with a proper marketing campaign, may have the potential to gut sales of the Google Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire before the holidays.

But I do not subscribe to the possibility that Apple is going to do an interim update to the new iPad to address alleged heat problems and reduce weight, as some are suggesting. That’s not Apple’s game, and existing customers would probably feel cheated. Better wait for the spring of 2013 to incorporate such changes, and others, into the fourth generation model.

As far as a new iMac and Mac mini are concerned, they are overdue, but, unless there are major changes in the former, both will probably arrive quietly in the near future, announced strictly with a press release.

Over the past few days, I’ve read the early Mountain Lion chatter on online message boards, including Apple’s own support discussions. With millions of Mac users already using OS 10.8 — one report suggested the number exceeded 3% of the Mac user base after the first two days — it’s quite clear that some people are going to encounter problems. The key is whether there is a trend towards serious, repeatable bugs that may indicate potential troubles with Mountain Lion that Apple will need to address in the first maintenance update.

After installing Mountain Lion on a late 2009 27-inch iMac, and a 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro, I can tell you that my upgrade experiences have been quite smooth. I can think of only two problems after the installation, one of which appears to have been encountered by others.

The first involved high resource use by Mountain Lion on the iMac, which slowed down performance noticeably. Using Apple’s Activity Monitor app, which is found in the Utilities folder, to see what was going wrong, I encountered a process called ABAssistantService hogging the CPU. This process was evidently caused by Contacts constantly polling iCloud for updates.

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