All things being equal, you’d expect more and more Mac note-books to sell in the months and years to come, at the expense of desktops. Some day, not even the iMac would have any reason to exist, and might disappear in favor of a few portable models with larger screens — or at least that’s one possibility.

The other has it that people are looking to save money in any way possible, and that may be one of the key reasons why Microsoft is squandering so much cash on its new ad campaign. Forgetting the obvious flaws in those annoying TV spots, they want to show people that you can get PCs real cheap if you shop around.

In yesteday’s commentary, I suggested that any movement on Apple’s part towards a lower-cost Mac would probably involve a little cost-cutting and perhaps a MacBook and iMac with smaller screens, to knock $200 or so off the retail price. There is, however, another way.

For a number of years, some of us have been urging Apple to deliver a desktop computer that sits between the Mac mini and Mac Pro but does not, as with the iMac, have a built-in display. Such a model would serve the purposes of folks who don’t want to pay extra for a screen when they already have one that’s perfectly serviceable, but for whom the Mac mini isn’t powerful or flexible enough and the Mac Pro is overkill.

I have called it the headless iMac, since I envision a product that would possibly contain much of the same components, but are simply installed in a box that has a few expansion options. This case design would afford space for a second internal hard drive, a second graphics or other expansion card, and perhaps room for additional memory modules.

Dan Frakes, of Macworld, refers to it as a Mythical Midrange Mac Minitower, but call it what you want. The question is whether Apple could sell enough of them to make sense. As far as R&D expenses are concerned, I don’t expect that it would involve a large figure, since the design elements would mostly involve the case and internal layout. Indeed, they could employ the same aluminum layout as the iMac, and give it sort of a family resemblance. It would be sleek and tiny, but surely larger than a Mac mini, so as to contain the additional parts.

Looking back at the early Mac lineup, the Mac IIcx was probably the closest equivalent. This model — and its immediate successors, such as the IIci and Quadra 700 — were perfect for people for whom the IIx series was too expensive and offered more computer than they needed.

On the PC side of the ledger, there are tons of desktops that exist above the entry-level, which afford good performance, reasonable expansion capability and are not super expensive. Apple could likely sell one of these babies for $899 and up and possibly move a fair number of units into homes and businesses that don’t find the existing Mac lineup to suit their needs.

I understand Apple doesn’t want to enter too many product segments, because it engenders customer confusion and increases manufacturing costs. At the same time, the Mac versus PC wars have stepped up in recent months because Microsoft has decided it’s no longer going to sit back and simply take it. Although still making decent profits, their business is down and they are laying off thousands of employees. They can also see a slipping market share, and that has to cut to the bone.

This doesn’t mean that Apple’s computer business is in danger. It’s quite possible that the worst of the economic crisis is over, and that the situation is stabilizing in most industries. Renewed growth is being predicted by the so-called financial experts during the last half of the year.

So Apple could possibly rest on its laurels as far as the Mac lineup is concerned and perhaps do just fine. On the other hand, with increasing speculation that a netbook is in their future, I also have to wonder whether a fourth desktop model is also called for. Apple’s market research might possibly require looking at the profiles of people who buy iMacs, or don’t consider Macs at all.

How many potential customers are removing Apple from their shopping list because there’s no model in the Mac lineup that meets their needs. Certainly Apple offers plenty of flexibility when it comes to iPods, with multiple models in various colors serving different price ranges and needs. Surely that level of flexibility ought to extend to Apple’s original business — personal computers. What’s more, if they could gain sales of several hundred thousand units per quarter by adding another desktop model to their arsenal, then it makes quite a bit of sense to move in that direction. It would also provide another affordable point of entry for people who find that the Mac mini doesn’t fit their needs.

Of course, I might be wrong about all this. After all, I’m just a tech journalist. What do I know? But I do believe that Apple ought to consider more than just netbooks as it continues to consider changes to the Mac lineup.

The critics say Apple needs to reduce the price of Macs. Apple says they won’t build junk. So between these two extremes, is there a happy medium that would make your next Mac more affordable?

Today’s Mac begins at $599, for the entry-level Mac mini. You can customize it after a fashion with a larger hard drive and additional memory, but that’s pretty much the extent of the hardware changes. However, this is the sort of computer that is closer in concept to an appliance. You would probably have it configured on Day One the way you want and the only internal changes you’re likely to make after that would involve repair of a defective part, such as a failed hard drive.

Although lacking a keyboard and mouse, the Mac mini is a pretty complete package, and it’s really designed for people who already have input devices and a display. Since it comes with built-in gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, along with a fair selection of basic consumer apps, a fair number of new owners can use it without installing anything extra.

If Apple were to make the Mac mini less expensive, how would they go about accomplishing that task? First and foremost, they could, I suppose, just reduce the price for the same two models, and hope that increased sales would compensate for lost profits in terms of volume. That is the approach taken by most of the PC makers who don’t earn a whole lot of cash from their low-end models. They also provide rich customization options, hoping that if you check enough boxes on the ordering slip, you’ll help make up the difference for those who want their cheap PCs without any extras whatsoever.

Absent profits, what else can Apple ditch? Unfortunately, less memory and a smaller hard drive would, while saving a small amount of money, simply make the product less usable, particularly for the Mac user who has big photo and music libraries. Suddenly you’d be forced to upgrade a hard drive, which doesn’t make your Mac mini so cheap.

Yes, slower Ethernet, and dropping Bluetooth and Wi-Fi might knock another $40 or $50 off the purchase price, but that’s trivial. And, again, if you need any of those things, the upgrade expense would exorbitant, since the mini isn’t easy to open and take apart for a non-technical audience.

Indeed, a $549 Mac mini, or even a $499 version, which removes those extras and reduces Apple’s profit margins, might sell more units in the end, but would that compensate for the inconvenience of forcing people to pay a lot more for possible upgrades later on? Is a $100 price difference the deal breaker?

On the software side of the ledger, I’m sure Apple allocates a certain percentage of the cost of building each unit for the bundled software. On the practical side, when it comes to manufacturing costs, it doesn’t matter what’s on the factory disk image, so removing iLife makes little sense. Besides, having it preloaded is one of the attractions to the new Mac user, particularly the ones migrating from Windows and accustomed to the ever-present crapware loaded on their new hard drives.

Another way to cut costs without building junk is to find ways to produce the same product less expensively, aside from the savings from higher production levels. One way might be to bundle a 3G connection card and then arrange for a subsidy from AT&T or Apple’s wireless partner in your country, whatever it might be. That can reduce the price of admission by $100 to $200, and suddenly put loads of new Macs into the homes of people for whom price was once a serious obstacle. Then again, that’s probably an approach for which a note-book is a better fit.

As a practical matter, Apple could, I suppose, produce knock-offs of a cheap PC, only preloaded with Mac OS X. That would enable them to take advantage of the same quantity pricing as all their competitors, but would it be the same solidly built Mac or just another piece of electronic junk?

No, that doesn’t make much sense. But Apple could also return a 17-inch iMac to their consumer lineup. Maybe a screen that small wouldn’t be quite so compelling, but at $799 or $899, it might make an awful lot of sense to those who want a complete package but are faced with the typically tighter budget caused by the world’s economic crisis.

As far as a note-book is concerned, Apple seems to feel we require a 13.3-inch screen, and maybe that’s true for most customers. But there are a fair number of people who loved the original 12-inch PowerBook, and building a MacBook nano with that sort of form factor would also let Apple reduce production expenses somewhat. The cheapest MacBook, last year’s model with a faster graphics chip, is $999. An $899 12-inch MacBook might seem less of a stretch to folks paying just a little bit less for the low-end piece of garbage that PC makers hawk.

Overall, however, I don’t see Apple making serious inroads in the low end of the PC market. There’s just not enough profit in it, and I doubt any of you would like to see Apple sacrifice earnings in the hopes of making a few more sales. They’re doing quite well right now, thank you.

The latest duel between Apple and Microsoft is playing out in a series of much-discussed ads from both companies that purport to present their sides of the great operating system wars.

On the one hand, you have the pleasantly satirical Mac versus PC spots from Apple, in which the PC is depicted as a pleasant but always frazzled person, while the Mac is simply cool. Microsoft’s answer is to have actors masquerade as regular people who are given money and the task of buying the best note-book. Hint: It’s always a PC. So what did you expect?

Now you just knew that Apple fans would quickly pick out the blatant flaws in Microsoft’s advertising, which only goes to show that the company didn’t vet those ads properly. Surely they could have staged it so their performers selected more compelling Windows-based note-books, as there are some models that compete far better with the Mac alternative. It’s almost as if they were designed to fail.

However, the larger issue is just how much a company wants to focus attention on its main competitor. With Apple, the 800-pound Microsoft gorilla is always in the room, so they may as well acknowledge it. Their technique, of course, is to use humor to focus on the well-known shortcomings in Windows. Sure there’s exaggeration on both sides, but the core message is actually quite accurate and that clearly doesn’t sit well with Microsoft’s leadership.

More to the point, CEO Steve Ballmer is the sort of “shoot from the hip” person who can’t hide his feelings about pointed criticism. You can almost hear him screaming into the phone at his ad agency demanding they do something, anything, to combat Apple’s campaign.

A writer from Fortune is suggesting that Bill Gates, faced with a similar set of circumstances, would have simply taken the high road and ignored Apple. Sometimes the best way to defeat the competitor is to accentuate the positives, such as they are, and pretend that there are no other companies out there with comparable products.

Indeed, those cute spots featuring a child doing cool things on a PC were just perfect. It made Windows seem warm, fuzzy and not as intimidating as some might have you believe. No doubt such basic tasks are probably near as easy to perform on a PC as on a Mac, and an expansion of that campaign might have done wonders to improve the tarnished image of Windows.

But, no, Microsoft doesn’t know when to stop, and running an ad campaign in which the Mac is mentioned constantly only elevates Apple’s status in this supposed battle to the death. Worse, doing a poor comparison is worse than none at all. Microsoft is actually not even promoting Windows in these ads, but someone else’s hardware. Whether it’s HP, Sony or another company doesn’t matter. Nothing in those ads conveys the message of whether Windows can actually get the job done, only that the hardware on which it runs may or may not be cheaper than a Mac. Even that depends on how you interpret the purchase choices that were made.

Of course, the best method of evaluating an ad campaign is what people in the industry call Return On Investment, or ROI for short. If the money spent is delivering decent sales and profits, you continue the campaign, even if lots of people hate your approach. However, if sales don’t change, or are impacted negatively, then you try a different approach and see if it fares better.

I rather expect that Apple’s Mac versus PC ads are bona fide hits. That’s why the campaign has continued for the past several years. At the same time, you have to think of Microsoft as a company scrambling to find a coherent message, because they are taking the music industry approach of throwing out tons of product in the hope that something will catch on.

Sure, Microsoft’s method may gain the attention of Mac users, who delight in finding holes in the message. That indeed may draw critical, but not friendly, attention to the campaign. But the average consumer may not care one way or the other. The worst that can happen is that people will simply fast forward through the ads on their DVRs. With more and more people time-shifting TV fare for later viewing, that can be death to even the most clever marketing plan. And nothing, to me at least, speaks clever in most of Microsoft’s efforts so far. Except for the ones featuring children, of course.

On the long term, it’s quite possible Microsoft will simply keep the ads going non-stop, one after another, in the hope that the message they are trying to convey, the existence of an Apple Tax, sinks in. But public perceptions have long ago concluded the very same thing, that a Mac is more expensive than a PC. But people who buy Macs anyway don’t care about the price difference. They seek a better product.

As a matter of fact, I won’t even repeat my well-worn arguments about the Apple Tax message. It doesn’t matter anymore. Microsoft hasn’t realized that yet, and it may indeed be too late for them before they do. Way too late!

Some tech writers have been telling us that we’re all moving towards cloud-based services. Not just email and the Web, but productivity apps, such as a word processor and spreadsheet, will soon all be hosted by massive server farms around the world. Instead of installing this stuff on your Mac and PC, you’ll just access the interface in your favorite browser.

Indeed, this state of affairs, should it come to pass, will mean the virtual (literally) end of the operating system wars, since it won’t matter. Issues of the Mac versus the PC versus Linux will prove irrelevant. Whatever you want you get, because any current browser will be able to access the services you want. Even better, in this environment you won’t even need to travel with your own computer. The hotel could leave one in your room, next to the TV, and you’d just login and do your work.

Right now, though, it seems that such dreams — assuming that’s what they are of course — are far from being fulfilled. In recent days, for example, Google, one of the guiding lights in the migration to cloud computing, suffered another of its periodic outages recently. Although the problem supposedly originated in Asia, soon Google users from around the world were unable to access their Gmail and other services for a period of up to several hours.

Amazon’s S3 service, another pioneer in online access, has also suffered from occasional hiccoughs, and you all remember the rough, ragged rollout of MobileMe, Apple’s successor to .Mac. For days and weeks on end, getting your .Mac mail was an uncertain process, and a small number of messages stored online may have been lost as Apple struggled to straighten this mess out.

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