When Apple created TV ads to tout the updated 17-inch MacBook Pro, which sells for the same $2,799 as the previous model, they didn’t emphasize so much its great performance, although its snazzy looks were certainly not ignored. Instead, they extolled its green-tinted virtues, such as easy recycling, particularly with the new long-life battery.

In delivering the long-neglected upgrade to the poor, neglected Mac mini this week, it was referred to as, “The world’s most energy-efficient desktop computer.” At idle, for example, the refreshed mini uses a mere 13 watts of power, down 45 percent from the previous version. Clearly the complaints from such activist organizations as Greenpeace have had their impact.

Indeed, the mini carries a laundry list of environmentally friendly features that, in large part, are shared with other models in the new lineup:

• BFR-free
• PVC-free (internal cables)
• Highly recyclable aluminum and polycarbonate enclosure
• Meets ENERGY STAR Version 5.0 requirements
• Rated EPEAT Gold

I don’t pretend to know enough about such matters to comment on their ultimate value, except to remind you that ENERGY STAR Version 5.0 specs do not become effective till July 2009, so Apple is clearly ahead of the industry in that respect. However, it’s also true that our society is moving in this direction, particularly with the new administration in the U.S., so this comes at an appropriate occasion for Apple. Lest you forget, former Vice President Al Gore, who acts as if he regards himself as the ultimate environmentalist, is a member of Apple’s board.

But let’s ignore the political implications of Gore’s presence, or Apple’s actions. Certainly it doesn’t hurt to have a desktop computer that’s more powerful and more power efficient at the same time. The same apparently applies to the iMac, where Apple boasts that the new model “uses an advanced power management system leveraged from the technology that makes the most of battery life in Apple’s MacBook family. To reduce energy consumption, the iMac hard drive spins down automatically when inactive. iMac also decides which processor — CPU or GPU — is best suited to perform a task efficiently. That means when iMac is idle, it’s using as little power as possible.”

Even the uber-powerful Mac Pro workstation makes a nod towards environmental friendliness, and Apple boasts that, ” compared with the previous-generation Mac Pro, the power used when the system is idle has been reduced by 15 percent.” That may not seem like an awful lot, but when you have a desktop computer with up to eight cores and advanced graphics chips chugging along, every little bit helps.

It also helps that, when you finally submit this gear to the recycling plant, it’ll be easier to repurpose the raw ingredients for other purposes. Or even to build more Macs, I suppose. I wonder when Apple is going to tell us that they have released upgraded models built, at least in part, from recycled parts?

From a value equation, it also seems that the new Macs present a far greater value to the customer, aside from environmental considerations. Now maybe the changes in the new Mac mini seem fairly minor, except for the souped up NVIDIA integrated graphics, surely the iMac has become, as much as any Apple product can be, a real bargain. Take the $1,499 version with a 24-inch display, 4GB RAM, and a standard 650GB hard drive. Lest you forget, you spent the same amount on the previous model with a 20-inch screen, half the memory and hard drive storage space.

True, the switch to standard integrated graphics may seem to portend a lessening of graphics capability, but if you’ve seen the widely-published benchmarks of the unibody MacBooks, which contain the same NVIDIA chipset, you’ll see that nothing has been sacrificed, except for shared memory. Graphics performance is actually superior to the discrete ATI graphics chip on the previous model.

As you might expect, there are already blow-out sales to dump the older models, but the reduced price just isn’t worth it. Saving $100 or $200 on a blowout iMac of the previous generation provides no advantage, unless you are really challenged financially. Even then, just consider the new $1,199 20-inch iMac, which is actually a better value than its $1,499 predecessor. It’s rare for that to happen, but I suspect Apple was constrained by the state of the economy to be more aggressive in packaging its speed bumped computers.

Naturally, the critics will be out in force suggesting that Apple isn’t doing enough to pay heed to the environment — despite the steps they took — and they’ll continue to complain that Macs still cost too much. Again, we return to the value proposition. As before, when you take any Mac and equip a Windows PC with the same level of standard equipment, including the software, prices will be extremely close. More often than not these days, Macs will even come out ahead, more so with the Mac Pro where workstations from Dell and other companies don’t even come close.

Whether this will accelerate Mac sales is another question, and surely one that I wouldn’t presume to be able to answer. That is an issue way above my pay grade, but I’m always willing to listen to the business experts in our audience.

You’ve probably read those reports that PC sales are widely expected to contract this year by nearly 12 percent. This should come as no surprise, considering the shaky economic climate. As with autos, owners of personal computers will try to stick with the ones they have, spending money on upgrades rather than on replacement hardware. Or perhaps they’ll just decide to leave well enough alone.

Certainly, Apple is not immune. You’ve already heard of surveys indicating that, for the first time in a few years, Mac sales have dropped as well, though only slightly. It’s not at all certain, though, whether you can believe those figures, because they said the same thing about iPod sales last quarter, and yet Apple managed to eke out an small increase, largely because of overseas sales. They were actually down in the U.S.

Now the tech pundits, whom I rag on regularly because many deserve it, will continue to insist that Apple has to cut prices to the bone to survive. Otherwise folks will blow what little money they have left on a cheap PC box and be done with it.

Yes, it’s real easy to be an armchair critic, because you don’t actually have to prove you know what you’re talking about, talk is cheap and Internet bandwidth plentiful.

So far, there’s no indication that Apple is paying heed to such demands, though I should imagine that, if sales were to drop precipitously, they might have to revise their marketing strategy. For now, you can expect Apple’s prices to remain the same as they continue to upgrade hardware over the year (and this is written in advance of today’s product refresh where they did precisely what I suggested).

Besides, Apple still has some $28 billion cash on hand, more than Microsoft, so they could easily sustain an extended downturn and not suffer seriously. Well, maybe Wall Street will freak, but in the real world, it wouldn’t hurt the company. They might have to cut production, but no Apple employees would need to lose their jobs as a result. Remember that pretty much all Apple gear these days is built by third-party contract manufacturers, so production plans don’t really hurt Cupertino directly.

The situation may also present a golden opportunity for Apple to steal even more market share from Windows. You see, I expect those who can afford a new computer might be more inclined to seek longevity, extra value for their hard-earned money. It wouldn’t necessarily make a whole lot of sense to get a cheap box this year, only to have to discard it next year when it becomes malware-ridden and the cost of cleaning it up to restore “like new” performance isn’t worth the effort.

This doesn’t mean that Apple’s more expensive models would stand to gain. Any Mac you can buy is a superior value to any Windows box of a comparable or even greater price. This isn’t one of those fanboy-style declarations. It’s been true for years that Macs tend to hang around longer than comparable PCs. While the components may, these days, be essentially the same, Apple has traditionally used extra care in the design and assembly package. That has to count when a long and useful life is considered.

Certainly, it doesn’t appear that Apple is cutting back on its advertising, or emphasizing cheaper models. Consider that ubiquitous TV spot for the 17-inch unibody MacBook Pro. Lest you forget, that particular model retails for $2,799, and Apple’s pitch ignores the price-tag and emphasizes the eight-hour maximum battery life, the ability to handle up to 1,000 recharges and its easy recycling capability.

Certainly, this battery’s advances more than compensate for the fact that it’s not easily removed, and that you are urged to go to an authorized Apple reseller for replacement. That, however, isn’t going to happen for at least three years, allowing for full charge/discharge cycles every single day, with a tolerance of lesser battery life when the maximum number of charges has been exceeded.

At the same time, Microsoft’s credibility seems to lessen by the day. Sure early reports of the Windows 7 beta have been favorable, but it already appears they are making interface changes based on customer responses. You’d think Microsoft would understand the process by now, and not have to make wasteful alterations to their operating systems after they achieve the beta process. I know that if I held any Microsoft stock right now, I would be protesting loudly and regularly over the company’s inability to build reliable operating systems in a timely fashion, not to mention their total lack of true innovation.

Yes, despite the hazards of figuring out profitable pathways during a prolonged economic downturn, it does appear that Apple knows what to do and will, as they say, stay the course. So when the climate improves — as it inevitably will regardless of how they mess up the situation in Washington, D.C. — Apple will be more than ready to ride a new wave of popularity and sales.

It’s easy to place the cause for some the world’s ills on defects in Microsoft’s software, and I’m going to make it even easier. The implied claim in this headline may seem outrageous at first blush. But I would rather present some of the possibilities — serious and otherwise — before you dismiss it completely.

The other day, I was talking to someone from AT&T about exchanging a phone. While I was waiting for the service representative to bring up our account on her terminal, I asked her if she was using Windows. As she apologized for the delay in retrieving the information, she said she was.

I cannot tell you how often I encounter the same difficulties as I make those customer service phone calls for one reason or another. It seems inevitable that, whenever slowdowns are experienced, it has to be on a Windows installation.

In fact, I’ve observed the very same situation when making bank transactions. It doesn’t matter which bank. I’m not aware of any that do not use a Windows-based bank management application. If anyone knows of a Mac or Linux alternative, do let me know which bank, so I can see if they just happen to have a local branch.

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

You know that Mac desktops now constitute over 70% of Apple’s sales, at least as of the last quarter of 2008. That means that note-book sales went up, while the iMac, Mac mini and Mac Pro declined rather substantially.

Now part of this is no doubt due to the perilous state of the economy. I sort of suspect that some people who might have preferred both decided they could only afford a single computer. So they choose a note-book, to get, as much as possible, the best of both worlds.

Of course, the entire PC industry is moving in the same direction, only Apple is leading the way.

Now this doesn’t mean that Apple is necessarily abandoning the traditional desktop any time soon. You will still see the iMac, which moves in good numbers, and the Mac Pro for high-end content creators. I also expect that the Mac mini will get its long-delayed refresh in the near future, though only Apple knows whether it’ll have the same form factor with just some new and faster parts, or will get a new look and focus.

This trend also means, of course, that the hopes and dreams for the so-called headless iMac, or the “mythical midrange Mac minitower” are not likely to come to pass. The demand for such a product just isn’t there and time has clearly passed it by.

Now as far as I’m concerned, I will find it difficult, at least for a while, to abandon my Mac Pro. Yes, my year-old 17-inch MacBook Pro, maxed out with 4GB of RAM, is a pretty snappy beast. For most of you, the screen real estate, CPU horsepower and hard drive are more than sufficient for any task you might toss at it. You could, if you want, hook up a separate keyboard and mouse, and even a 30-inch display if you like. In fact, I expect that if you hid the MacBook Pro behind a curtain, you would not likely even think of it as a “mere” note-book.

However, there are still some of us out there who require the ultimate performance that a Mac workstation can deliver, and it’s a sure thing that a pair of quad-core Intel Xeons is a far superior number cruncher when compared to the Core 2 Duo on Apple’s portables. But that situation is no doubt poised for change, as Intel continues to roll out mobile-based quad-core CPUs.

Consider a future MacBook Pro that contains two quad-core processors, with sophisticated power management that would put some of those cores to sleep, and extend battery life. You can already order your Apple note-book with a 7200 rpm hard drive for superior read/write speeds, and future generations of high-density solid state drives will deliver 500GB storage space and more at an affordable price.

Do you see where I’m going here?

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Intel working real hard to make mobile processors essentially match the performance of their high-end desktop equivalents in the not-too-distant future, because they have a strong financial incentive to move development in that direction.

At the same time, don’t assume that a 17-inch MacBook Pro is the largest model Apple plans to produce. While it would be rather costly and somewhat heavy, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility to foresee a 20-inch version as well. Now I don’t know that I’d want to buy one, because it would be a bulky load in a carrying case, and I don’t think many of you would want to lug one around an airport during a critical business trip. Air travel is torture enough as it is. But for taking around the office, or a rare trip between offices, it might be an ideal companion.

The key to the phasing out of desktop computers is the ability to migrate essentially all of the performance and most of the expansion flexibility to the portable segment. Now beyond processors and hard drives, there are still other issues. You can’t, for example, swap out the graphics processor in a Mac note-book today , but there is no reason that it can’t be done. Instead of putting the graphics hardware on the motherboard, they can be migrated to a separate printed circuit card that you can simply slide out.

Apple’s MacBook Pros have an ExpressCard/34 slot, which you might regard as the equivalent, in part, to the PCI-based expansion slot on the Mac Pro. Now very few people ever put anything in those slots; they go largely unused. They mostly serve as psychological props to shore up your confidence that, if need be, you could install a card if you wanted.

However, there are certainly a number of content creators who do populate those slots with specialty audio cards and other hardware. So I can’t see why Apple couldn’t come up with a MacBook Pro with two slots. That ought to serve a similar purpose, as would adding more RAM slots on the chassis.

I don’t say it’ll necessarily happen this year or the next, but I bet I’ll be writing a column on this subject four or five years from now on a successor to my 17-inch MacBook Pro. I’ll have a huge LED backlit display in front of me, and I won’t miss my Mac Pro. Not for a minute.