Several recent rumors have the Apple watchers scrambling to figure out what’s going on. As usual, some of the stories arose over patent filings, even though the process of securing intellectual property rights doesn’t actually guarantee that you’ll ever see a real product featuring that technology.

One curiosity spoke of what you might want to consider a “Mac Convertible,” meaning that you’d be able to run it in the same fashion as any other Mac, using Mac OS X. But you’d also have the option to swivel the screen and engage an iOS mode. This would make it roughly akin to a huge iPad with all the touchscreen goodies.

Now even before you examine the usability of such a scheme, actually doing the development work on this hybrid operating system shouldn’t be such a big deal. After all, both the iOS and Mac OS X sit atop the same basic core system. Moreover, when developers build software for the App Store, they will generally test their work on Macs running Apple’s developer tools, which deliver the content on screen in a special iOS window.

You might compare it to the legendary Classic environment, which allowed older Mac apps to run in a custom or emulator environment within Mac OS X. But the iOS would be far more native since, as I said, it’s essentially Mac OS X with a different skin and some internal alterations.

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This is likely an exceedingly silly question, but when you read what some of the armchair Apple critics spout on a far too regular basis, you’d think they have the gall to imagine themselves in the CEO office supplanting Steve Jobs and his executive team, doing a far better job. That may seem a stretch, but when a company continues to report record sales and profits, you have to accept the possibility that they actually know what they’re doing.

This doesn’t mean they can’t do a better job, but when you read article after article about how Apple is making foolish moves, you wonder if their stellar success may just be an accident. They are poised for a big fall. Maybe not this year or the next, but it is inevitable. How can they possibly succeed when they are so busy doing the wrong things?

This isn’t to say that Apple hasn’t screwed up badly, particularly in the past. Just what was former soft drink salesperson John Scully thinking when he was hoodwinked into licensing portions of the Mac OS interface to the one and only Bill Gates so long ago? That gave Gates and Microsoft the tools with which to affix a graphical user interface on to DOS, a text-based OS, and make it look and act something like a Mac.

Sure, it took a number of years for Microsoft to make it work well enough to be accepted by a large portion of the business community, at the expense of Macs. Yes, the Mac OS, aging by that point, may have been fundamentally better, but with even an 80% solution, along with loads of cheap gear and tons of applications to run, Apple seemed doomed to a tiny niche status.

It’s not that Apple didn’t help the cause. Rather than focus on a small number of well-designed products sold at fair prices, they wanted to be everything to everyone. You had loads of Macs along with a low-end variation, the Performa, that were offered in so many near-identical configurations even Apple’s top marketing executives found it difficult to separate one from the other.

In addition to keeping the prices unduly high compared to similarly-outiftted Windows hardware, Apple seemed to want to make the internal workings as hostile as possible for basic upgrades. This may not matter so much on a basic consumer model, but when the high-priced professional Macs required actual removal of internal cabling and logic boards to add a few memory sticks, you had to wonder just what the designers were thinking.

I remember a meeting involving Apple’s customer beta testers — a group that was exorcised by Steve Jobs no doubt in the interests of reducing the potential for new product leaks — where the audience applauded enthusiastically upon seeing a new Mac minitower that was actually easy to upgrade. Imagine that!

At the same time, many cheap PC boxes could be opened with a few screws and a slide out case, providing relatively easy access to the interior for the needed upgrades of peripheral cards, hard drives, and, of course RAM.

All right, there are still Macs where simple memory upgrades have been traditionally difficult, although the latest, higher-priced Mac mini has remedied that deficiency.

But the real problem with the Apple skeptics is that, whenever the company attempts to enter a new market, they are denigrated as incompetent to pursue that strategy. I mean, who’d want to spend $399 for a digital music player back in 2001? What’s this iPod all about, and how did Apple intend to expand it beyond an expensive curiosity?

Of course, you just know Apple was planning an iTunes Store to buy legal digital music, and the ultimate expansion to the Windows market. Apple’s vision included not just for the next quarter, but the next year, the year beyond that, and so on and so forth.

So the iPod became a sensation, and every single alleged iPod killer touted by the media as evidence that Apple had run out of steam failed. Microsoft even had to emulate Apple’s walled garden with the Zune and double-cross their partners to try to compete. They failed.

You hear the same arguments with the iPhone. The walled garden is bad, open is good. More Android OS-flavored gear is being sold in the U.S., so therefore the Mac versus PC wars of the 1990s are being replayed, so expect the same outcome. Of course, they fail to realize that Android is not a consistent platform, with a predictable user interface, or even the ability to upgrade your gear to the latest and greatest software. You are left at the mercy of those greedy wireless carriers who may even offer an alternate app repository rather than the loose-knit file library maintained by Google.

My Android may not be your Android, so it’s hard to really consider it a consistent OS that’s destined to supplant the iOS and the iPhone. Besides, in the last quarter, Apple reported an iPhone sales increase of 91% over the previous year, so it’s not as if they are destined to fail. Even if more Android OS devices are sold, it won’t hurt.

I won’t even get into the iPad. This is the hot ticket for the holiday season, and the also-rans are few and, so far at least, particularly unimpressive. Oh well, the critics say, just wait till next year. Or the year after that.

There are published reports that Apple’s once moribund MacBook Air lineup has begun to sweep the sales charts after the recent upgrade. Apple’s store isn’t showing sales rankings these days, but Amazon was listing the $999 entry-level model as bubbling under the Top 10 when I wrote this article.

Of course such figures change from day to day, hour to hour. There’s no certainty how they even relate to the overall global sales, although it’s clear that the MacBook Air’s slick, elegant form factor and reasonably affordable price has made it a compelling choice, despite the known limitations.

I won’t get into detail about those things, other than that 64GB of solid state storage can be severely restrictive, and not having onboard Ethernet can slow you down. I’m on the fence about the missing optical drive — I realize you can get an external one to dangle from one of the Air’s USB port.

But you have to consider the overall picture, which is whether a MacBook Air can replace a MacBook or MacBook Pro. While slim and trim is useful, and a trimmer 17-inch MacBook Pro would be a tremendous value, is Apple ready to deliver such a product?

Honestly, SSD has some really attractive features, such as lower power consumption, and freedom from the mechanical limitations of traditional hard drives. And I haven’t even begun to consider the vast performance increase. Since so much of what you do on any personal computer is based on a hard drive’s speed, a supposedly underpowered computer equipped with SSD suddenly becomes a near-equivalent of a model with a standard hard drive with a much speedier processor.

The biggest limitation, however, is price. Consider that SSD can cost ten to twenty times as much as a regular hard drive, and you can see where you have to scrimp on space or be prepared to raise the limit on your credit card. In these shaky economic times, that’s not a pleasant prospect.

But when a product is harbinger of the future, don’t assume it means next year, although there have been some rumors about a MacBook Pro equivalent of the MacBook Air next spring. While I can see the larger screen and perhaps elimination of an internal optical drive, I wouldn’t see giving up the gigabit Ethernet port, nor FireWire and maybe the extra USB hookups. One report even suggested that Intel’s new Light Peak peripheral standard would be in the offing, although it now appears that ultra-fast protocol won’t arrive so quickly. Besides, unless there’s some sort of extreme backwards compatibility, you’ll be waiting an awful long time to find gear to which it connects.

When it comes to SSD, it may take several years before production techniques become more efficient, and manufacturing yields expand to a point where it will come even somewhat close to being competitive with mechanical storage devices. So I don’t foresee an immediate adoption of SSD across the board on Apple portable Macs, although you’ll see more and more of them in specially equipped models.

Now my MacBook Pro has a 500GB hard drive, which is more than sufficient for my needs. I could survive with 256GB and have space leftover. I tend to leave most of my stuff on my 27-inch iMac, which includes a 1TB drive.

As some of you realize, Apple currently offers three solid state storage options for the 17-inch MacBook Pro, and they can really set back your budget. 128GB costs an extra $200. To get a reasonably useful 256GB, it’ll set you back $650.00. You have to wonder why Apple seems to manage a more affordable offering for the high-end MacBook Air, at $1,599 with a similar SSD. However, it doesn’t come in a standard drive enclosure, but as chips attached to the logic board. Perhaps that’s one reason why it seems more cost-effective, or maybe Apple made a special deal that will result in lowering SSD prices across the board come next year.

Oh, and in case you asked, 512GB SSD drives add $1,300 to a MacBook Pro’s $2,299 purchase price. Dream on. But, as I said, I expect that loads of MacBook users can survive nicely with a 256GB maximum, and 128GB might even be sufficient for some of you.

Aside from ditching mechanical hard drives, Apple’s huge new data center may make it possible for you to store more and more of your stuff in the cloud. You won’t see any “to the cloud” spots from Apple, but consider how much some of you have invested in iTunes and iPhoto libraries. Hundreds of gigabytes of stuff that could be left on a backup device, and, in large part, duplicated online so you don’t have to store them locally.

That cloud-based approach, though, depends on having extremely fast broadband hookups, so the typical slowdown compared to a local network won’t be so severe. With millions of people in the U.S. saddled with dial-up connections, relying strictly on the cloud isn’t possible. Even the average broadband connection of five to megabits won’t make the cut. It has to be faster — lots faster, and that may not come for at least several years. But cable companies are now experimenting with the new DOCSIS 3.0 standard that has a potential of 50 to 100 megabits, although the price of admission can be fairly high.

I can agree with Apple’s vision of future MacBooks and MacBook Pros inspired by the MacBook Air, but the sums of the parts do not add up, at least not yet.

There was plenty of anticipation ahead of Apple’s recent all-too-brief demonstration of some of the sexier features for 10.7 Lion. After the media assumed Apple was largely focusing on the iOS, to the detriment of the Mac OS, you had to wonder whether we’d see any compelling upgrades for Apple’s venerable product in the near future.

Unfortunately, the “Sneak Peak” we saw several weeks ago seems less than exciting.

At the top of Apple’s list is the Mac App Store, but you don’t have to wait for Lion’s arrival to see it. It’ll debut early next year, with some question marks. By focusing on the sort of easy app design that’s a hallmark of the iOS, major software suites such as Office 2011 and the Adobe Creative Suite would not apply, because they install extra stuff outside of the traditional Applications folder.

Key products that extend system capabilities, such as Ambrosia Software’s WireTap Studio, won’t be allowed, because they add kernel extensions to perform their magic. In this case, it’s capturing audio from such apps as iChat and Skype.

Now it’s fair to say that the Mac App Store remains under development. I realize Apple wants to make the software setup and removal process as simple as possible. Nowadays, installing new apps presents a source of confusion to many Mac users, what with installers, drag and drop, disk images, and so on and so forth. Ridding yourself of an application often involves more than just dragging an icon to the Trash. Quite often there are auxiliary support files that may still be lurking in the background, perhaps autolaunching at startup and consuming system resources, but they aren’t easily removed without some manual labor or a special app removing utility.

As others have observed, the Windows software removal tool presents a superior option, and it’s standard issue on Microsoft’s operating system.

As to Lion itself, I’m sure Apple has good intentions. They want to use the iOS experience to simplify their core OS, and make it easier to manage your stuff. What I’ve seen so far is a mixed bag, and there’s nothing so far to make it a compelling upgrade, though I grant we haven’t seen much. But I would have expected Apple to want to tantalize us right out of the starting gate.

So we have Expose on steroids, dubbed Mission Control, designed to let you keep tabs of all your open apps and document windows. Only it also threatens to further confuse the picture, particularly if you have a not-atypical ten or fifteen apps, and loads of documents, open at any one time. It stands to present not the pretty picture on Apple’s site, but a mass of tiny windows that will make matters even more confusing.

This isn’t to say that everything in Lion isn’t interesting. Full-screen apps, for example, might present a more efficient working environment, particularly when you’re using software that traditionally loads your screen with lots of floating palettes, such as Adobe, or large toolbars, such as the infamous Microsoft ribbon. So long as moving back and forth between the traditional and expanded view is seamless, working on a smaller display, such as the 11-inch MacBook Air, might be more pleasant.

I’m on the fence about Launchpad. In a sense, it grafts the icon barrage from your iOS device to the Mac desktop. If you are forced to see all your available apps, paging and paging through them to find what you want, it’ll be a mess. If you can pick and choose what’s displayed, it may be a useful alternative, although there are existing launching utilities that might be even better. In saying that, there’s nothing to prevent a third party from providing a Launchpad-style product for Snow Leopard.

The Auto-save and Auto-resume features are useful, if not compelling. The former is a feature already available in some apps. There are several third-party utilities that accomplish the task of adding automatic save to all or most of your apps that don’t support the feature. I was using an auto-save utility 20 years ago for the Classic Mac OS. So this presents nothing more than Apple assuming a function third parties have already provided for a number of years, though I grant it’ll likely be more seamless and elegant.

Automatic app resuming brings a key iOS multitasking capability to Mac OS X. It largely eliminates the quit process and replaces it with some form of suspension scheme. The app is halted, rather than quit, ready to resume almost instantaneously via a single click of an icon. This may also mean that the little lightbulbs you see in the Dock to indicate which apps are open will vanish. They won’t be needed. If an app suspends rather than quits, you’ll be able to get back to work almost instantaneously. Consider the Adobe Creative Suite with an extended launch process that typically takes ten, twenty seconds, or even more before you’re ready to work on your document.

I expect that Auto-resume will likely require reprogramming on the part of developers to support new system frameworks, and that means you may have to wait for upgrades before you can use this feature for anything but Apple’s own bundled apps. The same is true for the full-screen capability.

Most of these promised Lion features are potentially useful, with some of my caveats. But they don’t light my fire. I want more.