As Apple’s stock price begins a tepid recovery after taking a dive on news that iPhone sales in the last quarter missed inflated analyst expectations, you can pretty much expect the sort of chatter that has begun. The most extreme would no doubt be whether the Apple gravy train has reached a stop sign. You won’t see any more sky-high revenue increases year after year. Instead, Apple will grow at a more moderate pace, similar to “normal” companies.

Now I’m not about to predict the future, and maybe it’s true Apple’s growth will slow, to some degree, as customers await the arrival of a new iPhone, or because Apple is no longer walking on water. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the current iPhone, but with so much publicity about a product upgrade that may feature really significant changes and improvements, is it possible a fair number of customers are just waiting?

The answer depends on whom you ask. Certainly that’s what Apple CEO Tim Cook said during the quarterly conference call with financial analysts. Apple said the very same things when iPhone sales missed targets in the September 2011 quarter. At the time, you had to believe them, since the iPhone was expected in June or July of that year, and didn’t arrive until October. There was a reasonable level of media frenzy about what the next iPhone would be like. Even though some were disappointed that it wasn’t so different, at least externally, that didn’t stop sales from soaring once the iPhone 4s was released.

In recent weeks, there has been another flurry of speculation, suggesting the so-called iPhone 5 will sport a four-inch screen, or something within that range, LTE support, and a totally new case design. It comes across as a very compelling upgrade, and I suppose it’s possible that potential buyers, whose contracts are up now, would rather pay month to month until the next iPhone goes on sale. It’s pretty clear from many surveys that existing iPhone customers are, by substantial numbers, inclined to go Apple again when they want a replacement.

The real question, one that might be determined by a user survey, is just what percentage of potential customers are so hung up on the Apple mythos that they would rather wait till something better comes along, particularly in the June quarter, when that better something maybe be four to six months away.

In an interview recorded for this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, NPD Group industry analyst Stephen Baker suggests only a very small number of potential buyers would be willing to wait that long on the sidelines if they are ready to buy a new smartphone now. Consider, too, that most people aren’t really stuck in our little tech news bubble, and they aren’t so inclined to watch the daily by-play of rumors and speculation about a possible new Apple product. They will usually just select a new smartphone from the available products.

I suppose the real question is whether fence sitters somehow took 10% or so from iPhone sales. But obviously that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But Apple did agree that the endless financial crisis in Europe hurt Apple’s sales, which were relatively flat across the continent. That situation could have been responsible for much of the sales shortfall, far more than potential customers who held back for the next iPhone.

But it sure sounds more romantic to attribute the problem to a high level of customer anticipation. It works better from a corporate PR angle. Demand for Apple gear is off the charts, and sales shortfalls are caused by other reasons. In some cases, Apple can’t build enough product to fill demand, the product arrived too late in the quarter to make much of an impact, or fence-sitters are hanging out for the next version. This may be particularly true if there’s a perception that the new model will be far more than a simple refresh.

In the scheme of things, the iPhone 4s was perceived by many as a simple refresh of the iPhone 4. In practice, there were substantial changes inside the case, but that may not have been sufficient to escape the refresh label. If the next iPhone is as substantial an upgrade as the speculation states, it might make sense — to some.

But the real problem maybe be the fact that Apple isn’t responsible for Wall Street’s expectations. Apple delivered guidance for the June quarter, as they always do in anticipation of future earnings. Indeed, Apple exceeded that guidance, and earned a record amount of cash for a June quarter. But Wall Street took figures from analysts that were all over the place, averaged them out, and decided that Apple didn’t do well enough. Those estimates may have little or no basis, but it was sufficient to create the impression that Apple’s luster has dimmed.

In the real world, it may well be that Wall Street became overconfident, or failed to see signs from preliminary sales estimates that would bring inflated expectations down to Earth. I see that, after the initial hit to the stock, prices seem to have settled down, so maybe Wall Street has begun to realize that, where Apple is concerned, the sky is definitely not falling.

While the vast majority of Mountain Lion reviews published Wednesday were highly favorable towards Apple’s latest and greatest OS, and that includes some from PC-oriented publications, there were exceptions.

One notable attack came from Gizmodo, a publication that has shown no love towards Apple, and it puts the differences between Apple and Microsoft front and center. Says reviewer Jesus Diaz, “If Apple doesn’t want Microsoft to steal their innovation crown with Windows 8 Metro, they urgently need a new vision that breaks with this unholy mix of obsolete 1980s user interface heritage and iOS full screen skeumorphism.”

Skeumorphism? Wikipedia defines the word as, “a derivative object that retains ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original.”

In suggesting that “Apple has run out of ideas. Or worse, that Apple is too afraid to implement new concepts, fearing it will kill the company’s golden goose,” Diaz feels there must be something wrong with the common sense concept of familiarity. As I’ve said from time to time, if someone accustomed to the first Macintosh in 1984 got into a time machine, traveled to 2012, and tried to work on a MacBook Air running Mountain Lion, that person would have a surprisingly short learning curve. Sure, the desktop is colorful, dimensional, and there are loads of unfamiliar features, at first glance. But the fundamentals of the point and click interface that Apple pioneered then are still very much still in place, and learning to use more than one app at a time will come soon enough.

Contrast that to the layout in Windows 8, where Metro, on the surface at least, disposes of all the conventions that Windows users have grown accustomed to over the years, conventions that, as you realize, were largely “borrowed” from the Mac.

Now I understand the desire to make things better. But what Microsoft has done may be close to building a car without a steering wheel, or brake and accelerator pedal. Sure, you can click, or touch the interface to prowl beneath Metro to see a slimmed down Windows-style interface, but all that does is make for a bi-polar experience, where you can become lost real quickly.

It doesn’t mean that the traditional graphical user interface that has been tried and tested all these years is necessarily perfect. I’m sure many of you can build a large list of how OS X needs to change to improve usability, particularly for tens of millions of customers who discovered Apple by way of the iPhone and iPad. Certainly navigating the file system intimidates many. And it doesn’t mean there aren’t more elements of the iOS that can be integrated into OS X without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

But Apple understands that jarring changes with little or no discernible benefits can just confuse customers. They got justifiably attacked when making changes to the default scroll bar and scrolling behavior in Lion, which is carried over unchanged in Mountain Lion. But they also made it possible to open System Preferences and turn things back. Despite all the iOS elements that made their way into 10.8, it’s still a Mac OS, and, based on what Tim Cook has said in a very emphatic way, it isn’t going to be thrown away in place of a desktop version of iOS.

All right, so Gizmodo’s reviewer maybe wanted to say something different, something controversial, and he’s certainly entitled to his opinion. Mine is simple. The movement from Snow Leopard to Lion wasn’t very jarring. I did revert those minor interface changes. I never use Launchpad, and rarely open Mission Control. My Mac is still a Mac, and the same is true for Mountain Lion.

The Mountain Lion installation should be virtually seamless for most of you whether you upgrade from Snow Leopard or Lion. Expect the installation to take from 20 to 40 minutes for most of you; faster if your Mac uses an SSD. Yes, you’ll be asked to set up iCloud, if you haven’t done so already, but that’s not essential. Yes, Safari will seem a little different at first because of the integrated address/search bar, dubbed Smart Search. Apple is essentially following the scheme originated in Google Chrome, but making it more intuitive.

Yes, Address Book is now Contacts. Yes, iChat is now Messages, and integrates with iMessages in the iOS. Yes, Reminders has been divorced from iCal and renamed Calendar to be consistent with the iOS. The rest of the features will come to you over time. Read a few tips, play around, and you’ll soon just get it. With over 200 new features to spare, you’ll find a rich selection to discover, none of which will make a Mac less of a Mac.

I am particularly fond of Notification Center, a close cousin to the iOS version. It is similar in concept to Growl, a third-party utility that puts up notices when an application needs to send you some sort of announcement. For Mail, I’m alerted about incoming messages.

While Apple apps support Mountain Lion’s Notification Center out of the box, third parties will have to build updated versions of their apps using Apple’s custom APIs. Over time, I expect the need for Growl will largely vanish.

Now it’s supposed to be a given that a new OS X will ship with various and sundry bugs. That may be true, but the early chatter about OS 10.8 is extremely positive. One reviewer who had worked with all of Apple’s developer releases since February remarked this was one of the smoothest beta processes ever. Another said a few weeks back, ahead of the Golden Master release, that he was already using the Mountain Lion betas as his main OS.

For me, Mountain Lion feels noticeably snappier than Lion, sometimes in significant ways. One example is dragging an audio track through the timeline in Amadeus Pro, one of the mission critical apps that I use for post production of my radio shows. The operation is far, far smoother, and that’s a process that really exercises the graphics chips. It’s nice to see a late 2009 iMac suddenly feel like new all over again.

Yes, I suppose some Mountain Lion glitches will come to the fore soon enough. Most of them, however, may be due to third-party app conflicts rather than anything Apple has done wrong. There will be the inevitable 8.0.1 update to address the initial round of bugs. But I feel far more comfortable with Mountain Lion than any previous OS X release, and that’s saying a lot.

All right, so Apple doesn’t walk on water. The company is not immune to the state of the world economy, nor to the impact of customers waiting on the sidelines in anticipation for a new model that may not ship until October.

When you add such conditions up, it explains, in part, why Apple missed Wall Street’s expectations for the June quarter. On the surface, the numbers seemed pretty good, except for slow Mac growth. You might attribute that to the fact that the new MacBook Air and MacBook Pro lineup didn’t arrive until the second week of June, and other models still await significant refreshes.

So for the quarter ending June 30, 2012, Apple reported revenue of $35 billion, with a net profit of $8.8 billion, or $9.32 per diluted share. Compare those results to last year’s numbers, which totaled $28.6 billion revenues and a net profit of $7.3 billion, or $7.79 per diluted share. Such an increase would seem good enough for any company, but Apple’s stock price dipped 5% in after-hours trading, because Wall Street expected the company to post earnings averaging $37.22 billion.

The main problem appears to be the supposed lackluster sales growth of the iPhone. Apple moved 26 million, representing 28% growth over last year, but Wall Street had hoped for better. At the same time, more and more stories have surfaced about the iPhone 5, perceived as a major upgrade with a larger screen and other niceties, including LTE support. Since most iPhone customers have to commit to two-year contracts with wireless carriers to keep the purchase price at an affordable level, they may be taking pause and waiting for something better. This situation mirrors that of the September 2011 quarter, where iPhone sales also missed expectations in anticipation of a newer model.

At the same time, sales of the iPad continue to overwhelm the competition, with 17 million sold last quarter, an increase of 84% over last year. That number appears to have exceeded many analyst expectations. And, now, with rumors growing about the possibilities of an iPad mini this fall, the window of opportunity for Apple’s competitors seems to be closing fast. Maybe it’s another iPod phenomenon in the making.

As to iPods, 6.8 million were sold. About half of the sales were registered for the iPod touch. This is a 10% decline over last year, but few are surprised by the gradual erosion of the iPod, which still towers over other music players. Apple also sold 4 million Macs, a mere two percent sales increase over last year, likely due to the late arrival of model refreshes. But that still beats the overall PC industry, where sales for many companies have dipped.

I won’t dwell too heavily on the rest of the numbers. You can find a lot more information at Apple’s site.

During the quarterly conference call with financial analysts, Apple CEO TIm Cook basically agreed that rumors about the next iPhone may have had a “reasonable amount” of impact on current sales. If this is true, the figures for the September quarter may also be tepid unless, of course, the iPhone 5 arrives in September, as some are suggesting.

This doesn’t necessarily mean it won’t happen. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple took a close look at sales projections during the quarter, and began to make appropriate decisions to restore sales luster. But the premature release of a new product that may not be ready for public consumption would be the wrong approach. The smartphone market is too hotly contested to take chances on the one-and-only iPhone intro for the year.

Part of the problem is one of perception. Apple cannot slow the rumor train. Almost as soon as an iPhone 5 — or whatever it’s called — appears, there will be rumors about what form an iPhone 6 might take. Will it have an even larger screen, 3D without the glasses; will it cook your dinner?

Clearly, there are expectations for lots of Apple products over the remainder of this year. Wednesday morning signaled the arrival of OS 10.8 Mountain Lion, meeting predictions that it would hit the Mac App Store the day after Apple’s financials were announced. It’s not at all clear, though, how quickly other Macs might be updated. Both the Mac mini and the iMac are getting a tad long in the tooth, what with Intel releasing new chips several months back.

While Apple wouldn’t admit to any new product initiatives during the quarterly conference call, which is to be expected, there are still growing expectations that the iPad will get a little brother (or sister) with a 7.85-inch screen. It has been dubbed the iPad mini by the media, though it could be an iPad nano I suppose. I read a few reports that the third generation iPad could receive a minor refresh to address perceived heat problems and to make the unit a tad slimmer and lighter. But Apple doesn’t tend to make in-line product changes of that sort.

The other question is whether Wall Street might just be getting a little overconfident about Apple, and when the company misses projections, the stock price is dinged accordingly. Perhaps this is one quarter that will help financial analysts take a more realistic view of Apple’s prospects.

The original announcement about Mountain Lion came as a surprise to many of you. Before the first preview of OS 10.8 went live in February, odds were that there wouldn’t be another Mac system upgrade until the middle of 2013. After all, this was all in keeping with the “plan,” that new versions of OS X would arrive every two years.

Why should it be otherwise?

That is, except for the very first four versions of OS X, which arrived fairly quickly. The original 10.0 release, code-named Cheetah, arrived on March 24, 2001 (a Public Beta arrived six months earlier). Within six months, there came 10.1, Puma, to add critical missing features, such as DVD playback, and begin to address particularly sluggish performance, even on the speediest Macs. OS 10.2, Jaguar, shipped on August 24, 2002, and OS 10.3, Panther, arrived on October 24, 2003.

Before you could set your clock to Apple’s schedule, the mold was broken with OS 10.4, Tiger, which arrived roughly 18 months later, on April 29, 2005. OS 10.5, Leopard, went on sale on October 26, 2007, and OS 10.6, Snow Leopard, landed on August 28, 2009. At this point, it appeared that Apple’s OS upgrade schedule would slow down considerably from then on. Snow Leopard was meant largely as an under-the-hood update, without many visible new features, largely designed to pave the way towards a slimmer, more powerful OS.

So when OS 10.7, Lion, arrived on July 20, 2011, you might have become accustomed to biannual upgrades. Lion, as you know, was a full-feature release, representing the shaky beginnings of iOS integration. As usual, Apple released several maintenance updates, the latest being 10.7.4. There is also a 10.7.5 reportedly under development, but all eyes are on Mountain Lion.

Now one thing you should never do with Apple is assume you can guess their release schedule. Just when you’re certain you have it nailed down, they will change the rules. Consider the iPhone 4s, which arrived nearly four months later than many expected, resulting in slower sales in the September 2011 quarter, because of all those fence sitters. But Apple more than made up for that sales dip the following quarter.

With Mountain Lion, Apple is adding to the pace of iOS integration, at least in terms of certain key features and app names. It’s all quite different from Microsoft’s curious vision of the PC+ era, where some version of Windows is destined to run everywhere, rather than making them create unique OS environments for each device.

Yes, it’s true that Mountain Lion more closely resembles the iOS, at least superficially. Contacts are Contacts, not Address Book,. There are Notes, Reminders, a Game Center, a Notification Center, and other similarities. It’s all consistent with making it easier for users of an iPhone or iPad to move to the Mac and back again more seamlessly. It doesn’t mean the iOS and OS X should look and work the same, however, since the ways you interact with a Mac and a mobile device are supposed to be different.

You can see, for example, how Microsoft has screwed the pooch in trying to make Office 2013 friendly for Metro under Windows 8. If you use a touchscreen, the ribbon buttons will grow, to make it easier for your fingers to find the functions you want. But that’s a very partial solution, since most of what you do in the Office suite still requires a traditional keyboard and input device. This sort of schizophrenic behavior gives you the worst of both worlds.

As far Apple: Now that Mountain Lion is just about to be released, speculation will no doubt grow over the successor, presumably 10.9. Maybe a lot of the chatter will be all about the possible feline names Apple might use. Certainly the list is getting terribly short of the more common species. But the real issue is whether Apple can actually come up with roughly 200 fancy new features each and every year, or maybe we are going to see an OS 11 next.

Now the mobile computing universe moves a lot faster, so it makes sense to see iOS upgrades every single year, since Apple has to compete with such fast movers as Google. Sure, the list of new features in iOS 6 seems far more extensive that the ones advertised for Android 4.1 “Jelly Bean” and Windows Phone 8. But it seems most critics seize on a handful of tent pole features, while largely ignoring the rest.

With OS X, it’s certainly clear that Apple has a long-range game plan. They do know when new versions are going to be announced, and the probable release dates. But they will never release a long-range roadmap for anyone, as much as people, particularly in the enterprise, would hope to receive that information.

But there is something to be said for expectations. After Mountain Lion is released, you’ll read lots of reviews and analyses of the individual features. You’ll see articles on how those features can be improved, and the ones that Apple hasn’t gotten to yet. Since iOS integration is on the table, examining iOS 6 may provide some clues as to what you might see in OS 10.9, or perhaps not. Such features as Map, and the enhanced personal assistant capabilities of Siri, which mostly provide a wider range of information at your beck and call, don’t really seem appropriate for a traditional computer.

Apple, obviously, is going to keep OS X and the iOS distinctly different in a number of ways. That’s something Microsoft doesn’t understand, but it makes sense.