As most of our regular readers know, I’m no fan of Wall Street. It’s not that I have ever had enough money to play the market, but I rather think that I’d do as well or better in Las Vegas. On the other hand, my budget at the gambling tables has never exceeded $20, so who am I to talk?

Certainly in the current economic climate, I am even less inclined to want to entrust any stock broker with my hard-earned money for investment purposes. But I’ve been wondering about Apple’s stock price, which has shown a steady rise since the iPhone 3.0 SDK was unveiled earlier this month.

Now it’s not that Wall Street loves Apple. Usually it’s the reverse. Indeed, in the past, you’ve no doubt seen Apple’s stock price dip even though the company is reporting record sales. Go figure.

This time, maybe the market is just trying harder to find reason to be optimistic, and perhaps that explains it. Or maybe they are carefully looking at Apple’s ongoing game plan for once, what little anyone knows about it outside the company, and seeing lots of future earnings potential.

Certainly the new Macs have evidently been well received. There was a report, unconfirmed of course, that Apple boosted their production of the latest models because of unexpectedly high demand. You just know that COO Tim Cook keeps close tabs on inventory, and he isn’t going to ask for more product if there’s no compelling reason to do so. Unlike Microsoft and the auto industry for that matter, Apple doesn’t believe in flooding the channels with excess product just to deliver good sales figures. That’s the sort of game that can come back to bite a company in bad times.

All this excitement seems to be happening despite the fact that the average price of a Mac is higher than the average price of a PC. May I remind our readers, though, that I still maintain that Apple is price competitive, particularly when you equip models from both platforms with similar options, or as similar as you can make them. But I have no patience right now to resume that age-old argument.

But if you look at Apple’s online store — and the tallies may have changed by the time you read this article — the iMac is the top-selling Mac, even ahead of the MacBook and MacBook Pro. Number four is the Mac mini, ahead of the Mac Pro and MacBook Air.

I rather suspect that lots of people who may have dismissed the mini are now giving it serious consideration. Not just because it’s small and cute, but because its new integrated NVIDIA graphics hardware makes it even a passable game machine for casual gamers. Imagine that! More to the point, unless you are doing some fairly demanding tasks on your Mac, it is surely fast enough for most people.

Yes, the mini’s hard drives are slow, since they are similar to the ones in a MacBook. Sure, adding RAM is a pain, but that’s something you can do at the outset with your dealer’s help and be done with it. Besides, if you already have a decent display and keyboard, it’s a great bargain. Maybe if Apple would spend a small amount promoting this sleeper of a product at long last, more people would realize that simple fact.

But I think Wall Street is happiest about the potential of the iPhone 3.0 software for business. Yes, consumers will appreciate cut, copy and paste, multimedia messaging and such, but the ability to tap an extraordinary number of external peripherals via the Dock connector will yield great potential for lots and lots of industries.

Certainly the demonstrration of a small part of its health care potential during Apple’s rollout of the iPhone SDK upgrade is just a small sample. Being able to check blood pressure and blood glucose levels are just part of what the medical industry can do with an iPhone. You will be able to plug it into a host of diagnostic tools, and the information can easily be compared to a patient’s medical history. That can help reduce the number of mistakes a doctor or nurse might make during their rounds, and it would also help speed proper diagnosis and treatment of a patient.

Imagine emergency techs examining someone on scene who has suffered a seizure. Plug in some basic information about the patient in question, and the medics will have a ton of information that they can use to provide critical on-the-spot care that will save lives.

And, no doubt, reduce the number of malpractice claims in the health care industry.

I will leave it to you to contemplate other possibilities for the iPhone in the business world. Just having an efficient point-of-sale device is the beginning. Consider the car dealer who meets you in front of his showroom, and can immediately consult inventory to see if the model you want is available, and deliver a competitive price on the spot. Certainly managing production in auto factories may also be rendered more efficient.

Tons of iPhones may be sold to the enterprise as a result. RIM has to be shaking in their boots. Microsoft? Forget about them. They still haven’t a clue that the world has passed them by.

It’s hard to believe that the iPhone will be two years old in just a couple of months, and that, my friends, is the duration of a standard contract with a wireless carrier.

Now I assume those of you who didn’t trade up last year still have your first-generation model in regular use, and that it is still working quite nicely. That in itself may be quite an achievement in our disposable society, where most handsets can barely last half that long. I know my original iPhone is now in another owner’s hands, and my 3G model is working pretty much the same as new. Since it is also ensconced in a translucent case, it is, so far as I can tell, free of serious blemishes. Even though dropped a few times, the glass face remains unblemished.

In the scheme of things, that probably means that this phone could survive several years of regular use before I have to send it on to the recycle bin. I also assume that, since it’s a subsidized model, AT&T isn’t going to want to allow me to upgrade to the third-generation model this summer without paying some sort of penalty. Or perhaps they’ll just allow me to transfer it to another user on my account and let me re-up for another couple of years.

Indeed, that’s the thing about most of what Apple builds. While I realize some of you may have gone through several iPods due to older models breaking down as the result wear and tear, a lot of that damage is probably largely the result of a hard drive failure, and that’s the component most often replaced. I exclude such obvious happenstances as breakage.

So with little to wear out, how will Apple and the carriers it works with around the world entice you to buy a new iPhone far earlier than you might otherwise have contemplated such a move?

Well, going from EDGE to 3G was a no-brainer. Getting decent Internet performance on a wireless carrier’s network can make a huge difference. Even then, 3G is, at best, still slower than many home-based broadband connections. So where does Apple go next?

Well, assuming the carrier is rolling out something better, such as AT&T’s expected upgrade to HSDPA on their 3G networks, it would mean a theoretical speed of up to seven megabits and perhaps a bit more. Assuming Safari can be enhanced to keep up — and it’s rather on the slow side now — that would surely make the surfing experience considerably more productive. Although today’s iPhone 3G seems snappy enough when the network is running at a good clip, start to compare it with the experience of running Safari on your Mac or PC, and you’ll see what I mean.

That, however, is merely one advantage that the new model might provide, and it would probably not involve anything more than upgrading the chipsets. What else would a new iPhone offer?

Well, I suppose somewhat slicker looks and perhaps more color choices. Apple might even consider a larger version, a so-called “netbook” variation that comes closer in concept to the eMate 300, a Newton-based wireless appliance that Apple sold for a while, mostly to the educational market, in the last decade.

I’m not sure about a smaller version. You see, the screen is tiny enough as it is, and a little case shrinkage might be possible, but don’t expect Apple to succumb to the multiple model disease that other consumer electronics companies seem to have suffered from for many years. That’s not Apple’s scene.

But there are practical changes you might see in a new iPhone. One would simply be a better camera, with perhaps five megapixel resolution instead of just two. There may even be an automatic flash capability of some sort for low-light situations. Some have even suggested that video or movie-making capability would be added as well, turning the next iPhone into a miniature camcorder, perhaps in the spirit of Pure Digital’s popular flip video. I rather think that even today’s iPhone 3G has much of the hardware installed to accomplish that worthy task.

With the forthcoming iPhone 3.0 software, there are lots of other capabilities in the works. Apple has only disclosed a small number of the 100 new features they touted during their recent introduction of the new iPhone SDK.

Yes, we all know about the arrival of cut, copy and paste, multimedia messaging (MMS), Push Notification and the ability to check and compose email in landscape mode. The ability to record voice notes may impact some of the third-party apps that exist to perform that function, but what about dialing a call via voice? Isn’t that a feature particularly critical in states, such as California, where hands-free use of a cell phone while driving is required? Forget about third-party alternatives. This is really Apple’s job.

So, yes, I’m extremely optimistic about the promise of the next iPhone. If I am tempted to acquire one, I suppose my son wouldn’t object to having my 3G model transferred to his account. He doesn’t seem too enthusiastic about the possibility, but perhaps when he returns from his job in Spain this summer, he’ll have a change of heart.

More than two months after Steve Jobs took his extended hiatus to recover from his various health issues, some members of the tech media, clearly in desperate search for a story, are suggesting that Apple no longer has any creativity left. The illusion they present is that Steve Jobs was the one-man band who managed all the significant developments at Apple, and his absence will ultimately deprive the company of its primary innovative force.

Just for the sake of argument — though it argues against what Apple’s other executives have claimed — let’s assume for the moment that Jobs has had no involvement whatever in the company’s decision-making in recent weeks. Even if that’s the case, what about the decisions he made prior to that? Are we to assume that none of those decisions had any impact on what Apple planned to do in 2009? Can you believe that, on the day of his departure, he told his team that they were on their own, and anything he said up till then was to be considered null and void?

Of course that hardly makes any sense. More to the point, unless Jobs is at death’s door, and there is no evidence of that whatever, I cannot believe for a moment that he is not in regular touch with the executive team and working with them on current and future product development and marketing strategy.

Indeed, the features so far announced for the iPhone 3.0 SDK and firmware smack of Jobs’ input. Even if he wasn’t consulted, surely he made his thoughts known before he went away. Now I realize that the executive team could, perhaps, move in different directions in case the situation changed, but again I find it difficult to believe that such a thing would happen without Jobs knowing about and voicing any needed objections.

I suppose the situation gets muddier if Jobs, for reasons of health, boredom or a host of other reasons, decides that he is no longer interested in working for Apple Inc. There are surely plans afoot in the event of his permanent departure. Some suggest that the same team that you’ve seen already will simply remain in charge, and that COO Tim Cook, who is acting in Jobs’ stead, will simply become the CEO. Nobody — not even the skeptics — question his ability to keep the company running efficiently, even if there are concerns about his creative abilities.

In any case, why would the tech media think Apple has lost it?

Well, consider the extent of the product releases so far, at least before the new iPhone SDK was introduced last week. The iLife ’09 and iWork ’09 upgrades were interesting no doubt, and some of the features welcomed by one and all. But you can hardly call them trendsetters. Then again, what would you expect for a simple version update?

When it comes to the 17-inch MacBook Pro, once again you would expect that most of the new features simply mirror the ones presented last fall for the smaller version of Apple’s professional note-book. The larger case, however, afforded them room for a long-life battery, and there is that “non-glossy” screen option for folks for whom glossy is painful to use.

The new iPod shuffle is getting mixed reviews, mostly because of its proprietary remote control, which you need to access most of its functionality. However, Apple has already stated that third parties will soon release compatible headphones and no doubt remote adapters so you can use the headset you have now without having to buy a new one. In the normal course of events, however, I think people who buy shuffles largely do so to save money and get the most bang for the buck. They probably don’t generally concern themselves about third-party headsets.

That takes us to the revisions in Mac desktops. Yes, it’s been a busy month.

There was one published report indicating that Apple had upped its production run because of a higher demand for the new models. Certainly that’s promising, particularly in light of reports that Mac sales were down rather substantially in February. That assumes that the sales reports, which strictly represent U.S.-based retail and not online and international sales, indicate a real trend.

Looking over these upgrades, I’m rather impressed for the most part. That Apple intends to keep the Mac mini in production is a good thing, and the improvements, particularly to the graphics hardware, are welcome. It may seem expensive at first glance compared to cheap PC hardware, but when I compared Dell’s entry-level desktop, and attempted to outfit it as close as possible to the $799 Mac mini, the former hit $709 without adding 802.11n Wi-Fi, instead of the slower “g” standard, and gigabit Ethernet, which wasn’t listed as an option. Even assuming these two features had a cash value of $25, total, the value of iLife clearly accounts for the remaining price difference and then some.

The iMac is particularly intriguing, since, basically, Apple is giving you the same hardware for $300 less. If the report of a possible $899 educational model with a 17-inch screen is true, it may present Apple with a cheap product they can offer to the general consumer market if there’s enough demand. That would surely address concerns about the so-called “Apple Tax” that does not, as far as I’m concerned, really exist.

It all comes down to this. The products released so far are what you would expect even if Steve Jobs had been working full-time as CEO, and the year is still young.

They say that first impressions are often the most important, and that a product that doesn’t grab you right away may be doomed to failure.

Now after a decently-long gestation period, the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer, version 8, is now available for download. Forgetting preliminary reports about its performance potential — or lack thereof — I decided to give it a fair shake, download a copy and try it out.

Well, typical of Microsoft’s products, this was not so easy a process. Let me explain, and don’t miss the contrast where an installation scenario is handled properly.

You see, when I first launched my Vista installation, which comes courtesy of a Parallels Desktop virtual machine, I got a familiar notice, but not from Microsoft. Instead, if was the Windows version of Apple’s Software Update, informing me about the recent updates to iTunes and QuickTime.

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