One thing about Apple: They can turn almost any development, however innocuous at first glance, into some sort of marketing opportunity. Take the extended sick leave by Steve Jobs. Consider that an absent CEO from most any other company would yield a collective yawn, but not Apple, and that’s a major part of their carefully-crafted public image.

You can almost think of the life of Steve Jobs as part-folklore, the way he was ousted from Apple in 1985, only to return in the following decade when the company was on the brink. After assuming control of the shattered pieces of the business he co-founded, he righted the ship before it sank, and brought it into a new era of success.

His bout with cancer showed his mortality, and some wondered how anyone could recover, but recover he did, although certainly that long absence to mend from his present ailments led many to believe that Jobs might never return to Apple.

Officially, all Apple is saying is that Jobs is scheduled to end his leave of absence by the end of June, period. Understandably, some members of the tech and financial media are skeptical, suggesting that, even if he shows up as scheduled, he’ll occupy a reduced role in the company. Perhaps, but certainly nobody knows for certain outside Apple’s inner circle.

However, there are indications that Jobs will return healthy and fully engaged to resume his full time job. First there was that story quoting Apple’s other “Steve,” Steve Wozniak, that he has spoken to Jobs and he sounds healthy and energetic, and not sick at all. Sure, skeptics will respond that even someone seriously ill can sound alert and strong for at least a brief period during the day in order to field a phone conversation. Then again, Wozniak has known Jobs for decades, so let’s take his word for it.

Besides, the comments are certainly reassuring.

A few days later, the Mac rumor sites were rife with reports that Jobs has actually been observed on the Apple campus, looking hale and hearty. Apple had nothing to say yet again, and perhaps the story is someone’s invention. Or perhaps the campaign to pave the way for their CEO’s return is in full force.

Now you might take the comments from Wozniak as just a coincidence and the reports of Jobs that emerged from the rumor sites to be wishful thinking. All well and good, and if that’s the case, the discussion can end here.

But what if Apple corporate initiated that casual conversation between Wozniak and Jobs? What if, in turn, they fed the stories about Jobs being sighted on the campus. Whether true or not, the reports themselves are bound to generate discussion and, most of all, anticipation.

I can’t say for certain how seriously you folks consider all this. Maybe it just fell under the radar, or maybe it came to light because there hasn’t been much solid news emerging from Apple, but it sure keeps the brand in the public arena.

Of course, the talk will become far more interesting as anticipation builds for revelations about Snow Leopard and the next generation iPhone during the WWDC beginning on June 8th. Sure, the shape and feature set of the next iPhone has generated some stories too, with the emphasis on a 32GB version, a camera equipped with automatic focus and a few other goodies. In passing, I should say that most of the online chatter has it that the new iPhone’s case design will be extremely similar to its predecessor.

In the scheme of things, stories about a new iPhone have the largest amount of credibility, since Best Buy is already telling customers that they are running low on stock, and it appears there is a worldwide movement to pare the inventory as much as possible before the first shipments of a new model arrive.

Even if a new iPhone is introduced next week, few expect it’ll go on sale right away. It’ll probably get a July release date, similar to the previous model. As to Snow Leopard, since developers are getting a final beta, don’t expect to see it on sale for two or three months, and I’m suggesting the last Friday in August.

Now as to Steve Jobs, well we all know that Marketing VP Philip Schiller is the person booked to host the keynote address at WWDC next week, accompanied by the usual gang of executives who will hold fort on their particular areas of expertise.

But could Apple also be somehow preparing us for a “one more thing” that’ll certainly bring the house down? How about a brief cameo appearance from Steve Jobs? If he is truly healthy enough to return to his full-time job at the end of the month, surely he’ll be sufficiently hale and hearty to show up three weeks earlier? It sounds logical enough, but then again, maybe those hints are just hype and nothing more.

You know the feeling. You find some tiny crawling and airborne critters in your home, so you call the exterminator to get rid of them pronto. However, a few weeks later, and they’re back again, sometimes in greater numbers than before.

In our corner of the universe, the Mac clone insect population was first seeded when Apple switched to Intel processors. Soon they would be delivering Macs build with essentially the same components as a Windows PC. Well, not quite, since Apple bypassed the BIOS of the typical PC in favor of Intel’s Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI for short), a more modern method of configuring low-level functions during a computer’s boot-up process.

As you might expect, power users quickly devised methods to induce Mac OS X to install on generic PC hardware anyway, and a small but widespread community has grown up to support the practice. Indeed, Macworld published an article about just such a project, in which they built a “Hackentosh” that ran quite well, thank you, on Mac OS X before it was reformatted as a Windows PC and returned to conventional duty.

During this process, Apple didn’t go out of its way to stop the practice, since only a small number of people were involved, and they weren’t exactly engaged in a retail business of violating Apple’s user license. That license, as most of you realize, restricts installation of Mac OS X to Apple hardware.

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

When Bill Gates, bless his crooked soul, said years ago that we’d never need more than 640K of RAM, he kind of had the right idea in mind, but he was perhaps a few decades early in expressing this thought.

When Steve Jobs said, with the introduction of the original Power Macintosh G4, that we now had a supercomputer on our desktops, he was closer to the mark, but not quite there.

Today, the speediest personal computers have quad-core processors. The heftier Mac Pros sport two of them, and by next year at this time, six- and eight-core CPUs will be the norm. It wasn’t so long ago that you’d fill a room with hot-running hardware to come even close.

In passing, I should mention that one of the reasons the likes of AMD and Intel went to multicore was because they had begun to hit the wall when it comes to CPU clock speeds. At one time, we thought that 3 GHz ratings and higher were going to be the norm, but few Macs achieve that goal, and then just barely. Indeed, we are now told that playing design tricks with the chips, such as adding more cache RAM, integrated memory controllers, Hyper-Threading and, of course, additional processing cores would cure what ails us. Well at least when it comes to getting more power from our Macs and PCs.

What most of you have discovered is that multicore processors and all that extra stuff don’t count for a hill of beans with the vast majority of the apps you’re running. Only a very few are actually developed to handle the extra cores, so, for the most part they sit there doing nothing beyond consuming precious electric power.

With Snow Leopard, Apple is hoping to change that equation, by providing more thorough tools to make the operating system aware of such configurations, and to make it easier for developers to harness those tools. That, and being able to offload some of the data processing chores to the graphics chip, promise to deliver Macs with previously undreamed of performance potential.

All well and good. The real question, however, is how all this multicore magic translates to the real world, to regular people who don’t spend their workdays playing resource-hogging computer games or performing deep math and 3D rendering chores.

You will certainly find that your email doesn’t arrive any faster, nor will all that extra CPU horsepower help you put more words on the screen in your favorite word processor. No doubt Apple and its third-party software engineers are busy designing lots and lots of graphics eye candy to make things seem more powerful. I’m sure that apps will also launch faster, but part of that is based on the limitations of your hard drive. Stick, for example, a solid state drive inside your MacBook Air, and suddenly it seems to have consumed a large dose of uppers.

Such a dilemma.

Indeed, one of the reasons that netbooks may have taken off is the fact that most computers these days really offer more performance than we really need, so why spend more when something super cheap is good enough? Well, the netbooks have other limitations too, such as smaller hard drives with which to store your stuff, tiny keyboards and small screens that, combined, have caused a number of buyers to return them.

But even without netbooks in the picture, there may still be reason for many Mac users to think of downsizing. One of my friends, tech commentator Kirk McElhearn, has decided that his Mac Pro is just too much computer for his needs. So he’s ordered a full-outfitted Mac mini instead to replace it. He figures that loading a mini with 4GB of RAM ought to be sufficient and he’s also adding external FireWire 800 drives, in case the speed of the internal drive, based on a standard note-book design, proves to slow things down a little too much.

Aside from unneeded performance, Kirk is also concerned about the heat his Mac Pro generates in his home office, which is located in the French Alps and doesn’t have air conditioning. Most of his workload barely taxes the powerful processors of his Mac Pro, so he felt he might as well save some money and get something that was more suited to his particular needs.

Now I can’t tell you that Kirk’s little experiment will actually bear fruit, and that he won’t trade in his Mac mini for a new Mac Pro at the earliest opportunity. Sure, the iMac might have been a more suitable compromise, but he is one of those folks who cannot tolerate glossy screens.

How this might impact Apple’s marketing direction is another issue entirely. Certainly if a heavier dose of low-end iMacs are moving along with the Mac mini, you can bet they might consider adding more value to their cheaper gear. Indeed, they’ve already done that with the $999 MacBook. No, not by making it cheaper but by, you guessed it, giving it a faster processor, speedier RAM and a bigger hard drive.

Well, old habits die hard. Will our obsession with ever faster Macs and PCs soon end as well?

It seems all too common. Rather than compete with Apple by building a better product, Microsoft continues to use focus groups and PowerPoint presentations to devise the features that its rival products do not possess. Worse, this is done without regard to whether those features are even desired or useful.

Take this fall’s contribution to the world of iPod poseurs, known as the Zune HD. Now we all know that HD is supposed to stand for high definition television nowadays, although it once stood for hard drive. But, in addition to supporting HD video, Microsoft has decided we also need support for HD radio. Sure, it’ll have Multi-Touch capability, but that’s normal these days.

HD radio? Never heard of it? Do you even care?

Well, if you must know, HD radio is actually meant as an enhancement and perhaps an eventual replacement for standard or terrestrial broadcasting. This technology, which has been around for several years, adds a digital component to the analog AM and FM signals. As a result, AM suddenly sounds near as good as FM, and FM delivers audio quality that’s said to rival that of a CD.

All well and good. Indeed, hundreds or perhaps thousands of stations in many U.S. cities have already made the costly conversions to their transmission equipment to support HD radio. The problem is that, so far at least, nobody is really listening, and there’s the rub.

But it gets worse than that, and evidently Microsoft isn’t considering any of this in their marketing plans. You see, because of possible signal conflicts with other stations, some HD signals on the AM band cannot be transmitted at night, which is when most reception problems occur, so your back to analog and all that static. More to the point, the signal may not cover the same region as the analog variation, something people who are using antennas to receive stations recently converted from analog to digital are beginning to realize.

It appears to me that Microsoft is supporting HD radio not because they think it has possibilities for success, but because Apple doesn’t. Period.

Looking back at the original Zune, it’s stock in trade was support for Wi-Fi, before Apple added that feature when it brought out the iPhone touch. The Zune employed wireless networking not to sync the gadget’s music, but to “squirt” songs to a friend, songs that were severely crippled with onerous DRM and hence gave the recipient three days to listen before it vanished.

Now other digital media devices have included FM receivers. Well, at least they supported a format people actually used, but it didn’t help them gain sales traction against the iPod. If you must have a radio on your iPod, you buy the appropriate accessory. Why pay for a feature that most people won’t use? The same, of course, holds true for HD radio, and the justification is even flimsier.

This is where Apple has been able to advance against its competition. Yes, you can probably find more features in Windows, particularly when it comes to control panel-based customization, but most of that simply engenders confusion on the part of regular people. If you must customize your Mac beyond the basic settings, you can always do a Google search for a liberal selection of Terminal tips, buy an appropriate book on the subject, or download one of many third-party apps that will do all that stuff for you from within a simple graphical interface.

It is not too difficult, you see, to add features to a product. Too many features, however, without proper thought to correct implementation, simply make it harder to use. In fact product engineering teams have to consider, first and foremost, what to take out. This is akin in some ways to editing an article or a book. Get rid of the needless fluff and concentrate on what makes everything come together into a unified whole. The second thing is to figure out how the new feature best integrates with the ones that are already present, and that can take extra time to accomplish properly.

Apple, for the most part, seems to have a corporate culture that understands these concepts. Sure, they fail from time to time, and also leave bugs that require periodic updates. To be sure, I’ve often felt that Apple has, in recent years, released some of its hardware and software just a little bit too early, thus causing some measure of grief on the part of early adopters.

Microsoft, however, has apparently learned nothing from its experience with the Zune. They cannot just mimic an existing product, tack on an extra feature or two, and expect it to become a resounding success. That may have succeeded with Windows and their productivity apps, but the concept hasn’t helped them in their failed efforts to become a consumer electronics powerhouse.

My feeling is that they shouldn’t bother. The world doesn’t need a Zune HD, and maybe it doesn’t need HD radio either. But it’ll take many more more tragic failures before Microsoft gets the message.