It’s fair to say that the fairly decent price reductions of the MacBook Pro series will have an impact. People who complain that Macs are too costly will have less ammunition to assert their case. Microsoft will have to recast its lame laptop buyer spots to recognize the new reality. Or maybe not.

While not unexpected, it’s encouraging to see Apple keep the 8GB iPhone 3G in the lineup, for just $99. Former Apple hardware executive Jon Rubenstein, who now heads Palm, is going to be under severe pressure to somehow match that price cut with the new Palm Pre, and it’s not as if Palm is in terribly great shape these days.

Regardless, I suppose some of you will feel Apple listened to those Microsoft spots, and the price reductions will spark a trend, that Apple will soon do precisely the same with its desktop line. Cheap Macs — what a concept!

However, Apple doesn’t always exist in the same universe as the rest of the PC industry. You see, PC makers are by and large taking the same commodity hardware and competing with each other for every single sale. With netbooks, selling sometimes for less than $300, they are making do with paltry profits in the hope that they will make it up on volume, or perhaps by getting you to customize your tiny new box with high-profit extras.

In fact, you can already see this expansion trend in the netbook space. More and more makers are building in larger keyboards, some extremely close to full size, along with larger displays. True, these products will still be saddled with slower processors, and less memory, but for many normal tasks for a home or small business, that’s just fine. I can think of email, Web browsing and basic word processing, for example. Microsoft is even allegedly fine-tuning Windows 7 to run in acceptable form on these low-end note-books.

In the end, the netbook will be little more than a slightly cheaper entry-level product, offering most of the capabilities of the full-fledged note-book. For most people, I rather suspect the differences will become extremely difficult to discern in the real world unless you are doing chores that require a more powerful processor or graphics chip.

As far as Apple is concerned, the jury is still out as to whether they have any desire to enter that business. Certainly cutthroat pricing is not their cup of tea. Even at the lower prices, the MacBook Pros will still earn Apple healthy profits. They are benefiting from the lower cost of raw materials and higher production runs to compensate for all or most of the difference. Nothing Apple builds is designed to sell for a low profit. The possible exceptions are the App Store and iTunes, both of which serve to boost sales of hardware. So if they break even, it’s still a plus.

In contrast, the PC industry doesn’t seem to understand how to do things of that sort. Certainly Microsoft can’t imagine how to match Apple’s ecosystem, although the whole arrangement seems to make perfect sense to most anyone.

Looking again at Snow Leopard, it’s clear to me that Apple can make a perfectly decent profit for all its efforts even at $29. I expect lots of Leopard users with Intel-based Macs will upgrade right away, since the fee is so low, and assuming the original 10.6 doesn’t have any significant show stoppers.

Having a larger portion of the Mac user base on a single operating system also makes it cheaper for Apple to handle support and quality control. Ditching the PowerPC will encourage more people to buy new Macs, even if their older hardware seems to have a long useful life ahead of it.

That said, if you have, say, an iMac G5 with Leopard, it will continue to be supported and run great even if you can’t take advantage of the enhancements in Snow Leopard, which are largely performance based. Maybe the Finder will be slower, maybe apps will take longer to launch, but you will still have a solid computer that is more than capable of handling a lot of tasks.

Just the other day, in fact, I upgraded a client’s G5 with Leopard. First I had to boost his RAM allotment from the standard 512MB to 2GB for maximum performance. Even before the Leopard installation began, the improvement was almost startling. The initial startup process and basic app functions were so much faster, it almost seemed as if he’d purchased an all-new computer.

Upgrading to Leopard 10.5.7 didn’t hurt performance. He will gain the benefit of all the new features, and be able to get the latest and greatest software.

Except for the growing number of apps that are Intel only. That’s the next migration that’s coming on full force. Apple’s move to Snow Leopard will only accelerate that change. They’ll sell more hardware, all without having to keep cutting prices. That assumes, of course, that the economy will cooperate, and that is a question nobody, not even the so-called experts on Wall Street and Washington, D.C., can answer.

In the wake of what seemed to be significant announcements from Apple, it’s clear Wall Street wasn’t super impressed, but does anyone take the financial community seriously anymore after the recent economic debacle? And don’t get me started on some members of the tech media.

Take an article I read the other day that suggested that, by relabeling all unibody note-books as MacBook Pros, Apple had suddenly left a gaping hole in its product line. I suppose that’s because there’s a lone white MacBook available for $200 less. The author failed to consider the full impact of the price reductions, which clearly make Apple’s portables far more competitive with the Windows variety and make claims about an Apple Tax sillier than ever.

Of course, it may take a few days for Microsoft to comprehend the changed state of affairs. As of Tuesday evening, their notorious laptop ads were still running, and it was curious to see someone again dismissing a $1,999 MacBook Pro as too expensive, then buying, for less than $1,000, something more comparable to the $999 MacBook. Stupid is as stupid does.

There are also some who feel slighted because Steve Jobs didn’t make a cameo appearance, even though the rest of the executives who participated in the WWDC keynote did their usual credible job. They don’t have Steve’s charisma, and perhaps are not able to generate that alleged “reality distortion field,” but the facts they brought forth were more than sufficient to fill most expectations of the event.

As to Snow Leopard, some are fretting because there is no Marble interface or other eye candy to gaze over. This despite the fact that Apple has never presented 10.6 as anything more than a super cleanup of Leopard designed strictly for users of Intel Macs. The rest of the speculation in large part originated on rumor sites.

That Apple is cutting $100 off the upgrade price ought to be evidence that they don’t have unrealistic expectations, although an operating system capable of a huge performance boost may be more than sufficient to satisfy your needs. At least you have few new features to learn. Also, if your hard drive is a little starved for space, saving up to 6GB with Snow Leopard may also be reasonably compelling, at least for your purposes.

It may take a while, though, before you see some of those speed improvements. Application developers will have to take advantage of Apple’s new tools to provide support for Grand Central Dispatch. That’s the feature that supposedly makes it easier for apps to take advantage of those multicore processors in a meaningful way. Meantime, system-related functions ought to show a noticeable improvement, at least that’s the theory.

When it comes to the iPhone, it does appear the price of the 3G S line is perfectly sensible, since it’s the same as the 3G. Keeping the 8GB iPhone 3G around at $99 is going to create headaches for Palm, which can barely keep up with a demand that represents a fraction if iPhone sales.

The real problem impacts current owners of the 3G who might consider an upgrade. If you signed up for the standard two year pact most wireless carriers impose to support those discount subsidies, you will probably not be able to avoid a substantial penalty if you replace your phone with a 3G S. AT&T is asking for $200 extra, plus an $18 service fee. There are lots of understandable complaints, and some petitions as well. But this policy policy is no different than what’s in force for their other products, and most carriers I know about in the U.S. will enforce similar penalties.

I did check my upgrade options, by the way. I bought my iPhone 3G last July, and the $199 3G S with 16GB memory will cost me $399, plus that $18 of course. However, AT&T will usually relent and let a customer upgrade to a new phone with a new contract and no extra fees after 18 months.

If you have the original iPhone, there’s nothing to fear. You already paid full retail, without any subsidies, so you can upgrade at any time.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m not so desperate to dump my iPhone 3G. Yes, it would be nice to have a better camera, video recording capability, voice commands and a higher speed potential (especially when AT&T improves its download speeds here). But the promise of the iPhone 3.0 software is actually quite suitable for my immediate needs. If AT&T relents and gives existing customers more breathing space before they have to pay extra, I might reconsider.

But not now.

As far as I’m concerned, the WWDC delivered pretty much what I expected. I’m glad to see cheaper note-books, and a faster iPhone, but I’m more fascinated by the prospects of Snow Leopard. While I suspect most Mac users won’t see all that much of a difference, anyone with a Mac Pro will cherish the promise of superior processing capability. Why spend extra money only to have all those additional processor cores hanging out and doing nothing?

Also, what some of the pundits fail to consider is the fact that Apple has plenty of time to deliver more products during the remainder of 2009. Maybe Steve Jobs will even be back to host the next event.

When one’s predictions are largely fulfilled at an Apple event, you have to feel delighted, and that’s an understatement. Consider Snow Leopard. For quite some time, I have joined some of my colleagues in suggesting that Apple ought to provide an upgrade version, for Leopard users, that was priced far lower than usual. My reasoning is that, despite some new features, Snow Leopard is largely a bug fix and cleanup version, hence shouldn’t command the full upgrade price.

Yes, some were suggesting that we hadn’t heard about all the new Snow Leopard features, that Apple was secretly working on a new interface motif called Marble and other cool stuff that would be disclosed at the WWDC. Well, developers got their final beta release this week after a public demonstration of 10.6, but the new features are pretty much what you already read about, such as under-the-hood enhancements and full support for Microsoft Exchange. There are some interface tweaks, a snappier Finder, but nothing that would match the 300 new features touted for the original 10.5 release.

In addition, Apple has big competition on the horizon to contend with, and that’s Windows 7. Sure, it’s probably fair to say that the upgrade to Windows Vista is largely a refinement of the original along with some new eye candy to make it seem new and different. However, you just know that Microsoft will pretend that it is a whole lot more, a huge path to the future of personal computing under their aegis.

We really don’t know the exact upgrade costs for Vista, though some supposedly mistakenly released price lists show that Home Premium, the most common individual user version, will be roughly twice the $29 fee Apple is charging. If you want to get the Ultimate version and have all the features at your beck and call, expect to pay far more. In contrast, as we all know, the client version of Snow Leopard has it all in a single package.

The other promising development was Apple recasting the 13-inch unibody MacBook as a MacBook Pro and restoring the FireWire 800 port that the larger versions contain. That and a lower price across the board ought to make them far more attractive to potential buyers on a budget. On the other side of the coin, losing the ExpressCard slot may be a huge negative for some, who will be forced to acquire the 17-inch MacBook Pro to retain that feature. Apple claims only a small number of users ever bother with that expansion slot, but we’ll see.

In any case, Microsoft’s laptop ad campaign is now in worse shape than before, if that’s possible. You could argue before that comparable Macs and PCs were roughly similar in price. Now things have changed in Apple’s favor, and the spin control is going to be more difficult to tolerate. Talk about an alleged Apple Tax is now less credible than ever.

When it comes to the iPhone, the introduction of the 3G S was surprisingly low-key. Many expected Steve Jobs to make a cameo appearance, and perhaps provide a “one more thing” event to launch the new product. Not only didn’t it happen, Apple is rushing it to market far faster than you might have expected. I suppose using the same case design helped, and the revised internals are largely to be expected given the availability of new, speedier components for less money.

Indeed, going from a 3G to 3G S may not be so compelling an upgrade for many of you. If you don’t crave more storage space, a superior camera with video recording capability, support for faster 3G downloads and a few other odds and ends, you can probably stick with your existing iPhone. It will, as a matter of fact, still benefit from the performance improvements promised for the iPhone 3.0 software.

I’m also fascinated by the decision, not unexpected, to offer a $99 version, and the fact that it’s the 8GB version is even better, because that’s really all the phone I expect most users actually need. Even more interesting is how Apple has fired a large cannon into Palm’s bow with this maneuver, especially having the price reduction take effect immediately, since the Palm Pre, with the same storage capability, costs twice as much.

Now Palm is a beleaguered company, and if they were forced to cut the price of the Pre to match, they’d suffer big time financially. Sure, their lone wireless partner, Sprint, might opt to shoulder all or part of the losses. But the expected boost in iPhone sales is going to huge a huge impact on the competition. You can take that to the bank.

Now were I to consider upgrading my 16GB iPhone 3G, I would definitely want to put off the decision for a while. You see, AT&T expects existing customers to sign up to a revised two-year contract, but if you’re less than a year into the current agreement, they will require a $200 penalty regardless if which new iPhone you choose. Those who have the first-generation don’t have to fret, because the original purchase price wasn’t subsidized.

However, I gather that AT&T will let you upgrade without a penalty when you’re 18 months into a current contract, and that takes me to the middle of January 2010. Well, I can wait. Maybe it’ll even give them time to provide a tethering feature so I can use my iPhone with my MacBook Pro to get online when my Internet is down.

Now maybe Phil Schiller and the other Apple executives who participate in the WWDC keynote lack the charisma of Steve Jobs, but they surely provided enough meat and potatoes for me. What about you, gentle reader?

You have to hand it to Apple. They sure know how to catch your attention. While their stock began to dip in the run up to the WWDC keynote, and expectations were fairly centered on the iPhone and Snow Leopard, Apple did something few expected, and that was to cut prices on their entire note-book line.

In addition, the artificial line of demarcation between the unibody MacBooks and MacBook Pros was eliminated. They are all MacBook Pro now, and only the $999 white version remains a MacBook. What’s more, there were price cuts ranging from $200 to $700. The 15-inch version received Apple’s non-removable extended life battery with an advertised life of up to seven hours between charges and there were various and sundry configuration changes almost across the board. So Microsoft is going to have to alter its irritating laptop comparison campaign real quick, but it’ll still be screwed up regardless of how they mismanage it.

The Snow Leopard demonstration addressed now-familiar ground, covering the enhanced support for multiple core processors, offloading tasks to the graphics chips and providing full support for Microsoft Exchange servers. Although there are a fair number of enhancements, the alleged Marble theme was nowhere in evidence. That was clearly a rumor site fantasy.

Now I said I expected it to ship by the last week of August, but Apple has selected non-specific September release date instead. Oh well, I was close. That puts it, though, roughly a month earlier than Windows 7, and you can expect the marketing engines will be running full steam on both shortly. During the WWDC keynote, for example, Apple continued to disparage Windows 7 as a warmed over Vista with the same fundamental deficiencies, such as DLLs, Registry, Disk Defrag, UACs. If you don’t know what all that means, there’s no reason to be concerned, if you’re a Mac user. Meantime, Apple developers registered with one of their paid programs are getting near-final betas to pound on and make compatible with their own products. The rest of us will have to be content with the final version of the Safari 4 browser, now shipping in both Mac and Windows versions.

And, in keeping with my predictions, Snow Leopard is restricted to Intel-based Macs and will cost just $29 for a single user license and $49 for a family pack upgrade for Leopard users. It appears to me that Tiger users will stay pay the full $129 upgrade price. In any case, Apple boasted that the Mac user base has grown from 25 million in 2007 to some 75 million this year.

On the iPhone front, very little seemed surprising. There are now 50,000 apps on the App Store, and some 40 million iPhone an iPod touches have been sold. iPhone 3.0 has, as previously stated, over 100 new features, and 1,000 new APS for developers to play with.

I won’t repeat what most of you have read about already, such as the long-delayed cut/copy/paste feature, push notification and such. Among those new capabilities, multimedia messaging, or MMS, will require carrier support, so you won’t see it right away. AT&T will have it later this summer. Of Apple’s carrier partners in 26 countries, 29 will support MMS on the launch date.

You will also see tethering support, which means you’ll be able to use your iPhone to share your Internet connection via USB or Bluetooth, but that, too, requires carrier support, and Apple said 22 carriers in 44 countries would let you do it. So start calling AT&T or your local iPhone carrier and get your complaints handy if they are not yet on the list.

One feature that will really help listeners to our two radio shows is support for HTTP streaming audio and video. So at last you’ll be able to click on the Play buttons on our show sites and hear the live or on-demand broadcasts. Way to go Apple!

Another intriguing feature, Find My iPhone, works with MobileMe, and allows you to easily hunt for your lost iPhone. It works by showing you a map of its location, and letting you play a sound by which to identify it. And if it falls into the hands of thieves, you can send a command to wipe your data. Not to worry. When you recover or find the phone, you can easily restore everything via iTunes.

After all was said in done, yes, there’s a new iPhone 3GS coming shortly, sporting the same case design b

Now despite predictions that the iPhone software would be available today, all that’s happening will be the delivery of a Golden Master seed to developers. The actual release is slated for June 17.

As the rumors predicted, the new iPhone 3G S will offer roughly twice the speed as the existing version, adding support for voice commands, including voice dialing, and a 3 megapixel autofocus camera with video capturing capability. There will also be a digital compass and additional battery life.

The form factor is identical, otherwise, to the current model. The price of the 16GB model will be $199 and $299 for the 32GB version and both will be available in black and white. The existing 8GB iPhone 3G is repriced at $99, which is sure to kickstart the market in a major fashion.

The new products will be available beginning June 19, and availability will spread around the world in July and August as, I suppose, networks are upgraded for the 3G S. And, no, Steve Jobs was nowhere in sight and, no, Apple’s stock price didn’t rise all that much upon the conclusion of the two hour event.