I suppose you could say that Verizon Wireless picked a peculiar time to start selling a CDMA version of the iPhone. After all, the GSM version of the product has been out since last june, which, in the tech universe, is a pretty long time. Besides, since an iPhone 5 is due some time this summer, that spanking new Verizon offering is bound to have a relatively brief shelf life.

At the same time, the media has been all over the issue suggesting that initial sales haven’t been too good. After all, you didn’t have crowds snaking around the block waiting for this Verizon version of the iPhone to arrive at their favorite Apple Store. Yes, there were crowds here and there, but quite manageable. And, unlike AT&T in previous years, Verizon’s activation system had little difficulty managing the setup process.

However, Verizon boss Daniel Mead has since said that the iPhone launch was the largest in the company’s history, bar none. The reason it had all gone so smoothly, he says, is because of a staggered rollout that began days ahead of the availability of the iconic smartphone in retail stores. First Verizon’s own subscribers were allowed to place orders. Indeed, the initial ordering process resulted in a sell-out after just two hours, but the iPhone’s availability resumed soon thereafter.

The actual numbers will be released as a part Verizon’s next quarterly financial report, unless, of course, Apple beats them to the punch. But I’m not suggesting you’ll hear anything about it at this week’s media event, which is expected to focus strictly on the iPad 2 and, perhaps, iOS 5.

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After loads of speculation about what Apple might or might not be up to, it was a busy week, and I’m not just referring to the annual shareholder’s meeting, or those tabloid stories about the state of Steve Jobs’ health as he prepared to celebrate his 56th birthday.

There were also troubling rumors that the next iPad would be delayed by two months, and that the iPhone 5 would suffer a corresponding hold up. Mind you, these two rumors were never officially confirmed by anyone in the know; they were just stories that some sites took just a little too seriously. Evidently investors did too. It wasn’t just the crisis in Libya that was hurting Apple’s price, but concerns that, in addition to having a very ill CEO, two of Apple’s most important gadgets might not ship on time.

Now I suppose the arrival of the next iPhone remains an open question, but Apple answered concerns about the iPad simply by inviting the media to a special event in San Francisco set for March 2nd. The invitation made it quite clear that it was about the iPad, simply by rolling up a calendar window to an iPad desktop. Certainly Apple wouldn’t gut sales of the current model by announcing a revision prematurely. That’s the province of other tech companies. Instead, it seems sensible to expect the next iPad to ship within days of the official announcement. I won’t expand on the new features, but they will probably include a front-facing camera to support FaceTime, more powerful electronics and, no doubt, a somewhat thinner and lighter case. The possibility of a higher resolution display seem less certain, since there appears to be little to confirm the existence of 9.7-inch flat panel displays with four times as many pixels at a reasonable cost.

Then again, Apple is notorious for doing the unexpected.

Another development had also been anticipated. As the MacBook Pro lineup got long in the tooth, despite great sales, a new lineup arrived Thursday, incorporating dual-core and quad-core chips from Intel’s new Sandy Bridge processor family. It means much faster integrated graphics, and that, along with new discrete chips from AMD, delivers up to three times the graphics performance. That is, if you believe Apple’s claims.

A new peripheral port, Thunderbolt, originally developed by Intel under the name Light Peak, arrived. It is many times faster than FireWire 800 and USB 2.0, and you can daisy chain up to six devices on as single port, including an external display. It will probably take time for peripheral makers to build audio/video interfaces and high-performance drives to take advantage of the new technology.

Unfortunately, some tech pundits aren’t too impressed. Despite better performance, and the promise of Thunderbolt, it wasn’t enough. You see, there were other rumors about the 2011 MacBook Pros that failed to pan out. One had it that the hard drives would be hybrid devices, offering a mixture of 8-16GB of solid state storage, along with the standard mechanical assemblies. This would, the theory goes, provide much better startup performance, and perhaps better speeds from apps that depend on system resources.

But there is no hybrid drive in evidence. Instead, you get the usual run of regular hard drives, plus three pricey SSDs. In addition, the case is the same as the previous version, despite expectations that it would be slimmer to mirror the looks of the MacBook Air. Battery life remains in the 7 hour range, which is still quite good.

Apple did surprise us, however, with the release of the first Developer Preview of Mac OS X Lion. In fact, I had written a piece containing my hopes and dreams for Lion, not realizing that it would have a very short shelf life, although I did revise it some to recognize the updated information.

Lion is being fleshed out considerably. You can find the latest and greatest at Apple’s Lion site, and, even though they sign confidentiality agreements, you can expect some developers will leak some juicy tidbits about Lion in the days to come. Already there are stories about Finder revisions and other fancy stuff that may, in the end, truly justify a full $129 upgrade price. Mind you, Apple hasn’t revealed a price yet, only that delivery is planned for this summer.

One intriguing feature is Version. As you work on a document, the state is saved every hour. So if you need to revert your book manuscript, desktop publishing or video editing projects to a previous version, you’ll be able to bring up a Time Machine-style interface to choose the version you want.

Apple also greatly expanded the description of Resume, and it has become quite a compelling feature. At first, it appeared to just be something that would let you quickly relaunch an application. But it’s more than that. Imagine a typical situation, where you have loads of documents open in several apps. For one reason or another, you need to restart your Mac, perhaps after installing a system update. With Resume, once you restart, all of your previously opened apps will relaunch, along with the documents. Basically your work environment will be as it was prior to the restart. This is similar in concept to some old Mac OS utilities, by the way.

However, it appears that Resume, Version and Auto Save — the latter saving your documents periodically in case you forget to do so — are, according to Apple, “*Available with apps that have been developed to work with Lion.” This means that you may have the confusing situation of some apps supporting these features, and others not. Thus Resume would be less successful in restoring your working environment until all or most of your apps are updated.

On the other hand, Lion is still several months from release, and things will probably change — for the better in these three respects, I hope.

Editor’s Note: This article was written ahead of Apple’s release Thursday morning of a Developer Preview of Mac OS X Lion. Over the next few days, as further word comes forth about the new features, we’ll see just how much our hopes and dreams have been fulfilled.

The MacBook Pro has received its expected refresh, and as the media prepares for the release of the next iconic iPad at next week’s special event, there’s talk once again about yet another major release from Apple. At last October’s Back to the Mac presentation, you saw the first glimmerings of the next version of Mac OS X, code-named Lion. But the brief demonstration raised more questions than it answered.

The new features on display were, in large part, derived from the iOS, an expected development. But most were mostly eye candy that probably don’t offer a large amount of improvement in your productivity. The best two of the lot appear to be, at long last, a system-wide ability to automatically save your documents, and to auto-resume apps when you want to relaunch them. Both features, plus Version, which stores different “states” of your document, will require updates to your apps. As to auto-save, there have been utilities offering that feature on the Mac dating back to the early days. You only wonder why it took Apple so long to glom onto this very useful feature.

The iOS-style app launch display doesn’t impress me. Unless you can pick and choose which ones appear, you’re apt to have dozens and dozens of pages of those things, which works against easy organization. But it certainly looks nice.

So there are now published reports that Apple is ramping up development of Lion toward the promised summer release (confirmed by release of a Developer Preview), and that the key features might include significant changes to the user interface. Now from the early days of Aqua and Mac OS X, changes up till now have been relatively minor. The look and feel has been smoothed, and seems less jarring, more elegant. The question is whether Apple plans to take the theme further in the present direction, or devise something totally different. Will it offer the requisite “Wow!” factor? Time will tell.

The other issue is whether Apple plans to make any drastic alterations to the OS plumbing, but that seems doubtful. That was the purpose of Snow Leopard, and, at this point, it would be more comforting for developers not to have to change things all over again. I also expect Apple’s system architects planned on 10.6’s fundamentals to last for at least a few reference releases.

In saying that, perhaps there will be needed enhancements here and there to the security model, such as sandboxing all apps (which is already done in the iOS), and other features that those who want a safer Mac will crave. These aren’t sexy features, but as Macs penetrate further into the business world, you can bet that system admins will require the most secure environment possible. Yes, I know that there haven’t been any widescale Mac OS X malware infections, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. More to the point, the Mac is the “IT” platform right now as far as traditional personal computers are concerned. What’s more, Apple has hired additional security professionals, and their ideas will likely be incorporated into new OS releases.

Past the pomp and circumstance, and the under-the-hood improvements, I would hope Apple will consider needed changes to all or most of the core features of Mac OS X, such as the Finder and Open/Save dialogs. The Finder remains controversial. It gets better and better, but is always missing that last element of spit and polish. After a decade, you can’t even depend on a Finder window retaining the preset location and position. It would also be nice to have more sort options for Column View. I find myself returning to List View more and more often when managing my stuff.

The Open/Save dialog, though more Finder-like these days, remains underutilized. I have long suggested that Apple’s OS engineers should take inspiration from Jon Gotow’s DefaultFolder X. From automatic rebound, to the ability to actually rename a file within the dialog, I continue to wonder why Apple hasn’t simply offered Jon a job, and licensed his app. Maybe Apple’s interface designers will find ways to improve the spit and the polish, but there’s a lot of meat and potatoes in that utility. Unfortunately, DefaultFolder X doesn’t get the proper respect behind a modest user base of power users and content creators.

Worse, many Mac users avoid Open/Save. To launch a document, they double-click a Finder icon, even if the appropriate app is already open. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used these “obscure” words, “Choose Open from the File menu,” and heard responses that usually began with long pauses, and ended with, “What’s that?”

I’ve also been lobbying for years for an improved Help model. Not that dreaded Balloon Help of Mac OS 7, but something for the 21st century that is truly helpful, perhaps employing fuzzy logic to assess your skill levels based on the information you seek, and offering the assistance you truly need. It’s unfortunate that lots of really useful OS features go underutilized simply because they aren’t readily discovered.

Editor’s Note: Hours after I wrote the article below, Apple sent out one of its famous media invitations, announcing a special event to be held in San Francisco on March 2nd. As usual, the illustration in the invitation provides a broad hint at what it’s all about. In this case, the date is slightly peeled away to reveal what appears to be an iPad’s desktop. ‘Nuff said!

However, this week, Apple’s stock price took a dip when unconfirmed rumors arose that the so-called iPad 2 has been delayed until June as the result of production delays. Up till then, it was widely believed that the next iPad would come in April, a year after the original. And yet another rumor spoke of a delay in the iPhone 5 until September.

Understand that expectations of this sort are all about wishful thinking. Apple upgrades the iPhone annually, or has done so, except for building a special CDMA version for customers of Verizon Wireless and other carriers that use that cellular protocol. The same upgrade schedule applies to the iPod. Since two of Apple’s mobile product lines receive predictable updates (or have in recent years), you should expect the same from the iPad.

I suppose this makes sense for lots of reasons. More powerful processors, with superior energy-saving capabilities, are now available. Apple has surely learned a thing or two about designing tablet computers, and there are certain features that absolutely, positively, must be included in the next iPad.

What sort of features? Well, Apple is pushing FaceTime video conferencing, so therefore the iPad must be outfitted with a front camera to expand support across iOS and Mac products. There may even be a rear camera, although taking regular snapshots with such a gadget would seem an awkward process. But since the competition has two cameras, and it doesn’t cost a whole lot more to have both, Apple is expected to join the crowd.

At the same time, the iPad is a little too heavy for extended single-handed use. That’s a key advantage of the Amazon Kindle when it comes to reading. Certainly a sharper screen and extra freedom from reflections would help, particularly when you’re trying to use the iPad on the beach.

Despite getting a little long in the tooth when it comes to hardware and features, it’s not as if the iPad is losing its luster. It’s still the iconic product that has become a subplot for broadcast and cable TV shows. Can you beat that? Sales appear to be continuing at a good clip.

But, as I said, Apple never promised when the next iPad would come, or what features would be offered. Their internal release schedule remains a closely-guarded secret.

Maybe there is a production delay, but there will be no official confirmation from Apple or its suppliers. You’ll only know the truth if there is no new iPad come April or May. But that didn’t stop a bunch of investors from being scared off.

When it comes to other Apple gear, there are signs that a new MacBook Pro lineup is coming this week, some say to coincide with Steve Jobs’ 56th birthday on February 24th. The fact that existing inventories are rapidly disappearing without replenishment appears to indicate the channels are ready to accept the new model. This is typical Apple behavior. There’s a lesser rumor that the iMac will also be refreshed, but there’s far less evidence for that.

But if you didn’t see a new MacBook Pro and iMac this week, what’s the harm? Is last year’s version of both so far out of date that your experience as a Mac user, and your productivity on the job, are being seriously harmed? But Intel has new chips out, so there has to be an update. No ifs, ands, or buts about it.

I suppose this state of affairs is doubly true with Mac OS X. Yes, Lion, or 10.7, supposedly due later this year. You’ve already seen a brief preview at Apple’s site, although the new features don’t strike me as must-haves. It’s all about eye-candy, and I expect Apple to do a lot better in defining the need for this upgrade in the next few months.

However, is Snow Leopard so bad that you absolutely require a better version? It’s not like Windows Vista, which was bypassed in record numbers by businesses. Apple need make no apologies for making Mac OS 10.6 a glorified service pack, with mostly under-the-hood enhancements, and selling it for $100 less than a standard upgrade. Besides, it’s not as if Microsoft’s successor to Windows 7 is going to arrive anytime soon, or that there’s the promise of any seriously compelling enhancements. In fact, it seems, if you believe Microsoft, the biggest advantage Windows 7 can offer over Vista is the ability to pin your document windows at the corners of the screen. Is that really sufficient reason to dump the Mac OS in favor of Windows?

Not to the public, since Apple’s market share is on a steady roll, ahead of most PC makers. Indeed, if you regard the iPad as a personal computer — and you should — Apple is number one on the global note-book market.

More to the point, it’s not as if Apple’s customers, or prospective customers, are not going to do business with the company if a new product happens to be a few weeks late.d to announce the new iPad. So there you go!