There is a fairly standard routine for product refresh cycles in the auto industry. After a major model upgrade, in which the sheet metal and inner workings are extensively redesigned, the manufacturers take a breather (or start work on the next major revision). Annual updates for the next few years will tend to be incremental. Maybe the sheet metal will have fewer curves, or extra curves. The engine lineup may be fine-tuned, perhaps fuel economy figures will improve, and there will be more electronic gizmos to check off on the option list.

Such product cycles are normal. It can cost upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars for a major redesign, and doing that every single year will quickly eat into the profits of even the largest auto makers in the industry.

But if sales take a nosedive because of a poor design, you can bet that changes will be afoot, and an improved model will be rushed into production just as soon as possible. Even then, it might take a year or two to get the revised product into the showrooms. It’s surely a whole lot easier in the PC industry.

In a sense, Apple tends to follow the auto industry product update template. A major redesign of a specific model, such as the MacBook Pro and the unibody case, is followed by very minor speed bumps. Processors and graphics chips are swapped out and replaced with the latest and greatest from the parts bins of Apple’s component suppliers. Hard drives may have larger capacity, more solid state drives will appear in the lineup, and perhaps you’ll get a brand new feature to chew over. In the case of the most recent MacBook Pro refresh, it signaled the arrival of the super-speed peripheral port known as Thunderbolt.

In fact, if you took my 2010 MacBook Pro and put it side-by-side with the 2011 version, you probably would be hard pressed to find any visual difference. Aside from a different icon, the Thunderbolt port matches last year’s tiny monitor port. In fact, they are pin-for-pin compatible and both can be used to add an external display, although Thunderbolt can also support such high-end peripherals as RAID drives.

The rumor mills are now rampant with speculation that a major case redesign is in the offing for the MacBook Pro family in 2012 (or later this year), perhaps resembling the MacBook Air, with its tapered underside. Of course, that raises a more significant question, which is how Apple will squeeze such internal parts as optical drives in a slimmer, trimmer case. The expectation is that Apple will ditch them, simply because they are seldom used nowadays, that people who need them can do just as well with a USB-based drive on a small dongle intended for occasional use. Maybe that works all right, till you’re on a plane, and you want to watch a DVD from your personal collection. Suddenly you’re reaching for an extra appliance to view that special content.

Then again, maybe Apple will figure out how to retain the optical drive in a slimmer form factor, perhaps by coaxing one of their component makers to build a trimmer mechanism. Apple has the sort of buying power that’s sufficient to induce the companies with which they contract to build custom parts. Sure, maybe the same parts will ultimately be available for other PC makers to use, but few of them really have a sense of exquisite design and functionality anyway.

Moving along, there’s that aging tower design for the Mac Pro, which began in a somewhat different form with the Power Mac G5. Yes, the internals were simplified, since they didn’t need a gazillion cooling fans to keep your Mac from frying eggs. But the current iteration shows little sign of the miniaturization that’s become part and parcel of Apple’s other products. There is, for example, a published report of a somewhat thinner version that will be installable in racks. No, I’m not taking about the 1U pancake design of the late — and, to some, lamented — Xserve. I’m speaking more of what’s called a 3U design, which will still be thinner and lighter than the current back-breaking version, yet contain all of its expandability.

But if Apple is pouring a ton of cash into redesigning various Macs, you just know they intend for those new form factors to last out a few refreshes. For otherwise it wouldn’t make sense. But at least Apple is trying. If you examine mobile and desktop PCs from Dell and other major box assemblers, you might easily mistake the 2011 model, at least on the surface, for the 2001 version. With minor changes in the face plate, they continue to look nearly the same, since they are just commodity products that most customers buy for utility, rather than consider a superior, elegant face and an empowering user interface.

After all, sex appeal doesn’t always make it into the enterprise. Then again, since more and more Macs are being embraced by the business world, maybe, just maybe, the PC makers who still fail to grok elegant industrial design, will begin to change their ways. Maybe they’ll even follow the Apple and auto industry refresh cycle, but I doubt it.

Well, the news came today that, despite congressional investigations and lawsuits to address all those inflammatory allegations about what Apple’s “evil” data gathering operations are retrieving from you, Apple isn’t tracking your movements on your iPhone. At nearly the same time, the White House released a so-called “long form” birth certificate showing, once again, that President Obama was born in Hawaii, and not in Kenya, Zeta Reticuli, or any other alien locale.

Now both issues, and loads of others, demonstrate that, when there’s a perceived lack of information, imaginations can go wild and easily manufacture conspiracy theories of all sorts. In the case of the President, his people released the standard computerized certificate of “Live Birth” long ago. It’s the same sort of birth certificate I received when I requested a copy last year, and it’s the same type of document my wife and son have in their possession. They are all regarded as legal proof of one’s birth in the U.S., thus entitling you to get a driver’s license, passport, or any similarly important document.

That’s all well and good, except if you’re a conspiracy theorist, and feel, without evidence, that you must demand more.

In the case of that notorious tracking cache file on your iPhone, it was uncovered recently by security researchers, and the issue has become important enough to influence Washington politicians, state legal authorities, and even form the basis of a lawsuit. Both Apple and Google were asked to explain what they know about you, and how they come by that information.

According to Apple’s rather dry and detailed question and answer document on the iPhone tracking issue, the data basically shows the locations of network access points, be they cell phone towers, or Wi-Fi stations. Your credit card information, bank account access, and other personal information that you want to protect, is not stored in that file. More to the point, whatever information Apple does retrieve is stored anonymously, meaning it can’t possibly be traced back to you.

The real issue, however, is that the tracking file was present even if you shut off the Location feature. That, Apple admits, is a bug that they intend to fix in the near future. What’s more the cache file will be restricted to just seven days, and will contain less data of your iPhone’s movements during that time. The tracking file will not be backed up, and a future reference release of the iOS will even encrypt that file.

Now shorn of all the privacy concerns, having your iPhone (or iPad connected to a 3G network) keep tabs of your location can be a good thing. Consider the plight of the police or emergency medical workers. Suppose you were seriously injured in an accident along a lonely country road, and you call 911 for help. You may be lost, not fully aware of where you are, but the E911 system will allow them to determine your location within a rough boundary. It could save your life.

Say you want to use a GPS program for navigation. It’s certainly cheaper than buying one of those new-fangled systems on a car, where even family autos may sport systems that can cost $2,000 or more. In order to guide you to your destination, both GPS and triangulation of your location via cell towers are employed to guide you along your way. Bear in mind that GPS is slow, the result of having to coordinate data from multiple satellites, and engage in back and forth communication with your mobile device. The iOS data cache helps speed up the process, and improves accuracy. You can’t argue with that.

Besides, Google just happens to storing data from your Android OS device. Just what are they doing with that information?

But I agree that, if you want to turn off Location monitoring on your iPhone, the process should be thorough. There should be no remnants of a data file hanging around, even if that file can’t provide any private information about you to a third party if they stole your iPhone or 3G-equipped iPad. Your family photos and stored passwords for online access are far more critical.

Now don’t forget that you can use Apple’s Find My iPhone feature, with works with MobileMe, to wipe your iPhone clean of data if its lost or stolen. That’s one sensible reason to want to track its whereabouts.

Sure, maybe Apple could have done a better job in alerting customers to what was going before the rampant speculation mounted, and the media made a big deal of the issue. Steve Jobs and two of his senior VPs, Philip Schiller and Scott Forstall, also addressed those issues in an interview at AllThingsDigital.

While I enjoy conspiracy theories as much as anyone — and we do cover them on occasion on The Paracast — I expect evidence ahead of speculation. It’s very easy to want to blame a certain multinational company, with the legendary “Walled Garden,” and the charismatic CEO who creates a “reality distortion field,” with invading your privacy for their personal gain. The facts may be boring, but they do appear to demonstrate that, once again, Apple is striving to be a good corporate citizen. They may make mistakes along the way, but they appear to want to do the right thing.

In recent years, there have been rumors that Apple has been experimenting with resolution independence in Mac OS X. This would mean that images and text would scale to whatever screen size and/or resolution your Mac is using without degrading image quality. Of course doing such a thing in the print medium is old news. Adobe’s PostScript offered device independence, meaning that your documents would look their best regardless of the capabilities of the output device. It wouldn’t matter if it was a cheap inkjet printer, or a super-expensive output device with the maximum resolution the state of the art allows.

In passing, Mac OS X uses PDF technology to display the clearest text and pictures possible.

With the iPhone 4’s Retina Display, the pixels that make up the image are so tiny that, at a normal viewing distance, they seem to vanish. The screen displays text that seems to pop out at you, akin to a printed page. But providing similar capabilities in a larger screen presents one serious obstacle, and that’s the cost of the raw materials. The difference may be modest at 3.5 inches, but might become excessive at 9.7 inches, the iPad’s display size, and way beyond affordability for larger screens. If Apple wants to keep the same retail prices, they have to make killer deals from the LCD makers, or sacrifice profits.

The speculation about the arrival of a Retina Display on a Mac has been fueled by the alleged appearance of icons at twice the usual resolution in the preview versions of Mac OS X Lion that developers have been working on in recent weeks. If the icons are really present, clearly Apple has a purpose in mind behind their development. Or maybe it’s just part of the test process, and the standard icons will be back by the time Lion is released.

But imagine if you were able to buy a Mac with twice the resolution of the current models? Certainly you’d want to keep the physical size of the images and text the same as they are now, for otherwise you’d have to use a magnifying glass to read anything. Or at least those of us who aren’t as young as we used to be.

Certainly, when you consider the possibilities of a Retina Display on a 17-inch MacBook Pro, or 27-inch iMac, you’ll see where that level of quality actually make not make a whole lot of sense for most people, particularly if such enhancements come at a price. Unless you do lots of close-up, detail work, it may be largely a non-issue. At a normal viewing distance of one or two feet, the improvement may not be that visible, except for extremely small text.

Now I’m not being a downer on advanced technology, and I rather suspect that, once I have a 27-inch iMac with Retina Display, I’ll never go back. At the same time, the value of that feature in the real word is mostly hype. It’ll give Apple bragging rights for a while, and I agree there are some forms of work where it will demonstrate an advantage. Certainly the ability to see content on the screen that perfectly matches the crispness of the printed page, assuming lots of people care that  much about print anymore, presents a huge advantage. Even then, page sizes generally tend to be smaller than the real thing, because of the drive to pack more pixels on the screen. The letter-sized page stopped being letter sized long ago without scaling your documents to 150% or thereabouts.

Now adding more pixels has been part and parcel of the consumer electronics industry too. Consider high definition TVs. The best you get, 1080p, is actually more than any TV station displays (though cable and satellite systems do offer it on Pay-Per-View). You get that resolution as a matter of course on a Blu-ray DVD. Truth to tell, though, even with a 50-inch flat panel set, you probably won’t see much of a difference at a normal viewing distance of eight to ten feet. But close up, it’s fabulous.

I rather suspect a Retina Display — or something close to that level — will arrive on the iPad and regular Macs one of these days. As I said, it all depends on the availability of high-resolution flat panels at a price that makes sense. That’ll happen once technology and production yields improve, and certainly if Apple tosses a few billion dollars at the problem by signing orders with some of the display builders, you’ll see it happen even faster.

As with the iPhone’s Retina Display, Apple will probably get them first. It’ll be a while before the rest of the PC industry falls in line. Or maybe they won’t care. I mean, it’s not as if you’re seeing Android-based smartphones, or models using other mobile operating systems, boasting of similarly sharp screens.

Indeed, most of Apple’s own ads for the iPhone don’t play up the display advantages. You continue to discover how the iPhone enriches your digital lifestyle, rather than the specs of the raw ingredients. But it’s still neat to have shaper pictures.

There’s a growing and mostly media-inspired controversy about what information Apple’s Location Manager in your iPhone is collecting about you. Yes, there is a feature where you will allow the unit to store such information, but this data is supposedly stored anyway as a file regardless of your preference.

With growing concerns about online privacy, you have a right to concerned about what others know about you and your activities. If your movements are being tracked by outsiders, could that information possibly be used against you in some fashion, even if only to see if you’re more susceptible to certain online marketing schemes?

In a recent Wall Street Journal story, they actually checked the tracking file created by the iPhone. They confirmed that the file remains intact, regardless of your preference to record your location. According to published reports, authorities in South Korea and several European countries are probing Apple’s data recording activities to find out what’s really going on. Two U.S. Senators have dived in and requested a probe, and a lawsuit has been filed by private citizens in U.S. federal court.

Now understand Apple already stores a reasonable amount of information about you. In addition to product registration data, your iTunes account stores your address, phone number, and, most important, your billing preference. If you buy or rent something from iTunes, the App Store, or the Mac App Store, Apple is assured of getting prompt payment from you. Of course, that assumes your credit card is current, has enough of a credit limit to support the purchase, or there are enough available funds in your PayPal account.

My purchases from Apple have been modest over the years, so I’ve never exceeded the limits. As a journalist, when I review an Apple mobile gadget, they will send an iPhone gift card with which to make a few purchases, so the reviewer doesn’t have to reach into their own — or their employer’s — pockets unless they exceed the modest amount of cash available.

For the most part, iTunes has been an extremely secure environment for tens of millions of Apple customers. There have been reports of accounts being breached on a rare occasion, but the situation doesn’t appear to present a potential serious threat to customers. Besides, if you find a bogus charge on your credit card, or PayPal account (as I did recently when someone evidently skimmed the debit card number), you will be able to report the transaction to your financial institution and have it removed.

So far so good. Apple appears to be behaving as the responsible corporate citizen. Insofar as that infamous tracking file is concerned, unless someone gains control of your iPhone, and hacks it, the file is otherwise unavailable to any evildoer. It’s there strictly to allow you to your iPhone know where you are, so you can find a nearby restaurant, a supermarket, or use GPS with a navigation app.

At the same time, Google’s activities have also been the source of ongoing concerns. Consider that report a while back about vans traveling around the world to take photos for Google’s mapping feature, only to be caught sniffing unprotected Wi-Fi networks for data. Sure, they said, that was a mistake, but I’m not sure what you can believe. Remember, too, that Google is tracking your online activities, particularly in the apps that access their services, so you can be presented with carefully targeted ads. That is, of course, Google’s main source of revenue.

While there’s nothing wrong with making a fair profit from one’s products and services, the only issue here would be whether Google is invading your privacy, but you do have the option to opt out if you prefer.

As to the question about that mysterious tracking file in your iPhone, supposedly Apple isn’t capturing that file or its contents, and tracking your whereabouts. How do I know? Well, I don’t actually, but according to a published report, Steve Jobs said so in one of his unpredictable emails to a customer who threatened to get an Android OS phone if Apple didn’t give a satisfactory response to his concerns.

In answer to the first question, whether Google tracks users of Android OS smartphones, Jobs responded, “Oh yes they do.” He further added, “We don’t track anyone. The info circulating around is false.”

I suppose it might be possible that this email is a fake. Phony messages of that sort to appear from time to time, but the rumor site on which it first appeared appears to be taking it seriously, I presume based on examining the headers in the message.

Then again, Macworld and other publications have said the same thing about that tracking file. It stays on your iPhone, and is not being uploaded to Apple. But it would be more reassuring to all concerned if the file was automatically deleted every few weeks. It would also help if Apple would make a clear statement as to how this feature is managed, and their policy about retrieving and managing customer information.

So far as The Night Owl is concerned, it makes perfect sense to be concerned about your privacy. If Apple is behaving badly, they should be called out on their offense, and face the consequences. If that tracking file is not a serious issue, and I hope it’s much ado about nothing, some clarification would be helpful for everyone. It would also be good to know how Google handles the tracking of its users, and what protections are being offered, not to mention Microsoft and other companies that offer products and services that keep tabs on your location.