Just this week, I read a report quoting Mac commentator Jim Dalrymple, Editor-in-Chief of The Loop, as saying that there’s no chance that Apple will discontinue the Mac Pro. Of course, when you ask Jim to expand on such pithy comments, you won’t receive any additional details But it’s also true that Jim almost always gets it right. So there you go.

It also make sense. Sure, Mac Pro sales are probably a fraction of what the used to be. Sure, Apple has moved the high performance bar downward a notch with the iMac, which features quad-core configurations and Thunderbolt, the high performance expansion port Apple and Intel developed. With Thunderbolt you can, in theory, install a breakout box that would incorporate the same PCI cards that you can insert inside a Mac Pro, or even a bunch of extra storage devices. Even better, this sort of expansion is available for every other Mac, including the entry-level MacBook Air and Mac mini.

That doesn’t mean that a Mac Pro can be completely replaced with “lesser” hardware. The Xeon processors in a Mac Pro are still capable of feats of performance that will stress the rest of the Mac hardware lineup. Maybe there aren’t many apps that require the extra cores, but it’s a sure thing that a large number of content creators would seriously consider a Windows workstation without a Mac Pro around.

Besides, it’s not as if Apple would have to spend a lot of money to fund developing a new model. It would largely involve installing the new processor and graphic cards, adding a couple of Thunderbolt ports, and updating the logic board accordingly. Yes, I suppose some of you would prefer a thinner, lighter form factor, but it’s not as if the current overweight hardware is necessary turning customers away.

It was also reported this week that Intel has released some more processors from the Ivy Bridge family, and these are low powered chips that would likely be suitable for a MacBook Air. Assuming they are shipping in quantities sufficient for Apple’s needs, it’s reasonable to suggest that the entire Mac lineup will be upgraded, perhaps at the WWDC, or perhaps even as early as next week. Recent Apple developer conferences have avoided much hardware talk, and a low-key hardware introduction a week earlier would allow Apple to concentrate on operating systems at the WWDC.

So far as 10.8 Mountain Lion is concerned, my feeling is that a final or release candidate will be distributed to developers at the start of the WWDC. The expected delivery date will be late July or August, in keeping with the promise of a summer release. I do not expect to see the final product arrive for the conference. I’d think Apple would want to give developers a month or two to play with it before the final release, to reduce the number of point-zero bugs. Besides, the stories from the rumor sites indicate Mountain Lion still has a ways to go before it’s ready for prime time.

When it comes to the price, I repeated my theory during the taping of this week’s tech show: Apple will very likely deliver the Mountain Lion upgrade as free download from the Mac App Store to Lion users. Snow Leopard users will have to pay $29.99 to upgrade to the latest Mac OS.

Maybe this is a romantic ideal, and certainly it turns back the clock to the early days of the Mac, when the OS was freely available for copying and downloading. But Apple will keep it on their online storefront regardless.

It makes perfect sense because this move follows the iOS tradition of free annual reference release upgrades. It’s not as if Apple needs the money. Besides, making Mountain Lion free will speed migration. Yes, the stragglers who never upgraded to Lion won’t get it free, but to do otherwise would be unfair to those who did pay for 10.7. With the highest possible early adoption of the latest and greatest OS X, it’ll make it more convenient for developers to jump on board with compatible apps.

I also think the action would have another goal, which is to freak Microsoft. With a final Windows 8 prerelease now available for download, I’m sure Microsoft is working out the final pricing. Very likely, Steve Ballmer and Crew will want to see how Apple handles Mountain Lion pricing, and they could very well be in for a rude awakening. All right, if you buy a new PC as of June 2, you will be able to upgrade to Windows 8 for $14.99. But that will leave hundreds of millions of potential customers who may already be highly skeptical about Windows 8 and the controversial Metro interface. If Microsoft doesn’t make the upgrade path reasonably inexpensive, they might find it hard to make the sale. Most early adopters may simply be people who buy new PCs with Windows 8 preloaded, or take advantage of a cheap upgrade path.

Meantime, this year’s WWDC will be one fascinating event, and not just because Steve Jobs is not around as the master of ceremonies. The WWDC will no doubt yield at least a few surprises, and I think I’m more right than wrong about the announcements I’m predicting here.

One thing is certain from the Tim Cook interview at the AllThingsDigital D10 event, and that is that he has the company line down pat. What’s more, his positions don’t appear to represent the huge departure from the Jobs era at Apple that some would have you believe.

This doesn’t mean that Cook hopes or expects to be another Steve Jobs, or that they plan to channel Apple’s co-founder in plotting corporate strategy or developing new products. Indeed, there’s one telling point in the wide-ranging interview in which Cook recounts his visit to the home of the ailing Steve Jobs to be essentially anointed as the next CEO of Apple. According to Jobs, the Disney company’s biggest mistake after Walt Disney died was to attempt to imagine what he would have done in their place. So Disney suffered until new leadership found the way to turn the huge ship around and move ahead.

Apple has the advantage of having replaced Jobs while he was still alive and, though seriously ill, as active as he could be. Since Cook was already a temporary CEO, and had gotten used to the reigns of power, the transition was clearly far less difficult. In the months that followed, Cook quickly asserted his leadership and made some changes in Apple’s corporate strategy. This is where the critics say that Apple might be in danger of losing its way. The theory has it that he did things Jobs would not have done and therefore he moved Apple closer to becoming just another tech company, more corporate, perhaps losing that “Think Different” aura.

Well, maybe, but I didn’t get that impression from several readings of the text from that interview.

One particularly ill-informed critic has listed ten ways in which Cook’s stewardship of Apple is moving in the wrong direction. One has it that Apple’s penchant for secrecy has loosened, and cites that infamous loss of a prototype of the iPhone 4 in 2010, which, as you recall, occurred while Steve Jobs was still alive. Stuff happens, and it’s important to note that Cook said that Apple plans to double down on corporate security. If you thought Apple played things close to the vest before, well it’s only going to get worse.

At the same time, Cook promises Apple will be more open in reporting on its dealings with third-party contract makers, such as Foxconn. That Cook made a trip to China to observe one of the production lines is a gesture, to be sure, but a significant one intended to demonstrate that he is serious about not tolerating bad working conditions. At the same time, Foxconn has announced yet another doubling of employee salaries. It’s still a fraction of what factory workers get in the U.S., but it’s far better than what employees at other factories in China are getting.

Another alleged problem with Cook’s management is the possible reduction in quality of Apple gear since he took over. I think it’s fair to say that Siri has been singled out. There’s even a brief quote suggesting that, in the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs, he wasn’t exposed to the iPhone 4s until it was presented to him at a board meeting, where he didn’t seem very impressed. I do not believe that everyone’s favorite micromanager never spent serous face time with the iPhone 4s, and Siri, before he died. Besides, as I mentioned in yesterday’s column, Siri was acquired by Apple in 2010. So would that have been done under the radar? Give me a break!

Sure we have Cook admitting that Siri isn’t a perfect solution. At the same time, it’s the one feature of the iPhone 4s that people keep talking about. Siri has become almost a cultural icon, and the TV spots featuring, first, regular people, and later show business figures, have garnered lots and lots of attention, positive buzz if you will. Cook says that Apple is looking into making Siri work more reliably, and to expand it in ways that, of course, he won’t reveal. So much for suggesting that Jobs was unhappy with Siri.

The real question is how well Cook and Apple will do going forward. That Cook rejected a $75 million payment in dividend income for his labors may have been done strictly to show his commitment to the company. It’s not as if he really needs the money. But it will probably take a couple of years, at least, for him to prove that Apple can persevere with amazing products and record revenues. Certainly Cook says all the right things about the company’s ongoing focus on a small number of trend-setting products where they feel they can make a difference. He’s certainly believable even if his demeanor is more reserved than Jobs. But the questions will persist until he shows, year after year, that Apple can continue to innovate. One or two failures, and industry analysts will be looking for his head, and suggesting possible replacements.

Going forward, maybe the words of Steve Jobs were prescient, that his successors should not, for even a moment, wonder what he would do in their place.

In recent stories about the early days of Tim Cook’s management of Apple, the ways in which he’s changed Apple have been mentioned over and over again. Many of the stories are largely positive, such as a more open approach in dealing with the investment community and Washington. That Cook seems more even-handed than his mercurial predecessor seems a plus. He’s even said to sit down with employees over lunch, which may be a blessing or a curse depending on whether they really want their boss watching over them.

A key question is how Cook is handling new product introductions. There, some give him a mixed rating, because the iPhone 4s didn’t look any different from its predecessor. More recently, one critic says that Siri, which is still considered in the beta stage, would never have been green lit by Steve Jobs, implying that Jobs never, ever allowed Apple to release products that were less than perfect.

Such a claim reveals not just a case of selective memory, but a lack of common sense. Let me start with the former.

I think few would disagree with me that Apple’s attempts at establishing cloud-based services have been works in progress. Starting with the original iTools in 2000, through .Mac, MobileMe, and now iCloud, these services have had shaky rollouts and ongoing troubles. It’s fair to say that even iCloud can be regarded as only partly complete, and many of you have encountered outages and flaky behavior since it arrived last fall.

While Siri seems to work beautifully if you happen to be a professional actor, and it seems all right if you’re a professional radio broadcaster too based on my experiences, it is by no means a feature complete and reliable solution. It can be flaky, it can be inaccurate, and sometimes it will fail miserably in recognizing someone’s voice. That’s why it continues to possess the beta classification in Apple’s official description of the service on their site.

Beta means, of course, it’s unfinished, and may not function reliably. On the other hand, Siri has gotten enough buzz to form the basis of much of Apple’s iPhone 4s ad campaign. Where the first TV ads featured actors portraying regular people taking Siri through its paces, more recent ads have featured well known personalities from the world of show business, such as Zooey Deschanel, Samuel L. Jackson (riding high as one of the stars of the box office sensation, “The Avengers”), and, more recently, quirky character actor John Malkovich. While some of criticized Apple for taking that route, it’s also true that these ads have gotten lots of attention, particularly from younger people. Compare them to the foolish and noisy promotional efforts of the competition, and you’ll see what I mean. “Droid” does? Well, it announces itself in spots that give you a headache.

At the same time, there have been lawsuits targeting Apple that claim Siri is imperfect, that it doesn’t behave like a finished product. Of course, the ambulance chasing attorneys who accepted those cases may not have seen the word “Beta” on Apple’s site next to Siri.

So let’s look at the history: Apple bought Siri, a company who had developed a mobile assistant app, in the spring of 2010. Siri made its debut on the iPhone 4s in October of 2011. Let’s not forget that Steve Jobs, while in serious condition, was still alive and working for Apple. Anyone who has read Walter Isaacson’s official biography of Jobs would agree that he remained active until the very end. Both the iPhone 4s and Siri represent products and services that Steve Jobs approved. Tim Cook didn’t just throw out the baby with the bathwater in announcing them at the Apple media event. As you recall, Jobs succumbed to his illness the day after that media event.

So as you see, Cook may have been the master of ceremonies at the introductory party where the iPhone 4s was first rolled out, but it would be foolish to believe that Jobs didn’t agree to every single detail, even though he couldn’t be present. To think that any of this happened without his approval is just plain foolish. It may fit into the meme of Tim Cook being less of a perfectionist than Jobs, but as a practical matter, that doesn’t appear to be the case. Just read the text of his interview this week at the AllThingsDigital conference and you’ll see what I mean.

Besides, if you take that position, how do you explain the new iPad and the Retina Display? This product refresh has been a sensation from the standpoint of customer and critical response, not to mention sales. Sure, maybe some would have preferred that the third generation iPad be a tad lighter and thinner, although Apple’s compromises were relatively minor in the scheme of things. You’d have to place it side by side with its predecessor, lift both, back and forth, to be able to detect the minor weight difference. Before you criticize Apple, consider what they had to do to accommodate that marvelous Retina Display, an LTE radio, and a heftier battery to keep everything running for up to 10 hours or more.

More to the point, it’s fair to suggest that Jobs, knowing his time was short, worked hard to finalize a host of products that will debut over the next few years. If those products, and their introductions, fail in any way, Cook will receive the blame, as he should as CEO. But what will they say if Apple’s products and sales figures soar way past even the most optimistic projections?

I suppose they will then tell us that Steve Jobs was really a loser all along, and it was Tim Cook who, working in the background, saved the company — or similar nonsense.

It may seem strange to read the stats, but over 45% of Windows users around the world are still using XP. We’re talking here of an operating system first released in 2001, the same year that the original release version of Mac OS X debuted. While XP’s share has slowly eroded over time, it actually spiked slightly in January before resuming a downward slope.

Now this state of affairs is hard to relate to on a Mac. Apple’s rapid OS upgrade cycle, and the fact that growing pains tend to be minimal for most people, means that a hefty portion of the user base is pretty current. One recent survey, in fact, had Lion (10.7) and Snow Leopard (10.6) together taking almost 83% of the Mac market. In contrast, OS 10.4, Tiger, barely exceeded 3%. With most Mac users remaining fairly up to date with OS versions, it means most of you can run the latest and greatest apps, and Apple’s recent security fixes will make your computing experience safer, surer.

Let’s now consider Microsoft’s plight. Since Windows XP went out of production, Microsoft has released Windows Vista to tepid reviews and Windows 7 to reasonably favorable reviews. In the real world, Windows 7 is largely a shave and haircut of Windows Vista. It’s faster, more reliable, and it appears a fair number of people have upgraded, particularly in the business world. But there are still companies that have built carefully crafted workflows with XP, and have been slow to upgrade.

With official support for XP and Office 2003 — which is also still in wide use — ending on April 18th, 2014, Microsoft paid an analysis firm, IDC, to create a white paper to help encourage more companies to upgrade. This 12-page document claims that XP’s “end user labor costs” can be up to five times more when compared with using Windows 7. So, the annual support costs for a PC with Windows XP is estimated at $870, involving an extra eight hours of downtime, whereas the support costs for a Windows 7 PC are estimated at $168.

Compelling, yes, but the report is, obviously, self-serving. The white paper surveyed nine companies to craft this study, which would seem a pitifully small survey for the usage and expense patterns of an operating system in use by hundreds of millions of people. Imagine, for example, if a presidential poll from Gallup surveyed just nine people. Would you take it seriously?

That said, the survey covers a host of usage areas and bases estimated costs on how long it takes to perform a maintenance function, and the amount of expected downtime for companies that stick with Windows XP. They study calculates such usage criteria as reboot times, the impact of malware, and how long it takes to troubleshoot problems.

I am not going to judge the accuracy of the numbers. It would make sense that Windows XP is more vulnerable to malware than Windows 7. Even security experts have said as much. That said, it would seem that employee education and using current security software ought to take care of most of the issues. It may also be true that XP is more trouble prone, that it takes longer to fix system issues, and reboot the system. All this downtime adds up to reduced worker productivity. Being able to use Bluetooth, USB 3.0, and more efficient configuration of multiple monitors are just some of the additional arguments in favor of switching to Windows 7. But many businesses have no need for these frills.

The survey also ignores the costs of upgrading to Windows 7, the time it takes to deploy the new OS, employee retraining, and the potential need to upgrade third-party software as well to support the upgrade. Taken against the costs of just staying put, many companies may have decided that they just aren’t ready to make that commitment. In a climate where even large companies are downsizing, they don’t want to deal with potential uncertainties of this sort. A single survey of a handful of companies may not be sufficient ammunition to change their minds.

A better survey might have examined companies who aren’t upgrading to Windows 7, and understanding why they are sticking with XP. Maybe Microsoft would learn something from the exercise. Arguing that maintenance costs might be lower may not be enough.

What’s more, this study comes at a peculiar time. Microsoft is in the final stages of building Windows 8, and you’d think they’d want to work hard to encourage businesses to upgrade from Day One. Why concentrate on an OS that will be yesterday’s news in just a few more months? Or maybe Microsoft has justly concluded that Windows 8 is will not be a compelling upgrade for the enterprise.

The white paper hasn’t much to say about Windows 8, but here are two compelling sentences: “IDC has not yet broken out Windows 8 shipment projections from the current forecast totals. However, on traditional PC form factors (desktops, laptops), IDC does not expect to see any near-term acceleration to current commercial shipment forecasts associated with the release of Windows 8.”

That says it all. If Microsoft hopes to boost migration from Windows XP, it’ll have to be with Windows 7 for the foreseeable future. It appears Microsoft understands Windows 8 and the controversial Metro interface will be a hard sell for anyone but customers who might simply buy new PCs after the new OS ships. At the same time, if they can sell tens of millions of additional copies of Windows 7 to the enterprise — which will be highly skeptical of the potential for Windows 8 — this white paper becomes a critical tool.

Clearly, Microsoft has a problem. Far too many customers are still not ready to upgrade their OS, and the PC market is flat overall. This white paper appears to be a desperate effort to eke out some extra sales, assuming IT people look it over and are persuaded by the arguments about potential cost savings. I don’t envy Microsoft.