Those so-called supermarket tabloids, such as the National Enquirer, are notorious for publishing bad news. Usually, it’s about celebrities or politicians, and the readers appear to enjoy reading about the peccadilloes of the rich and the famous.

Most of the time, those stories appear to be made up in a reporter’s word processor, although some may be partly true, with lurid embellishments devised to generate headlines. On some occasions, though, they cover a story ignored by the mainstream media and they actually get it right. One particular example involved former Senator John Edwards, who fathered a child with his mistress. Nobody paid attention, but the National Enquirer had the photos and enough evidence to prove that their report was correct.

That takes us to a certain photo that recently appeared in which a frail-looking Steve Jobs appears to be exiting a cancer treatment center. In a curious move, that photo was submitted to a physician who, on the basis of what he saw and knowledge of Jobs’ past medical problems — at least the public versions — concluded he had but six weeks to live.

I don’t pretend to know the truth. But you can no longer say “a picture is worth a thousand words,” since anyone well versed in Photoshop could have edited that photo to make Jobs appear more sickly than he truly is. Naturally Apple has had nothing to say about the story. At the same time, Jobs joined other Silicon Valley executives some days later to have dinner with President Obama. The sole published photo shows Jobs from the rear, so you really can’t see much of significance, other than the fact that he is holding a glass in his hands, and it’s not tipping over.

Even if the story is, at least in part, true, it doesn’t necessarily indicate that Steve Jobs is going to die soon. Notice that nobody is holding Jobs, or helping him to walk in that photo. Further, a cancer survivor would, on a fairly regular basis, undergo periodic examinations to check on his condition. It’s also possible Jobs is undergoing treatment for other problems, such as adverse reactions to the powerful medicines he’s no doubt receiving because of that liver transplant he received in 2009. Maybe he’s suffered from the symptoms of rejection, or he just needs more rest to help the recovery process. I wouldn’t pretend to have any inside information.

At the same, it’s also been reported that Steve Jobs has been seen at the Apple campus since taking that sick leave a few weeks ago. If he is healthy enough to travel to his office, and to attend a dinner meeting with the President of the United States, it wouldn’t seem that he’s at death’s door. If his condition was so serious, you’d expect he’d be bed-ridden most of the time.

But that’s as far as it goes for me. The point is that, while tabloids are sometimes correct, stories are frequently highly exaggerated, deliberately sensationalized to sell papers. Nothing more, nothing less!

Should the worst occur, it doesn’t necessarily mean that Apple is going to suffer right away. Knowing that he was seriously ill when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a few years ago, it would have made perfect sense for him to work with the company’s board and devise a succession plan. Apple is keeping it a secret, ostensibly because of competitive reasons. It may well be that establishing Tim Cook as the temporary CEO is not just supremely logical, because of his expertise as an operations person, but to test his skills to see if he could handle the job permanently.

Sure, you might say that Cook doesn’t have the incredible vision of a Steve Jobs. Certainly he doesn’t have the public charisma. Indeed, his verbal delivery is mostly laid back and dry, but perhaps a little coaching from an acting professional could enhance his performance. Such skills can, to some degree, be learned. More to the point, Cook has an incredibly brilliant team of executives who have absorbed Apple’s DNA and know how to expand on the dreams and hopes of Steve Jobs far, far into the future.

It may well be that Apple can survive and prosper in the tradition of Steve Jobs for many years, until their place in the sun has passed, and other visionary companies are poised to take their place. And even if Steve Jobs does survive for years, as we hope he does, Apple’s ongoing success is never assured.

Yes, the histories of great companies will no doubt give Apple a high ranking. But that’s also true of Ford, Microsoft and other companies that, in their own ways, also changed the world in one way or another.

But make no mistake! I am not inclined to take that tabloid story about the condition of Steve Jobs seriously. If he were truly that ill, I would think other information would have come forth by now to confirm the details. Well, at least I hope I’m right.

The online world of Mac rumor sites is filled with speculation about the expected updates for the MacBook Pro. They’ve even unearthed possible placeholder catalog listings from Best Buy and elsewhere to confirm these stories, with a possible release coming later this week.

I suppose, as speculation goes, this seems reasonable enough. The MacBook Pro had its last upgrade in the spring of 2010. Intel has released a new processor family, Sandy Bridge, that’s supposed to offer the usual enhancements of faster number-crunching capability with improved power management. Integrated graphics, not a strong suit for Intel, are said to be much better at delivering at least adequate frame rates for games.

As you may have heard, the launch of the new Intel parts has been somewhat rocky. Some of the initial production suffered from a hardware bug that might impact long-term performance on certain SATA peripheral ports. With workarounds, and new parts now shipping, that issue appears to involve a trivial delay.

The second brand of speculation is about Light Peak, a brand new fiber optic connection scheme that’s supposed to provide much greater speed for networking and peripherals. Said to have been developed with a huge push from Apple, Light Peak could allow you to connect stuff to your Macs using a single type of cable. On the short term, there will be adapter plugs, I suppose, and the usual glitches until the industry embraces the new protocol.

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It wasn’t so many years ago that Apple’s Mac market share was a mere blip compared to the Windows PC. Some suggested it was mostly noise, and very little signal, but that’s also when the tech pundit of the week suggested Apple was dying any day now.

For the past 19 quarters, Apple’s sales growth has exceeded that of most of the PC industry. Yes, some of the companies who made netbooks grew pretty fast too for a while, but with buyer’s remorse setting in, along with the arrival of the iPad, the netbook became a product whose days in the sun are probably over. That is, except for folks who cannot afford something better.

Now comes the news that the iPad may have finally put Apple over the top in sales. According to a survey of PC note-book sales for the fourth quarter of 2010, from DisplaySearch, the MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, combined with the iPod, had a 17.2% share of the global market. Total unit sales were roughly 10.2 million, compared to 9.3 million for second-place HP. Dell, which seems to be doing better of late, was at number four with 5.9 million.

This survey doesn’t include desktop PCs, but it’s fair to say Apple wouldn’t have done as well, because there’s no iPad equivalent on the desktop side of the fence. More to the point, though, is the fact that this is the sort of survey that many industry analysts wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole, simply because the iPad is included in the stats. They’d rather pretend that the iPad is not a personal computer, and thus should be placed into some other ephemeral category of their choosing. In fact, I gather tablets are subdivided in such a way that the Amazon Kindle, which sort of fits into that category, also gets its own special ranking.

Anything, I suppose, to keep Apple from gaining bragging rights, even though the company’s market value has long since surpassed that of Microsoft, and the same is true for total revenue. Yes, Microsoft still has somewhat higher profits, but most of that comes from software, where actual production costs are quite low, beyond the initial development and ongoing upgrade process.

The real issue, of course, is whether it’s right to call an iPad a personal computer. Just what is a personal computer anyway?

Well, you can certainly run productivity apps on an iPad, and play games, music and videos. Yes, it has Internet access, not to mention email. You can print, after a fashion, to a handful of HP devices, and, if you get a third party hack, to other printers connected to a Mac or PC. In passing, I expect this AirPrint feature will be officially expanded in the not-too-distant future.

Sure, it’s not a Mac, and not a PC, but a personal computer shouldn’t be restricted to only two operating systems. It’s the functionality and not the OS that counts.

You can, of course, create a long list of the PC functions that the iPad doesn’t support — at least not yet! But that’s not any reason to put it in another category. What about those tablets that run Windows 7? Wouldn’t Microsoft want them to be included as part of the total PC sales figures, even if they don’t sell many of them?

At the risk of quoting Steve Jobs again, you have to regard the iPad as the PC of the future. There are certainly things it can’t do, and the fact that it has to be docked with a Mac or PC for data syncing and OS updates is purely temporary, as far as I’m concerned. Some expect that Apple’s huge data center in North Carolina will help free the iPad of dependence on the traditional PC. Remember, you can recharge the thing from a regular wall socket; it doesn’t have to be attached to your regular computer to replenish the battery.

Over time, I continue to believe the iPad will replace the functions of most PCs some day. This doesn’t mean that the original PC form factor is obsolete. There’s plenty of life left in a Mac or a PC, and I expect that many of you will still need them to run legacy apps, and engage in heavy-duty content creation, such as writing long pieces, video editing, and all the other functions for which a tablet is not yet suitable.

It’s also likely that this transition is happening faster than Apple’s competitors wanted or expected. Total iPad sales have already exceeded those of Macs. There seems to be little chance that the current crop of iPad wannabes have any chance of gaining significant market share. As one columnist suggested recently, those new tablets have unsubsidized prices that are way out of whack compared to an iPad. The only way to reduce the price to a sensible level is to tie yourself to a long-term data contract, whether you need one or not. Besides, the iPad is an icon. That’s something none of the current crop of pretenders can hope to achieve.

The real question is this: When will the rest of those industry surveyors recognize reality and give the iPad a fair shake in their stats? Or maybe some must appeal to certain vested interests that just don’t want to see Apple become number one in yet another product category.

When the first iMac arrived in 1998, loads of Mac users — and the usual skeptics — complained about what you lost. Where was the SCSI port? Where do you connect a mouse and a printer? And no floppy drive? How dare they?

As you may recall, the original Bondi Blue iMac had Ethernet and USB, but that was it; all the other ports to which Mac users were accustomed were gone. No ADB for input devices, no LocalTalk for printers, no SCSI for hard drives, scanners, and other stuff. Of course, that also meant you were free of SCSI conflicts, which could sometimes cause your Mac to hang unyieldingly while trying to get data from a hard drive.

If you wanted to connect a peripheral using a different connection method, you needed some sort of adapter, assuming one was available. There were also external floppy drives for those of you who couldn’t break the habit, but they only worked with the higher capacity 1.4MB or HD variety. As far as the rest of the floppies were concerned, well, good luck, or just use a different Mac.

USB was especially troublesome, because few devices supporting that protocol were available. Indeed, USB first debuted on the Windows side of the tracks, but it went nowhere until it was embraced by Apple on the iMac. Of course, with a Windows PC, you had loads of legacy ports too, so USB wasn’t required. Apple changed the rules.

It took a while for Mac users to become accustomed to such changes. If you opted to buy a Power Mac, you’d often order it with a SCSI card so you could use your existing external drives and scanners. Apple’s FireWire, which debuted on the Power Mac, and ultimately arrived on the iMac, was meant to replace SCSI functionality in large part.

The point is that Apple, under the direction of Steve Jobs, was fearless when it came to removing older technologies and adopting new ones. These days, the iPod, which debuted as a FireWire device, only supports USB. FireWire has vanished from the MacBook and MacBook Air. Apple has never even considered adding a Blu-ray drive, although they are available from third party vendors. Blu-ray, according to Steve Jobs, has complicated licensing schemes that amount to a “bag of hurt.”

The MacBook Air even lost the Ethernet port, because it was meant to connect wirelessly as much as possible. There’s no internal optical drive either, although both are available as USB-based accessories. I wonder how many of you actually buy them.

As rumors expand that a new generation MacBook Pro is already in production, you have to wonder whether Apple is picking up a trick or two from the MacBook Air. While Ethernet, USB, and a single FireWire 800 port, are probably givens, can you depend on an optical drive? How often do you really need one?

I’m not just referring to CDs and DVDs. Some of you might use optical media for backup, and what about installing software? Yes, the Mac App Store helps in moving software installations to the cloud. Many of the most popular apps you buy are also available unboxed from other sites; even the Adobe Creative Suite, though it’s one huge download if you go that route.

Not having an optical drive means a lighter weight portable computer, with one less mechanical device to break. Whether it presents an inconvenience depends on your requirements. I know that my MacBook Pro has been here for 10 months, and I’ve used the optical drive maybe once or twice. The iMac, purchased in late 2009, has had its optical drive working more often, maybe once a month. I suppose an external drive would comfortably replace both. As with the MacBook Air, your OS backup can be reduced to a small USB drive, but don’t lose it when you toss out the trash.

Apple’s approach is thoroughly different from most consumer electronics companies. The normal approach is that, once a hardware feature is added, it rarely goes away. Apple long ago decided that good design is not just knowing what features to add, but what to avoid, or, in fact, remove.

I can’t say that a MacBook Pro without an optical drive would be a great seller. It may be too premature to wean many Mac users from a hardware component long taken for granted. At the very least, Apple will need to offer an external drive, as an option, for those of you who are still devoted to optical.

At the very least, expect to see more and more solid state drives offered, at least as an option. I expect they are still far too expensive if you require 480GB or more. Going from the standard 128GB on the 13-inch MacBook Air to 256GB adds $300 to the purchase price.

Apple’s designers, and Steve Jobs of course, have the gift of understanding where technology is going. Features may vanish from Macs or mobile gadgets. You won’t like it, but, after a few years, you’ll see the method in Apple’s madness.