Just recently my son, Grayson, came home for a one-month visit; he works as an educator in Madrid. Since we have only one car, he paid for a rental so he could socialize with his friends during his stay. Public transportation in this area is poorly implemented.

Well, he took advantage of one of those Priceline deals, yes the same Priceline that actor William Shatner hawks on TV and radio, and got a compact car, a Mazda3, for the same price as a lesser vehicle. While the car was perfect for his needs, my wife remarked, after riding in it briefly, that the air conditioner didn’t seem up to the task of handling those 100-plus temperatures in the Phoenix area, although Grayson, not having an air conditioner in his own apartment in Spain, didn’t seem to notice. In passing, I also took a ride, and confirmed that it was near impossible to get the car’s interior temperature down to my comfort level.

Grayson replaced the car, not for the quality of the air conditioning, but as the result of a curious thump that appeared to emanate from the real axle. The noise was gone, but the air conditioner still seemed sub-par. So I examined the reviews for the Mazda3, just to see if any of the critics mentioned the poor-qualty air conditioning.

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I suppose this is the sort of uncertain question that many ask in one form or another whenever Apple or Microsoft releases a major OS upgrade. Early so-called “version one-point-zero” bugs appear, one or two quick updates are released, and you have to wonder whether they might have done better to wait rather than rush the product out.

Now Microsoft released Windows XP and Windows 7 in the fall. The troubled Windows Vista came out in January 2007, missing the holiday season. But it’s also true that lots of PC users decided to miss Vista completely, so they stayed on with XP. Only after the arrival of Windows 7, in October, 2009, did millions of customers finally decide to upgrade to a newer version of Windows, when they weren’t switching to Macs of course.

With Lion, Apple has changed the mold. Unlike previous versions of OS X, most Mac users are expected to download their copies from the Mac App Store, for $29.99. For those who prefer physical media, there is a USB thumb drive version for $69.99, but that price penalty makes it quite clear what Apple expects you to do; that is, if you have a broadband Internet connection or a nearby Wi-Fi hotspot to download your copy.

But the methodology of delivering Lion isn’t the problem. It’s the persistent bugs reported in the initial 10.7 release that trouble a number of Mac users. Some even claim Lion is Apple’s Vista, a major OS upgrade that breaks the mold but is fated to be troublesome because it wasn’t fully baked before release.

First and foremost, I do not regard OS X Lion is necessarily buggier than other OS X upgrades. They all had early-release flaws of one degree or another. It makes sense there will be problems because of all the serious changes in Lion. At the same time, I have little doubt that Apple is going to straighten out the worst ills in the months to come.

Apple also made some critical decisions about Lion and support for older Macs and older software. Some of the early Intel-based Macs, with Core Solo and Core Duo processors, aren’t supported. But that leaves nearly five years of Macs that can run Lion, though some will require an update to at least 2GB RAM. But Apple’s decision to ditch the Rosetta PowerPC emulation software has been a cause of criticism and obvious problems. Many older apps won’t run. There’s not a lick of evidence that Apple would reconsider and develop a version of Rosetta for Lion, or license the technology to a third party. When Apple makes the decision to discard technology that, as they say, is that.

Certainly, Lion had some problems out of the starting gate. The OS 10.7.1 update fixed reported issues with Wi-Fi, the usual inconsistent connections sort of thing. But I still have a different sort of problem, probably related, to report. Just about once a week, I lose Internet access. It only happens on my 27-inch iMac. No other Internet connected device has this trouble, and that includes a Lexmark S800 Genesis printer, iPad 2, iPhone 4, Apple TV, and even the home alarm system. No problems. My iMac was perfectly well behaved prior to installing Lion; never lost the connection. Restarting the router, a Linksys E4200, or the Cox cable modem, made by Cisco, doesn’t change a thing. If I restart the iMac, it just works all over again — until the next failure.

As a corollary, I’ve had occasional problems with streaming TV shows from Netflix on that iMac. I get a “plugin” error, but it may well be that it’s a Netflix issue, one you have to hope they’ll solve this month as millions of customers have to decide whether to accept huge price increases, downgrade services, or look elsewhere. I’ll probably keep the streaming for now.

Otherwise, Lion has performed like a champ. I see no serious performance problems. Even apps that aren’t particularly Lion savvy seem to be relatively well behaved, though some software, such as Word 2011 and the latest Adobe InDesign, seem to take forever to quit.

Now one particularly irritating Lion bug, reported by some, involves reports of random crashes that produce a black screen. Reports trace this problem to the NVIDIA graphics hardware on some 2010 MacBook Pros. There are also reports of poor battery life. Now as the owner of a 17-inch MacBook Pro of that vintage, I have to tell you that I haven’t encountered any graphics oddities, black screens of death, or poor battery life.

As usual with such issues, some problems may be restricted to specific applications or installation scenarios. That makes it doubly difficult for Apple to actually isolate problems of this sort prior to the release date. The final beta testers will always be the early adopters, and that situation is no different with Lion.

Despite some of the complaints, I do not see Lion as being necessarily less stable than other versions of OS X. But there’s nothing wrong with waiting out a few maintenance updates before diving on.

I have to admit this one caught me by surprise. On Tuesday, AT&T made assurances that they’d be bringing 5,000 offshore support jobs to the U.S. if their proposed merger with T-Mobile was approved. What’s more, they also promised that, although there would be those expected staff reductions to eliminate “duplication,” such reductions would come largely as the result of attrition. That means, employees who were discharged for other reasons, quit or retired.

That is the sort of promise that was designed to satisfy the concerns of people who believed a merger of that sort was a potential job killer. But certainly the possibility of eliminating one of the four largest wireless carriers hasn’t gone over well with the public (particularly consumer advocates), politicians, and certainly not with Sprint, the third largest wireless service.

Now it appears that the U.S. Justice Department agrees, and so they’ve filed a civil complaint in the United States District Court for the District Columbia to block the proposed $39 billion merger. In that complaint, the DOJ alleges that “AT&T’s elimination of T-Mobile as an independent, low-priced rival would remove a significant competitive force from the market.” The complaint also claims that, if the merger isn’t blocked, “customers of mobile wireless telecommunications services likely will face higher prices, less product variety and innovation, and poorer quality services due to reduced incentives to invest than would exist absent the merger.”

This is serious business. The DOJ has, in recent years, rarely moved to stop mergers. Usually they demand concessions to allow a deal to go through. But this time, they are going the whole nine yards, which, for all practical purposes, will probably doom the deal.

Now in deciding to acquire T-Mobile from its current owner, Deutsche Telekom, AT&T claimed the merger was necessary to improve the company’s troubled network and deliver fewer dropped calls and superior quality connections. But merger plans always include buzzwords about the benefits of the corporate marriage. Another is “synergy,” which is something that rarely occurs. Usually a merger is designed to rid the industry of a competitor, as HP did with Compaq some years back.

In the case of the telecom industry, you have seen AT&T rebuilt from the mergers of regional carriers, or Baby Bells, in effect undoing a fair amount of the Ma Bell breakup of the 1980s. Verizon is the other former Baby Bell still standing, along with Qwest, now part of CenturyLink. But nobody expects AT&T and Verizon to even consider a merger. No one in their right mind would approve that one.

AT&T has requested an expedited hearing in an effort to overturn the government’s action, and attempt to persuade the courts to accept their merger proposal. I would even imagine they might present additional concessions, perhaps selling off even more wireless spectrum than they have already offered, and perhaps guaranteeing that T-Mobile’s discount contract prices would remain intact. But if AT&T divests itself of assets at the same time claiming that the pooling of assets of two companies is necessary to improve service to customers, you end up with one huge logical contradiction.

Now after the lawsuit was filed, Sprint announced it’s pleased with the action. The FCC continues to examine the merger proposal, but is clearly skeptical.

If the merger were ultimately approved despite the lawsuit, and I am not going to predict how the courts might react, Sprint would be the odd one out here. Smaller than the other two remaining large carriers, they’d struggle even harder to build a decent market and overcome previous problems that have resulted in customers leaving the company. But the arrival of an iPhone would surely help.

While the courts can be unpredictable, it seems, on the surface, that the DOJ’s action ought to be sufficient to put the kibosh on this deal.

Besides, it’s not as if such a merger, if granted, would magically transform AT&T’s sputtering network overnight. For one thing, the two networks, while using the same GSM protocol, also support different frequencies for 3G service. It could take months or years to install upgrades that make both networks fully compatible and allow the system to support all existing mobile hardware seamlessly. Glitches will be inevitable. I can’t imagine such things happening overnight.

But if AT&T were to put the same amount of cash on the table to invest in building out their own network, particularly in regions where service is nonexistent or troublesome, they’d probably get far more bang for the buck. Besides, an independent T-Mobile would be able to continue to tout lower prices and other advantages. Regardless, it will probably take weeks or months for this matter to be settled. AT&T is clearly girding for a fight.

Either way, nothing stops Apple from adding a T-Mobile version of the iPhone this fall, not to mention one for Sprint. Besides, I see nothing harmful in having a robust competitive landscape for wireless service in the U.S. It’s not as if customers clamored for the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, and maybe these two companies will come to realize that, at the end of the day, this was not a marriage made in heaven.

The basic form factor of the iPhone was nailed down in 2007. The changes since then have been relatively minor in the scheme of things, moving the case from tapered to square, aluminum to glass, and adjusting the position and appearance of the few external controls.

Sure, a lot has changed inside. The processor is now designed by Apple, and each upgrade delivers incremental performance improvements. Compare the iPhone 3GS, still being sold, to the iPhone 4, and you’ll leap from sluggish to snappy. Externally the biggest improvement is the Retina Display.

The real difference from a usability standpoint is the OS, which has had steady and feature rich upgrades. Some of the features were long in coming, such as adding cut, copy and paste. Others are natural evolutions of the iOS touch interface. For iOS 5, Apple is finally going to fix the broken Push Notification system. In its place will be a Notification Center, a place where you can see and act on all of your alerts. The present scheme, putting up a single modal dialog, just stops you in your tracks, shades of the Classic Mac OS. You have to act upon its choices to get rid of it. If more than one notice needs to arrive, it appears you’re stuck.

Most every element of the iOS is getting a serious update in version five. You’ll be able to perform modest image enhancements of your photos, borrowing some of the tools from iPhoto for OS X. You’ll even be able to open the Camera app from the Lock screen, which will be a real boon in capturing that once-in-a-lifetime moment.

Perhaps the most significant upgrade will make the iPhone and iPad PC Free. You won’t need a Mac or a PC to activate and set up your iOS device, and all the syncing can be done in the cloud.

According to Apple, all current iOS gear will be compatible, plus the original iPad and 3rd generation iPod touch, which essentially backdates compatibility to 2009, which isn’t too shabby in the mobile universe. That doesn’t mean performance will necessarily be great on the older hardware. The iPhone 3GS is struggling to keep up with iOS 4, so I suspect the next software upgrade might tempt many of you to finally upgrade your older iPhones.

That takes us to the next iPhone.

Now Apple isn’t always predictable. Assuming that a new iPhone had to arrive this summer is only one example where Apple didn’t quite meet analyst expectations, though it doesn’t seem that sales were hurt in any noticeable way. But the rumors now point to an iPhone announcement at the end of September or early in October. If that’s true, the expected early September media event to introduce new iPods won’t be the appropriate venue. Or maybe Apple will fool you yet again.

Regardless, when you’re not seeing alleged leaked prototypes, you’ll read plenty of speculation on what Apple is going to change.

One camp has it that Apple is going to deliver a major upgrade, meaning that the square look may be out, and curved may be in yet again. Some suggest the proposed iPhone 5 will have a curved aluminum backside, perhaps mirroring the shape of the iPad 2. From ensuring a family resemblance, this move would make sense. At the same time, the antenna design is being rejiggered to make the iPhone less vulnerable to so-called “death grips.” As much as Apple tried to spin their way out of that controversy, I’ve little doubt that marching orders were given to find a more efficient solution in that $100 million antenna test lab at Apple headquarters.

The other round of speculation talks of an iPhone 4GS, a piece of hardware that will look very much like the current all-so-popular models, only with revised hardware. Again, the antenna configuration will be altered for better performance when gripped tightly in different ways.

Regardless, it seems almost a sure thing that the internal workings will include the same A5 processor as the iPad 2. With more higher pixel camera sensors available, it would seem likely that you’ll have eight megapixels rather than five.

There is a remaining question, and that is whether Apple will go for a world phone, meaning that one model will support both GSM and CDMA in a single handset. That move ought to reduce the costs of manufacturing, though it may not make much difference from a customer standpoint. If you buy an iPhone through one carrier, you’ll be locked in to that carrier unless the unit is jailbroken.

In the U.S., there are reports of an October  media event by Sprint, ostensibly to discuss company strategy, but possibly to also introduce an iPhone for that network. There’s even the possibility of a T-Mobile version, since it’ll be some time next year, even by the most optimistic assessments, before their planned merger with AT&T is acted on.

The real issue is whether the new iPhone will be so different as to make it a must-have. If your contract with your wireless carrier is coming due, no problem. It’s also quite possible AT&T will once again liberalize the early termination terms if you order a new iPhone before the two years are up.

As a practical matter, though, assuming the iPhone 4 will run iOS 5 with essentially the same performance as iOS 4, the rush to upgrade to the next iPhone may not seem so compelling. But count on Apple to amaze us with something totally unexpected in the new model to entice you to upgrade.