In one of this cute and funny Mac versus PC ads, which are sadly no longer being produced, the Mac personification, as portrayed by actor Justin Long, reminded the PC (as portrayed by John Hodgman), that there are over 100,000 Windows viruses, but not on the Mac.

Now this particular phrase became controversial, because you could take away different interpretations. Did he mean that the Mac simply didn’t have over 100,000 viruses, or that it had no viruses? If the latter, Apple’s ad agency was giving out erroneous information. Even though the number of Mac OS X viruses are small, there have been some, although there’s no evidence of any widespread outbreak.

At least not yet!

Therein lies the issue. The Mac OS X Public Beta came out over a decade ago. As the Mac platform has become more popular over the years, security experts, and representatives from security software companies, have reminded us again and again that serious malware outbreaks will come real soon now. Maybe so, but that largely depends on your definition of what “soon” really means.

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I gather there are some of you who assume that, because something is published, it must be true, even if it comes from a site that posts rumors. This can become a trifle irritating when the report ends up being only partly true, or completely false.

When you read an erroneous story, you might wonder where it came from. Are there people sitting in front of their computers making all this up, or did someone, somewhere, provide information that the publishers of those blogs believed to be true?

Now I’m not about to guess which is which. Besides, sometimes those rumor sites have it right, at least in part. So you have to wonder: Just how they are coming by that information? Are they examining the trash bins outside of Apple’s headquarters, or those at one of Apple’s contract factories? Since it’s safe to assume that any mission critical documents are shredded, and that communications by email are encrypted, there’s always the phone. But I assume those conversations might also be secured in some fashion, and even if a government agency was wiretapping those phones, they clearly wouldn’t be feeding the information they gather to a rumor site, or to one of that site’s sources.

Other potential repositories of confidential information could be employees of Apple or one of their suppliers. You have already heard of a certain employee who got in trouble over this, or that infamous episode where an Apple engineer, who was evidently doing external testing of a prototype iPhone 4, either lost or had it taken from him while at a restaurant. The latter episode, however, is an anomaly, and I expect Apple exhorted employees to be more careful with their backpacks and prerelease gear in the future, or heads will roll.

Another potential source is Apple Inc., someone officially charged with feeding the rumor sites tidbits of information, knowing that they’ll jump at the chance to have an exclusive. The sites may not even know the real source, but they may go with the report anyway if it seems even somewhat credible.

While this may seem a screwy way of generating interest in a new product, it’s a known fact that Apple is extremely controlling and secretive; that information is only released when it suits a particular marketing plan. But you and I have no way to know what that marketing plan might be, other than the way it all plays out in public.

It is also well known that Apple will treat certain favored members of the press more openly than others. So you’ll find reviews of new Apple gadgets on or before the day of release, and ahead of most media reviewers, who are left on the back of the bus for their piece of the pie. That is, unless they don’t give up in frustration and buy one to test, and, after use, maybe auction it off on eBay or use it for the office.

You’ll also read stories in the mainstream media that supposedly come from “informed sources,” or something of that sort. Here it is quite possible that Apple is, once again, quietly seeding the stories on the promise that nobody will be quoted directly. The reporters who are so favored with early access know full well that, on the day that they dare violate their pact with Apple, they will lose that cherished status then and there. So they behave themselves, and you often read previews of new Apple products and services that will shortly come to pass. Apple, in turn, can rely on plausible deniability to appear ignorant about the matter.

Of course, if you aren’t among the privileged, you have to fend for yourself. If there are no secret sources to telephone or email you, there’s always — perish forbid — informed speculation. That requires research, to understand the whys, wherefores, and timing of Apple product refreshes, and what product segments they are likely to enter. If you know, for example, that Intel has released a major new processor family that seems suitable for a new Mac, you can expect updated products to incorporate some of those parts once they are available in decent quantities. In some cases, such as the original MacBook Air and some of the Mac Pro versions, Apple got first digs on new Intel processors that were only later made available to other PC makers.

But Apple fools the media time and time again. The latest update to the MacBook Air seemed a long time coming. Some believed the product would soon vanish. But the end result is far more commercially viable. And, of course, Apple TV seemed to be floundering for quite a while until it was totally revamped this past fall.

When Steve Jobs signaled the MacBook Air as heralding the future of the entire MacBook line, you have to wonder whether those forthcoming MacBooks and MacBook Pros might come without built-in optical drives, and whether solid state storage would replace traditional mechanical devices. But with SSD still a luxury purchase when you require capacities above 128GB, it may take a while for chips to get cheap enough to really make this a viable hard drive replacement. But, yes, it will likely happen someday, and thus the MacBook Air might indeed signal major changes in Apple note-books.

And one more thing: When I suggested in yesterday’s column that the next iPad would sport a front-facing camera and perhaps that Micro-USB port, I wasn’t being inspired by a rumor site. Both features are perfectly logical (the latter will be required in Europe next year), and thus I regard it as informed speculation pure and simple.

It’s part of the human condition to tell stories and, often as not, to embellish the ones you hear in the retelling. Sometimes you wonder how information conveyed orally passes on through generations supposedly without loads of changes.

So here’s a little story: Years ago, the late comedian Steve Allen would occasionally conduct an informal experiment on one of his shows. He’d have someone tell a joke to another person, whispering in the recipient’s ear. In turn, the person who heard the story would whisper it to another person, and on it went through ten generations of oral transmission. At the end of the line, the final link in the chain would repeat what he or she had heard.

As you might imagine, that little joke, suffering through ten generations of human oral transmission and embellishment, would bear no relationship to the original. Not even close.

Does this remind you at all about some of those Mac rumor sites?

The scenario is often similar. Someone delivers supposedly secret information about a new product or service from Apple. Maybe it’s an iPad or iPhone case that might deliver hints of an upcoming model changeover.

Such stories can often take a life of their own. Another site quotes the original, maybe adds a smattering of speculation or embellishment to the mix and, after going through this regurgitation cycle a few times, what may have been just a very basic rumor suddenly becomes a major story. It has to be a major story because so many bloggers take it seriously. Sometimes even the mainstream media chimes in, and soon a little event becomes a major revelation.

Now in the old days, a journalist usually wouldn’t just repeat what someone else had already published. They’d try to verify the source, or lacking that, seek out other sources to see if the story had merit. Sometimes there’d even be a denial, or the realization that the information had been distorted somehow in the original report. Regardless, at least some effort was being made to actually do a little reporting, rather than serve is a copying machine.

All too often the simple repetition of a published report, without any new content, is sufficient to give it added credibility. Now you have two publications delivering the same information. Why it must be true!

In this viral media environment, even the most innocuous anecdote, photo, or video can not just assume a life of its ow,n but dominate the headlines.

Consider that curious Antennagate scandal that began that way. Someone posted a YouTube video showing how easy you could kill the reception on an iPhone 4 if you held it a certain way. Everyone wanted to get into the act, so they duplicated the notorious “Death Grip” on their iPhones and, soon enough, Apple had a serious public relations problem.

It’s not that they didn’t make things worse. An offhand comment in an email purportedly coming from Steve Jobs suggested that, if you had such a problem, just hold the phone differently. That only fueled the fire, and before long, Apple issued this strange press release that the problem was actually caused by the overoptimistic display of signal strength bars on your iPhone. Imagine! After building the thing for three years, Apple had just discovered the error of their ways. But don’t you worry! It’ll be fixed in the next iPhone update.

Unfortunately, an incorrect signal strength reading served as a poor excuse for the oh-so-obvious dip in signal strength when the Death Grip was applied. True, other smartphones had the same shortcomings, since they all obeyed the laws of physics. Some even had labels affixed to the sensitive region of the phone, while others put up warning notices in their user manuals. But who reads manuals anyway?

Obviously, the technology testers at Consumer Reports magazine didn’t read manuals, because they fooled themselves into believing that the iPhone 4 was the only smartphone on the planet that had this alleged antenna deficiency. Apple’s solution was to give you all a free case until the furor died down, but Antennagate demonstrates once again how little things, if not dealt with promptly, can come to mean an awful lot.

Now I don’t want to date myself any more than is obvious by the flavor of this article, but at one time newspapers had staffs of investigative reporters who’d actually dig into a story to separate the truth and the fantasy. You still see that from time to time, but as advertising and circulations decreased, publishers fired the least profitable segment of their business. You get the picture!

But as far as Apple rumors are concerned, I have high confidence in these two: The second generation iPad will have a front-facing camera for FaceTime use, and very likely a Micro-USB port, to meet the new European Union requirements for a uniform charging port for mobile devices. You may even see the same port on the iPhone 5.

Apple has gotten a bad rap for high OS upgrade prices. It all started in the early days when you could download the latest and greatest Mac OS free of charge, or just get your blank floppies copied at a local dealer or user group. If you wanted the full package with all the user manuals, you did have to buy the retail package, but few bothered.

One day, back in the days of Mac OS 7, Apple decided to stop giving the crown jewels away, except for the usual maintenance fixer-uppers. Although Mac users complained bitterly about the inability to get what used to be available free, it’s not as if Microsoft gave away copies of Windows.

So Mac users became accustomed, grudgingly of course, to shelling out $99 for Apple’s latest and greatest operating system.

Then came Mac OS X.

In the fall of 2000, you were afforded the “privilege” of buying a copy of the Mac OS X Public Beta for just $29.95. In responses to protests about then having to pay the full $129 retail price for the “final release,” sometimes known as 10.0, Apple relented and allowed you to deduct what you paid for the Public Beta.

Well, that made sense, until Steve Jobs admitted, during the official March 2001 rollout media event, that the first official release of Mac OS X was meant for early adopters and power users. Yes, my friends, it was still a beta, feature limited to the extent that you couldn’t even burn a CD.

When 10.1 arrived, which was largely a bug fix and feature restoration release, Apple’s $19.95 shipping and handling fee was the source of loads of complaints. Why should it cost so much to mail a CD and a tiny booklet? Apple must be cleaning up. Of course, you could also go to your favorite Apple dealer and get a copy — or two or three as I did — at no cost, so this wasn’t such a big issue.

From then on, the reference releases of Mac OS X remained $129 for 10.2 through 10.5, but then came Snow Leopard.

According to Apple, Snow Leopard wasn’t so much a feature release in the sense of sporting 200 or 300 flashy goodies. Instead, it was meant as a slimmer, trimmer OS, without the code for PowerPC Macs, which were no longer supported. New features were intended to create the foundation to allow developers to build more powerful and speedier apps. That is, when they got around to adding support for the new features, and that situation is still very much a work in progress.

Since Snow Leopard wasn’t intended as a full feature release, Apple exacted a modest $29 for a copy for 10.5 users. If you are running 10.4, there is a special Mac Box Set, the latest version of which, recently released, adds iLife ’11 and iWork ’09 to the mix, and sells for the standard $129.

That takes us to Lion.

It’s widely expected that Mac OS X Lion will cost $129, same as the standard issue Mac OS X upgrade. Or maybe not. You see, Apple has been busy reducing the prices of consumer grade software of late, so the latest and greatest iLife is now $49, rather than $79. Does that signal a trend?

Now I fully expect that Lion will sport the usual 200 to 300 brand new features, a few of which will be sexy enough to entice you to buy the upgrade however it’s priced. But I do not include much of that iOS-inspired stuff that, frankly, doesn’t light my fire. It’s a bit like all the additional features of a landlord insurance policy; there’s no harm in them, but you’re really interested in covering the main perils. Yes, auto-save and auto-resume are useful, but I don’t think Apple can hang a full upgrade on those two. There will have to be lots more.

At the same time, with tens of millions of Mac users now accustomed to paying $29 for OS upgrades, do you think they are ready to shell out $100 extra for a single-user copy of 10.7? Talk about being spoiled. It’s also true that Apple exacts only a small part of their revenue from the sale of OS upgrades. Mac OS X is meant as a feature enhancement for Macs, which is what Apple really wants you to buy.

This situation is quite unlike the Windows world, where there are several flavors of Windows, and even though your new PC has the latest version preloaded, it may not be the “lesser” Home Premium version. If you want all the advertised features present and accounted for, prepare to shell out an extra $100 for Ultimate.

Yes, it costs far more to upgrade your Windows box than a Mac. However, Windows power users will generally geek out dealers who offer the “OEM” version, the one allegedly available strictly to manufacturers. But if you’re crafting a home-built PC, technically you’re a manufacturer and thus qualify for pricing that’s far less than what regular consumers pay.

After all is said and done, I expect that Apple will probably not return to the $129 price point for Lion. It’ll be something closer to $79 or $99 a copy, which will simply allow Apple to sell even more copies. But they’ll still prefer that you buy a new Mac, so they can enjoy the full profit experience.