Since making a low-key announcement about 10.5’s successor last summer, Apple has been, publicly at least, extremely quiet on the subject. The preview at Apple’s site remains substantially unchanged, at least as of the time I’m writing this article. And the expected release date, ” in about a year,” hasn’t been altered.

To the surprise of many, Apple said nothing about it at Macworld Expo. Then again, Snow Leopard is not supposed to be visually distinctive compared to Leopard. Most of the changes, such as improved support for multicore processors, and the ability to offload processing chores to the graphic chips, are under-the-hood and difficult to demonstrate. Certainly the improved ability to support Microsoft Exchange servers won’t do much to the look and feel, other than to alter or add some preference settings in Address Book, iCal and Mail.

But this hasn’t stopped the tech press from attempting to read the tea leaves and coming up with a few possibilities here and there that may or may not be true. Some quote Mac developers as suggesting that the Finder has migrated from Carbon to Cocoa. But the underlying programming isn’t going to impact most users, unless the revised Finder is visibly different, and/or performs far more reliably than the current version. That, however, remains unconfirmed.

Other reports talk of revisions to the QuickTime Player interface and perhaps a new interface color scheme that has been labeled “marble.” But Apple remains silent about that too. This sort of speculation also has it that Apple is actually working on fairly substantial interface changes, but is withholding them from the developer community until the last minute, perhaps until the WWDC.

From a logical point of view, however, if Apple wants to deliver Snow Leopard some time this summer, it wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense to suddenly unleash changes of that magnitude. It would give software publishers precious little time to modify their applications to take advantage of those changes, assuming the alterations aren’t just restricted to the color scheme.

At the same time, Microsoft is supposedly on track to release the final or release candidate version of Windows 7 a few days from now. Early reports indicate that it’s actually a fairly good operating system upgrade, and that it addresses many of the performance shortcomings of Windows Vista. There will also be a new taskbar, one that, in part, largely emulates Mac OS X’s Dock. Another change will be an XP compatibility mode, which will allow Windows users to be able to run older applications without running into difficulty. That feature, which will evidently be available as a downloadable module, recalls the Mac OS X’s now-departed Classic mode.

Well, when Microsoft is going to imitate something, they sure look to a good source.

Assuming that there are few serious issues with the planned last prerelease version of Windows 7, Microsoft is expected to ship the final version late this year or early in 2010. As with Vista, upgrade costs are apt to be exceedingly high. While Microsoft will charge an estimated $50 for OEM licenses to PC makers who will bundle Windows 7 with their new hardware, ordinary customers have to pay several times that figure for the very same product. I suppose Microsoft will argue, though, that any customer who buys a few million licenses at a time is entitled to a special discount.

As for Snow Leopard, while some media pundits suggest that the release may actually come in time for WWDC, the general consensus is that it’ll happen some time this summer, perhaps in August. Regardless, it’ll be out way ahead of Windows 7. Certainly there’s no incentive to push to fast towards release. Apple has plenty of time to make sure it’s well baked before it hits the release stage. Besides, previous versions of Mac OS X, by and large, seem to have been released a little too early and thus they were rather bug-prone.

The other consideration is Apple’s planned upgrade policy, and we’ll certainly know that by WWDC. That seems certain to me. Here the expectations are all over the map. I agree with some, including my friend Adam Engst, of TidBITS, that Snow Leopard should be given away free or, if required by accounting rules, sold for a modest fee, perhaps $19 for a single user license.

Certainly Apple has an incentive to want to get Snow Leopard onto as many Macs as possible, and I presume it’ll be, as has been reported already, Intel-only. It would surely reduce support expenses, and it would also allow developers to move full steam ahead to make their applications fully compatible with all the new features that are guaranteed to improve performance tremendously. That’s particularly true for software that taxes your Mac’s processors.

As to those who have PowerPC Macs: Well, the handwriting has been on the wall for quite some time. Adobe and other companies have already produced Intel-only versions of some of their new products, and that’s a trend that you can expect to increase over the next year.

Sure, these older Macs have plenty of life left in them. They can still run reliably as productive tools for home and business users. But Apple wants you to upgrade. That’s what keeps them in business, and maybe the arrival of Snow Leopard will help speed up the process. That is, if the economy cooperates.

Make no mistake about it. Other than close partners and contract equipment manufacturers, very few people outside of Apple know the truth about their future plans. By being exceptionally secretive, however, Apple feeds the rumors big time simply by saying nothing. The less they say, the more people talk.

So we have stories in recent days suggesting that Apple is in heavy talks with Verizon Wireless to add a second carrier to the U.S. once their contract with AT&T ends, and that’s reportedly in 2010.

On the surface this appears credible. After all, Verizon, by dint of its acquisition of Alltel, has emerged as the number one wireless carrier in the U.S. Even better, they have a reputation for superior network reliability and customer service. Indeed, some suggest that Verizon may have been a better fit for a company such as Apple, since it prides itself on offering an excellent customer experience.

On the other hand, Verizon uses the CDMA standard, one supported by far fewer companies worldwide, whereas building GSM-based product for AT&T allows Apple to manufacture one model that can work with dozens and dozens of carriers around the world.

However, it’s also true that Verizon will match the rest of the world in moving to the forthcoming  LTE standard, but that change is probably a couple of years away. However, when it happens, it would allow Apple to add Verizon to its list of carriers without the need to build two different iPhone versions.

On the other hand, the rest of the industry has been building multiple versions of their products that for years, and with the possibility of selling several million additional iPhones, it would seem to make sense for Apple to join the crowd. So I’d never say never. On the other hand, Apple could also strike a deal with T-Mobile, the nation’s fourth largest carrier, which also uses the GSM system. However, T-Mobile’s subscriber list, less than 33 million according to the most recent estimate, is far smaller than Verizon, and their 3G network isn’t well deployed yet.

Then again, Apple is always talking to potential partners. There’s no doubt about that, but it doesn’t mean that contracts are pending now, or in the near future. It may even be possible that some Verizon executives are quietly releasing just enough information about such discussions to be enticing to the media. It may also allow Verizon to fool potential customers into believing that the iPhone is coming, eventually, so there’s no reason for them to leave and go to AT&T.

On other fronts, there have already been published reports that Apple is shopping contract builders about assembling a netbook of some sort. One story had it that 10-inch screens had already been ordered for delivery later this year.

Even if true, that doesn’t mean there’s an Apple netbook in our future, although I rather suspect there will be something of this sort, probably based on the iPhone operating system. You see, Apple is always working on prototypes for new gear in its test labs. They might simply be gathering production estimates on various components just to have the information ready in case they do commit to actually releasing one of these products.

That would mean there is not just an iPhone-based netbook under development, but one that more closely resembles a traditional Mac portable computer. There is surely a CDMA version of the iPhone there too, along with lots of other stuff we can only dream about.

If any new gear is about to be announced, it may also be true that Apple will contact its favored mainstream reporters, perhaps from such outlets as The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek or Time. They will receive briefings on deep background about the impending product or strategic maneuver, with the agreement that nobody from Apple will be quoted directly.

Consider that Wall Street Journal story recently about Steve Jobs that appeared to confirm his plans to return to Apple in late June as promised, and assuring us that he is still working closely with the company on new gear. It was widely quoted, and taken seriously, as it should be, since it’s all but a certainty that it was released with Apple’s full knowledge and cooperation.

When you read stories like that, you just know that there isn’t any mind reading involved. It’s either a phone call or a personal briefing, and it doesn’t require any psychic gifts to understand why it was done. That’s also an important segment of Apple’s marketing strategy.

Additionally, when a new product spec appears briefly on Apple’s site, do you really think it was an inadvertent mistake, or do they simply know that there are trolls watching every little thing on the site, in the hopes that something of this sort will suddenly appear and, of course, just as quickly disappear?

A clever way to divert attention from your own shortcomings is to talk about someone else’s, real or imagined. In business, you focus on the things your competitor supposedly does wrong, hoping they won’t stop to look more closely at your own failings.

So we have Microsoft making a huge deal about an alleged “Apple Tax,” purported to be the extra price you pay when you choose Apple’s ultra cool Macs instead of an ordinary Windows box. Now regular readers know that I don’t believe there is such a thing. It’s a hype, a false claim from Microsoft and Windows fanboys to stem the ongoing erosion of PC market share.

When it comes to purchase price, a Mac and a PC, almost identically configured in terms of hardware and software, will be priced really close. The PC may have a slight advantage at the low end of the market, while Macs will beat the mainstream workstations by a surprisingly large margin at the high-end, with the Mac Pro.

But the real price you pay is the cost to own, and that’s something Microsoft doesn’t want you to know. They sure tried their best, hiring a hack industry analyst by the name of Roger Kay to deliver a misleading white paper that pretended to show that it costs thousands less for a family to own several Windows PCs instead of Macs over a period of five years.

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

Several years ago, during one of their quarterly conference calls with financial analysts, Apple again dismissed the possibility that they’d ever build a cheap Mac. The reason, often stated, is that they didn’t want to build a crappy Mac.

Well, it is true that, in the 1990s when Apple couldn’t do anything right (more or less), there were some relatively low-cost and low-powered Macs that you might consider junk. I won’t name the particular models, bearing the moniker Performa, but I’m sure our long-time readers get the idea.

However, not a few months after the conference call in question, the Mac mini came out. True, it wasn’t quite like the PC boxes that sold for comparable prices. Indeed, the internals were pretty much based on Apple’s lowest cost note-book, which at that time was the iBook. As a side note, this was yet another example of Apple’s use of note-book parts in desktop computers. Much of that design strategy debuted with the iMac, which has been designed in that fashion pretty much from day one.

In any case, although it doesn’t seem to have gotten lots of R&D love from Apple, the Mac mini has remained a consistent seller over the years. The latest model, introduced early last month, has received really good reviews, particularly as a result of the addition of NVIDIA’s 9400M integrated graphics processor, which delivers many times the performance of the previous Intel-built version.

Now over the years, Apple also poured lots of cold water on the prospects of entering the mobile phone business, at least until they had the iPhone near release. Clearly there is so much wrong with the interfaces of existing smartphones that Apple was able to deliver a cutting-edge product that, as with the iPod before it, is a great source of emulation on the part of rival companies.

More recently, the nascent netbook market has gotten lots and lots of discussion. In the days ahead of the release of Apple’s financials for the March quarter, some misguided analysts were suggesting that Apple had no alternative but to release a netbook forthwith or face serious erosion of its Mac business.

Now existing netbooks are little more than shrunken note-books with tinier processors, smaller hard drives or simply Flash memory. The keyboard is squeezed together tightly, and the screen is very small. For doing basic email and Web browsing, and perhaps running a word processor, they’re probably all right, but the jury is out on whether buyer’s remorse will set in when customers save enough money to buy a real note-book computer.

Meantime, Apple has reminded us that the existing netbooks are just cheap junk, and they have no intention whatever of building similar products. But they leave the door open just enough to suggest that they have their own ideas, and if the market is more than a flash in the pan, they would consider entering it.

You know, of course, that such statements are pretty much an admission that netbook prototypes are currently being tested at Apple headquarters, in one of the buildings that’s sealed from outside scrutiny. Sure, you’ve read reports that allegedly come from Asian contract manufacturers that might be selected to build an Apple product of this sort. There’s even a story that Apple is already placing orders on 10-inch displays to fit inside such a device.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to take such stories seriously. No company that expects business from Apple is going to admit being selected to build a future product for them. That would be akin to committing commercial suicide. The real manufacturers vying for a crack at a new Apple gadget undoubtedly engage in the bidding wars under deep confidentiality agreements, with the understanding that disclosure would put them out of the running.

In saying that, though, it’s fair to say that the real Apple netbook being developed is probably not going to imitate the PC maker’s scheme of just shrinking an existing note-book design. That may reduce development costs, but that’s not Apple’s scene.

The credible speculation has it that Apple will simply take the slim, trim iPhone operating system and deliver it in a larger product. It may even, some suggest, have a tablet screen, which essentially means a movable display with the standard iPhone-derived touch functions.

Then again, we are all working in the dark here. I don’t think there were many — or any — accurate predictions of what Apple’s iPhone would be before it was announced. The same is true for an Apple netbook. Yes, maybe it’ll be a descendant of the eMate 300, a portable computer based on the Newton operating system. Maybe it will have a built-in keyboard, though I rather suspect it’ll simply support wireless input devices.

What’s clear is that Apple hasn’t lost its ability to amaze us, so I can put all the predictions on the table that I want, with full assurance that I’ll probably be dead wrong on most counts.