So I’m reading a story suggesting that, with dipping iPod sales, Apple needs to get a new digital music product going pronto. Evidently they are forgetting that the replacement products in question — the iPhone and iPod touch — are already in the hands of tens of millions of people around the world. And that includes countries where Apple doesn’t have a contract with a local wireless carrier for the iPhone.

Indeed, Apple executives were already reminding us, during their last quarterly conference with financial analysts, that the new gear would cannibalize sales from the old. That’s the way it should be, and, no, Microsoft’s Zune HD is going to get very few of those sales when it comes out.

Besides, when you click Home on your iPhone, you can’t miss the telltale iPod logo. But subtleties of this nature are sometimes too hard for some media pundits to comprehend.

There are several stories out now, from people who are supposedly running that alleged Golden Master build of Snow Leopard. Now just a point of order here. Beyond the walls of One Infinite Loop, only  registered developers and some book authors have legitimate access to Snow Leopard. To gain that access, they had to sign confidentiality agreements that, in essence, states that they can’t reveal any information not already disclosed by Apple until the product is released.

So the people who are writing about their Snow Leopard installations are either violating Apple’s NDA — in which case they are going to find themselves in a heap of trouble — or received copies from unauthorized sources.

Regardless, it’s a mite premature to start measuring performance and writing reviews. Besides, we won’t really know which Snow Leopard build got the final blessing until it’s actually released. It is possible that it’ll end up being the version that’s already being mentioned. It may also be possible that Apple found additional bugs they wanted to address before the DVD was sent off to the pressing plant, to avoid a rush towards 10.6.1.

Besides, it’s not as if the world ends if you had to wait another week or two to get your hands on a copy, or read a fully-authenticated and properly vetted review. At $29, Snow Leopard is an exceedingly modest purchase, so it’s not a major loss if you find you don’t like 10.6. And I do presume most everyone who plans to order a copy realizes it’ll only run on Intel-based Macs.

That fact should come as little surprise either, since the news had leaked long ago, and the feature set seemed to provide at best modest benefit to owners of PowerPC based hardware anyway. Indeed, there hasn’t been much complaining either, and Leopard will continue to be supported an updated for a while yet.

If the Snow Leopard system requirements mean anything, it’s that more and more publishers are taking the hint and ditching PowerPC support. But remember that people with personal computers that are several years old are far less inclined to buy app and system upgrades anyway, so there’s not a huge loss there.

The other news tidbit still being spread by the rumor sites involves the alleged Apple tablet computer. It may be out in September. Then again, maybe Apple will hold off until early in 2010. Or perhaps, to satisfy both camps, there will be one next month, and the product line will be enhanced a few months thereafter.

Or perhaps no such product will ever see the light of day.

Yes, I realize that some elements of the media are already talking about sightings of iTablet or iPad prototypes. Some more respected media analysts claim to have had face time with one, or knowing of someone who did.

Sure, it may well be that all of the speculation has its basis in fact, although timetables have to be pretty speculative. Remember that there was talk about an iPhone for several years before such a product actually came to be.

What is giving credence to the rumors, however, is the statement from some Apple executives that if they were to enter the netbook arena, and they aren’t saying they would, they have some insanely great ideas to deliver. It’s also true that when Apple begins to really put down a specific product segment, it’s almost a sure thing that they plan on answering the problems they describe with their own hardware at some near-future point in time.

This happened in the months ahead of the introduction of the Mac mini, for example. No, Apple wouldn’t build a cheap PC, but of course they did, and of course it isn’t quite as cheap as the other models.

So it’s perfectly possible that there will be an Apple tablet, perhaps based on the iPod touch, or a regular MacBook. Or perhaps both. It’s also possible that Apple is really planning to cut the prices on some more Macs for the coming holiday season, to really fuel sales.

Possible, yes. But possibilities aren’t always realities when it comes to Apple. If they were always predictable, where would the fun be?

There’s lots of mileage in creating a climate of fear, as any dictator can tell you. Indeed, even in a supposedly free country, you will find opposing politicians presenting their point of view not with logic and reason, but supposedly to protect you from the dastardly deeds of the opposition.

I won’t get into that silliness about the so-called “death boards” that will supposedly let the government euthanize the older people in your family, so you don’t have to continue to spend money to keep them healthy. That, of course, represents one political party essentially accusing the other of attempted murder, and it was always based on a complete lie.

Of course, in the tech world, Apple has cleverly used its Mac versus PC ads as a way to make you fear Microsoft, as if that’s anything that is difficult to do. The PC, depicted as an always-befuddled nerd, is perennially overcome by Windows-borne difficulties, such as ongoing threats of virus, constant crashes, and the sheer difficulty in getting anything done.

In a clever casting move, the PC is actually the nicer guy. You feel for him, and you want to help the poor fellow find a way to get through his workday without suffering further difficulties and perhaps even make a few extra dollars so he can buy a nice-looking suit that actually fits. The Mac fellow is a little too smug, but that’s clearly the intent.

But Apple isn’t just pleasingly satiric about promoting its interests. There are times when it can be damned hard-nosed about the way management attempts to control the message and the medium. Take any attempt to write about CEO Steve Jobs in a way that doesn’t toe the company line, and attempts to probe into this mercurial personality’s background, in the tradition of a regular investigative journalist.

Just the other day, for example, it was reported that Apple reportedly attempted to block the publication of a profile Jobs, a piece that evidently referred to him as a “Silicon Che Guevara,” an attempt to draw a comparison to a ruthless dictator of recent history.

The piece in question, which appeared in the UK’s Sunday Times, actually didn’t plow very much new ground. Compared to the various books on this highly-uncooperative personality, it would seem strange for Apple to object this one. They could just have given the requisite “no comment” responses and gone on their way.

However, Jobs has created an extremely paranoiac corporate communications culture, where the media isn’t expected to read between the lines and separate facts from hype. True, Jobs will sit down for a rare, rare interview, or at least he did before his recent serious illness. But the questions the reporter is allowed to ask are strictly limited, and Jobs is notorious for walking out if he hears a question that strays from the script.

This is not to say that Jobs has any valid reason to fear the press. He fully understands the art of thrust and parry and can certainly handle difficult questions, should he choose to do so. On the other hand, perhaps the penchant for corporate secrecy has its advantages. The press seems to like being beaten down, because reporters just keep coming back for more abuse. When Apple has something new to announce, it still gets worldwide headlines. So there may be madness in their methods.

On the other hand, trying to shout down or otherwise suppress a story that contains information about the personal life of Steve Jobs is destined to fail. The harder they try, the more curious the press will become.

Now I realize Apple won’t take this suggestion seriously, and if they did, the offending employee would be quickly shouted down by Jobs. What Jobs should really attempt is the simplest solution of all: Choose one or two reporters who are known to be tough but fair, and submit to several hours of unedited questions.

It will probably never happen, but it may help correct a fair portion of the erroneous information out there once and for all.

Sounds like a radical idea, right?

There may be personal details about his family life he wouldn’t wish to disclose, such as which schools his children attend and other elements that he is surely entitled not to reveal. On the other hand, a special news program with Jobs honestly discussing his life, including both success and failures, might prove to be a catharsis for someone who clearly has serious personal issues.

For the audience, who hear, see or at least read the text of the interview, they would get the answers to their questions about Steve Jobs direct from the horse’s mouth.

Sure, he would be right in saying that he is entitled to a private life. However, his words and actions have transformed him into a major public figure. He has the right to correct false information, of course, but the easiest way to deal with the fame and fortune — wanted or otherwise — is simply to come out of hiding and, for one time only, answer all the questions and then return to his private life.

Now consider that the email component of Office for the Mac, Entourage, is a direct descendant of the free version, Outlook Express. Without considering the source code itself, I expect that the changes were evolutionary until Microsoft changed their app to Universal to run naive on Intel-based Macs.

Now on the surface, Entourage seemed largely meant to serve as the Mac equivalent of Outlook, the email component of Office for Windows that’s also used as a contact manager, and communicates with Microsoft’s Exchange Server.

Alas, Microsoft gets the well-deserved rap of crippling its Mac products, at least when it doesn’t discontinue them. So there were always features in Outlook for Exchange that never seemed to become available on Entourage, though it got better over the years.

Now you’d think that the world’s largest software company, with thousands and thousands of skilled programmers, would figure how to make a Mac version of every nook and cranny of its Windows email software. In fact, I’m willing to suggest that any excuse they offer for not doing so is a load of nonsense. And, my friends, I find it difficult to believe that they couldn’t graft Visual Basic for Applications onto Office 2008.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.

The other day, I read several reports explaining that there were several dozen possible upgrade scenarios to take you from either Windows XP or Windows Vista to Windows 7. Assuming you really care about such things, you’ll find that only a fraction of them are designed with even a semblance of the concept of simplicity.

Now just to be fair and balanced, according to published reports about installing Snow Leopard, it’s designed to install in place under most circumstances. That means you launch the Installer, click on a few buttons, and walk away. There is no further need for user intervention required except, perhaps, for the data you enter on the Registration screen. There are some variations on the simplicity theme, but they aren’t really worth mentioning.

Even better, say must reinstall Snow Leopard and, after a few upgrades, and you already have 10.6.4. In the old days, you’d have to do a clean (Archive and Install) installation of the most recent full version you have at hand, and then download and install all those updates again, hundreds of megabytes worth. If the published information about Snow Leopard remains accurate once it’s actually released, that will no longer be necessary. The files that got changed to make it 10.6.4 rather than 10.6 will not be deleted. You won’t have to start from scratch. Consider the amount of time you’ll save, not to mention the long wait for all those downloads via your Internet connection. After all, how many of you save those update files after use? Really now!

Now I realize there are situations where a Mac OS X installation fails. There are some members of the tech media out there, in fact, who will tell you with a straight face that you should never just upgrade Mac OS X. It’s got to be a clean install to avoid possible hazards when all is said and done.

All I can tell you is that I did follow the obsessive/compulsive method in the old days of the Classic Mac OS. I was even quite cautious for the first few versions of Mac OS X, but not lately. It’s not that something can’t go wrong, but with millions of successful installations from people who never, ever saw a Mac troubleshooting site, it’s clear that simplicity is usually the way to go. The main exceptions involve systems that exhibit anomalous behavior or have been heavily hacked prior to the upgrade.

When it comes to Windows, totally clean installs are the norm, and it’s not as painless as Archive and Install on the Mac, where you basically lay aside your old system stuff in a Previous System. Under Windows, it’s Archive and Erase primarily. That means backing up your files, wiping the drive and then running your Windows installer. Once you have determined that everything is fully operational, you can proceed to reinstall all your apps and peripheral drivers that aren’t part of a Windows package.

I realize that if you’re in the IT department of a large company, you will probably deploy your PCs with a specific pretested disk image when they are upgraded. All the computers in a particular department with specific app requirements will basically run a mirror image of the original installation and employees need to retrieve the documents they require. They’d usually be backed on the network for them.

In circumstances of that sort, you can expect that even upgraded Macs — and new ones for that matter — would be put into service in a similar fashion. For the enterprise, this approach makes sense and ensures maximum predictability and reliability.

For small businesses and particularly home users that don’t have a PC guru in the family, it can mean one huge mess. That, plus the Microsoft Tax you pay to get an individual upgrade kit, makes it far less worrisome to just throw out your current PC box (all right take it to the recycling plant) and get a new one. Besides, the damn thing is probably infected by all sorts of malware anyway, unless you kept abreast of updates with your security software, and that means you didn’t forget to renew the annual licenses.

Now with over 90,000 employees and billions and billions of dollars at disposal, you’d think Microsoft had better things to do than to deliver the Bing search engine to Yahoo!’s customers. Surely they could come up with some positively brilliant methods of installing an operating system upgrade and doing all the heavy lifting behind the scenes without requiring more than a few mouse clicks. That ought to apply regardless of the previous version of Windows you’re running, the number of apps you have and any of ten thousand and one different installation scenarios.

But Microsoft’s corporate mentality doesn’t know how to cope with simplicity. That’s why they have dozens of Windows 7 installation strategies, and only a handful that aren’t totally hostile to normal users.