For a once-beleaguered company, the amount of attention that will be focused on Apple’s quarterly financials next week will likely come close to matching that for a statement about health care or national security from the president. That may seem surprising, but it’s true. Nearly everything that happens with Apple these days is fodder for extensive coverage.

Certainly estimates of how well Apple will do are all over the map. Some suggest that Mac sales must be lower than last year, before the worst of the economic crunch hit. If you go along with that proposition, then the only issue is how much sales have dipped.

The reality appears to be pointing in a different direction, and some analysts are even revising their forecasts as a result. For one thing, early reports from the retail front indicate that Apple’s sales actually rose beginning in May, perhaps coinciding with the beginning of their annual “back to school” bash. The reduced prices for Mac note-books first announced at the WWDC also boosted demand.

Indeed, right now Apple is quoting 7–10 business days delay for popular models for both the 13-inch and 15-inch versions of the MacBook Pro. For a company that was suffering from reduced demand, that would seem to be quite surprising.

More recently an analyst predicting a roughly three percent drop in Mac sales is now admitting that outlook may have been far too conservative. If that’s the case, it could be that Mac sales actually improved in the past quarter over the same period in 2008. Indeed, one estimate of the Mac retail market share in the U.S. shows it rose to 8.7% in the last quarter. Don’t ask about Dell. Another estimate pinned Apple’s share at 7.6%, which makes you wonder just how accurate those surveys are supposed to be.

But it seems nobody is suggesting that the iPod sales are flat or slightly improved. Virtually every estimate of the situation suggests the iPod’s day in the sun has ended, and it’s all downhill from here. The question is how far downhill. Reduced sales may surely be true for the standard models, although I think the iPod shuffle is such a casual purchase it ought to help prop up the rest of the product line to some degree. But the real star is the iPod touch, which may make up for the difference of the other models. While it would seem to me that an iPhone would be a better purchase, not everyone wants to combine an iPod with a smartphone. There is the extra cost of buying even a basic voice and data plan from a wireless carrier for example, or perhaps switching to a provider that you really don’t like.

No, I’m not avoiding mention of AT&T. However, that’s not the only potential villain. I do not know anything about the quality of the other carriers with whom Apple has partnered, so it’s quite possible one or more are also on your “to be avoided” list.

The other consideration is storage space. While the iPhone and iPod touch both top out at 32GB, when the new versions of the latter are introduced, you can expect storage capacity to double. I wonder how many people are even going to seriously consider an iPod classic when there’s, say, a 64GB iPod touch available. Yes, I realize a few of you have music and video libraries that exceed 64GB, but I am sure those numbers are small. Besides, Apple makes it fairly convenient to download the stuff that you really want for your travels and leave the rest at home, so unless you’re spending the next year on an island away from your home computer, taking a subset of a massive library with you shouldn’t be so big a deal.

The long and short of it is that the iPod might do somewhat better than anyone has a right to expect. If not, perhaps Apple will make more significant changes when the lineup is refreshed, which will probably happen in August or September.

When it comes to the iPhone, I found it rather amusing when I read an article touting the initial sales of a new BlackBerry model at less than half what Apple sold during a single weekend when it released the iPhone 3G and, more recently, the iPhone 3GS. The article ignored that news completely and, instead, pointed to the original weekend when the first-generation iPhone went on sale, and tried to demonstrate that the BlackBerry was doing just as well or better. They forget, of course, that the BlackBerry has been available for years, whereas the iPhone just completed its second year on the market. So there you go.

While some industry analysts know what they’re doing, others are clearly as dumb as sticks, or they’re on the payrolls of certain companies and thus they don’t have any concept of honesty and integrity.

If the past is a guide, Apple will do better than most of these people expect, or are willing to predict. That, of course, means that absolutely nothing has changed.

Although I remain skeptical how it’ll all turn out, the top executives at Microsoft must be freaking upon learning that Google plans to build the Chrome operating system. Worse, that it’ll be deployed first for netbooks and eventually to regular note-books and desktop computers as well.

Most of the online chatter doesn’t really mention Apple much, beyond the fact that Google CEO Eric Schmidt might have to reconsider his position as a member of Apple’s Board of Directors. Right now he will recuse himself from sessions dealing with the iPhone, because of Google’s Android operating system. So if Mac OS X is discussed, the theory goes that Schmidt will have to stay away from those discussions as well, which more or less excludes him from a large portion of those meetings. Well, that’s something for Apple and Google to figure out, since it has little to do with any practical issues regarding Google’s forthcoming OS.

Now Google’s focus is primarily on Web-based applications, such as Gmail and Google Apps. The real competitor to Microsoft is the latter, since they are struggling to compete with Google for search advertising and other areas. Indeed, Office 10 for Windows will be offered in an ad-sponsored online version, clearly a reaction to Google. Originality is not in their DNA, but when they see someone else succeeding in a product segment they want to exploit, you just know they are going to try to do something about it.

This doesn’t mean that Google’s new OS is a sure thing. It’s not. Yes, it is built upon a secure Linux foundation, which means it’ll be far more robust out of the box than any version of Windows. Indeed, it may well be that focusing on Web-based applications will serve a certain class of customers. But the PC industry is too heavily focused on desktop apps on the Mac and Windows platforms to give Google much elbow room right now. Then again, just giving Microsoft conniptions ought to be sufficient to make this initiative worthwhile.

From Apple’s standpoint, they have been pushing hard for industry standards for much of what they do. So it would seem that anything you can run from the browser under the Chrome OS will work on a Mac as well, and on a Windows PC for that matter. Well, maybe Microsoft will try to block them on Internet Explorer, despite the fact that the new version, version 8, supposedly adheres more closely to Internet standards.

But it’s not just browsers and operating systems where Microsoft is experiencing a slow, inexorable decline. They haven’t done so well with their mobile phone initiative either. Windows Mobile is an afterthought when the media pundits speak of smartphones. The chatter is all about the iPhone, the BlackBerry, the latest Android-based device and, of course, the Palm Pre. How fascinating it is to see real competition in this space, rather than face an 800-pound gorilla that spends a large part of its time beating down any competition that dares invade its territory.

Certainly Microsoft’s woes started big-time when the iPod arrived, and Apple rapidly managed to carve for itself a hefty majority of the market, contrary to the conventional wisdom of the usual naysayers. Microsoft tried working with the usual group of third-party manufacturers and failed. They tried the Zune and it was a failure too. The lifetime of the dedicated media playing is coming to a close, except, perhaps, for the iPod touch, which is really just a small personal computer.

When it comes to the iPhone, Apple’s ace in the hole, beyond a great user interface, is the App Store. With 1.5 billion downloads in the first year and 65,000 selections, I suspect only the Windows platform has more apps available. What Apple has done is simply amazing, and no other company, even with a larger share of the smartphone market, has been able to come close.

Of course Apple tried and tested a lot of the basic structure of the App Store in building the world’s largest music retailer, iTunes. So it wasn’t quite as hard to just expand its capabilities to accommodate the iPhone and iPod touch. Imagine what would have been involved if they had to invent it all over again from scratch?

Microsoft? They’d love to build a true competitor, but maybe they are just left to recall the famous movie phrase from the late Marlon Brando, “I coulda been a contender.”

This isn’t to say that Microsoft is doomed, though it may look that way. Their search engine flavor of the week, Bing, has gotten off to a good start and is apparently taking a tiny bit of market share away from Google. Bing has also garnered fairly good reviews from the critics, so maybe it has potential.

There are also reports that Microsoft has a Web-based or lightweight operating system on the back burner, and it might very well get accelerated development if the Chrome OS really takes off. On the other hand, I don’t see Google appealing to more than a core segment of power users and curiosity seekers. That is, unless or until the public embraces the Chrome OS and decides it’s really a good thing.

My first report on the iPhone 3GS presented the tale of a botched ordering process when AT&T got involved for a pre-shipping verification. However, the phone itself has worked great since Day One, without any activation delays or other untoward behavior to report.

Certainly, a sequel is called for, although I can’t say that I’ve anything atypical to report. I know some iPhone 3GS users, and some who bought the previous version, reported a hot-running environment. Even with occasional use during the days when it’s 110 degrees in the shade here in Arizona, the phone has functioned quite nicely, without building up any excessive heat.

I should point out that, if it runs too hot, you’ll see a warning message on the phone, which is a safety measure taken by Apple to make sure that critical internal components are not damaged. If you do see such a message, best thing to do is shut it down and let it cool off, and if the problem keeps recurring even when the phone isn’t being subjected to rigorous use, it’s a case for Apple’s service people to figure out. As with any mass-produced electronic gadget, some iPhones will end up defective. No way around it. That’s what warranties are for, and I think the extra $69 to expand the program to two years is worth it, unless you plan to trade off again next year, assuming AT&T cooperates with a sensible upgrade program.

It does appear that the iPhone’s biggest problem is probably AT&T, although it’s possible that some of the other carriers in other countries do worse. In any case, AT&T has not garnered the best reviews for network quality and customer support over the years. I presume that, to capture a deal with Apple, the former number one wireless carrier in the U.S. had to agree to provide certain minimum levels of quality.

Indeed, customer support has always been first rate in the nearly two years I’ve been a customer of theirs. Network quality appears to have undergone steady improvements; not perfect, but getting better. New cell towers in my neighborhood zapped most disconnect symptoms. I still encounter an occasional dead zone where dropped calls are common, but that’s true for all wireless systems.

Voice quality is good, as good as any wireless phone I’ve used on AT&T, Verizon Wireless and certainly better than Sprint, a company that seems to be suffering from a continued loss of customers no matter what they do. In passing, maybe Sprint will be helped by the Palm Pre, which it’s still offering exclusively, but not if they can only sell 50,000 units every week. That is not a success in the cell phone business.

If you live in a very congested city, such as New York or San Francisco, all bets are off. Most of the reviews that describe consistent connection and voice quality issues were written in either location, which is where most of the tests were done. Clearly AT&T has ongoing capacity issues in major metropolitan areas that still need to be addressed.

Then there are those two significant features that are not available because of AT&T. One is MMS, which provides the ability to send, say, a video or photo in the same fashion as a text message. That’s not too important to me, as regular email will do just fine, but those for whom texting is a constant probably disagree with me.

The other problem is more significant. Although the iPhone 3.0 software supports tethering, which allows you to use your iPhone as a broadband modem with your Mac or PC, AT&T has yet to roll out that feature. There’s also some controversy about what it will cost. A published report said $55, which is far more than AT&T charges for other phones that can be used with a computer, but AT&T denied the claim.

It may well be that the charge will end up being $55, but that includes the standard $30 data access charge. This means you’ll pay $25 extra, which is not such a serious dent on your budget. Other alternatives cost more.

But AT&T’s biggest remaining hurdle is to expand 3G capacity, and that is surely not a simple matter. It means investing billions of dollars to build extra broadband pipes and cell towers. Even when the checks are ready to be signed, there may be complex zoning and right-of-way issues to resolve before construction of a cell tower can even start. The phrase “shovel ready” is a joke in such circumstances.

AT&T is supposedly also working to double broadband download speeds, but it may take months or years for that added performance potential to be available in your city. That means that the speedier Internet access promised in the 3GS remains unavailable; it is to me so far.

However, the 3GS is otherwise an excellent performer. I believe Apple when they boast of roughly twice the speed for many functions. Internet sites appear far quicker, and switching from app to app also feels snappier. I’ve yet to assess the promise of improved gaming performance with more robust graphics. Games are not my cup of tea, but I plan to try a few in order to judge the potential.

There is, as you might expect, more to come.

A few years back, Mac users would regularly check troubleshooting sites for the latest information on hardware and software bugs, along with sage advice on what was needed to fix the problems. That was before CNET acquired MacFixIt (notice that I’m not putting a link here), which was, in turn, acquired by CBS.

This isn’t to say that CNET doesn’t have hard-working people who are dedicated to their craft as tech columnists, reviewers and reporters. But MacFixIt took a direction that did not serve the Mac community well. Instead of making some effort to separate the occasional unusual problem from bugs that would affect a wide number of people, they appear to have got into the habit of just publishing stories without thoroughly vetting them.

Rather than depend solely on information coming their way, they also troll Apple’s support discussion forums and technical documents for information, hoping they’ll reveal a useful tidbit. There’s certainly a little good and bad in this approach, although it’s also extremely lazy.

You see, any forum that’s focused on support issues will be heavily weighted towards presenting posts from people who took the time to report their troubles. People who have encountered no difficulties at all have better things to do, such as using their Macs to actually get something accomplished.

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