For most of you, a motor vehicle is an appliance. You put in the key in the slot, turn on the ignition, place it in gear and away you go. Or at least that happens most of the time — and please don’t remind me about the keyless ignition systems some cars sport nowadays.

When your car doesn’t start, you aren’t expected to open the hood, peek into the dark, dusty, oil-stained interior and try to figure out what’s causing the problem. Sure, I know some of you are Saturday mechanics, but most people don’t want to be bothered with such matters. You expect your car to just work, and if it doesn’t, you call your favorite serviceperson to sort things out.

Indeed, most of today’s cars are incredibly reliable, and that’s good. It’s also true that most of what they do is managed by sophisticated computer systems, and the first step at diagnosing a problem is to hook up a diagnostic panel, which will check the error codes to figure out what went wrong. Gone are the days when your trusty mechanic just listened for a few moments and knew exactly what he had to do to fix your car.

Almost sounds like a personal computer, right?

Well, of course, a personal computer is nowhere near as reliable as a car. And that’s not just on the PC side of the universe. Indeed, if you drove a car equipped with Mac OS X, don’t expect a smooth cross-country trip. Be grateful if you can make it crosstown before something goes wrong.

With most any 21st century motor vehicle sold in the U.S., you shouldn’t expect serious troubles to arise over the first year or two, let alone a single day. Sure, things do break, and you may have to make a few visits to the dealer for warranty repairs. There are also flat tires, which you can do nothing to prevent other than to avoid rough and gravely roads as much as you can, and definitely stay away from broken glass. But, on the whole, you don’t expect it to betray you very often. That only happens when a car is getting a little long in the tooth.

Sure, the Mac is supposed to be a computing appliance. Steve Jobs told us that 25 years ago when the original compact all-in-one debuted. Maybe his intentions were good, but the first time you saw system error message of some sort, you just knew that the news portended reliability issues.

At one time, you could hardly work on your Mac more than a few hours with a heavy-duty graphics or desktop publishing program before things went awry. If an application didn’t unexpectedly quit, the system would just freeze, and clicking the telltale Restart button within the error prompt seldom did a thing to fix anything.

After the requisite forced restart, you were back in action, hoping you saved most of the serious stuff before things went badly. You forgot to save frequently or activate an auto-backup feature for the rare programs that had one? That’s just too bad.

With a Unix-based operating system, today’s Mac is far more reliable. Applications still quit on occasion, though not nearly as often. When they do, you can often launch them again with only a short delay before getting back to work.

Oh, yes, don’t forget to save your document regularly. That situation still hasn’t changed, and few applications have added an autosave routine. Now why is that?

On a rare occasion, you will still be forced to restart your Mac, though it takes a really serious programming defect or other untoward event to require such a thing. Now I realize some of you will restart your Mac every so often anyway, just to clear out the cobwebs. Sometimes it does a world of good, and things run great once again. Sometimes it doesn’t do anything.

You can place me in the center of these two extremes. If I’m not installing software that requires the restart, I’ll definitely perform that task every couple of weeks or so, and take a brief break while the process is engaged. For the rest of the time, when I’m not using them, my desktop and portable Macs relax in Sleep mode.

Yes, I know that Sleep mode sometimes delivers its own instances of irritability. The Mac doesn’t return to normal operation, and you’re forced to restart. You’d think that, after all these years, Apple still can’t deliver that feature in a foolproof fashion.

Oh well, that’s what system updates are for.

Now even though your motor vehicle has software-driven functions, updates are few and far between. Usually they are described in some obscure service bulletin that is designed to address situations where the engine stops cold while you’re blocked in a traffic jam, just at the point where traffic begins to lighten up and you’re expected to accelerate to normal cruising speed. But that doesn’t happen too often; at least not to me.

With a Mac, any Mac, it doesn’t just work. It will never just work. Maybe Snow Leopard will help somewhat, but don’t expect miracles. I have even fewer expectations for Windows 7.

Despite Apple’s mixed signals of silence and denial, rumors continue to grow that CEO Steve Jobs is seriously ill, perhaps about to breathe his last, and that he can no longer continue to run the company he co-founded.

Now rumors are a dime a dozen, I suppose, but just what is contributing to this one, which rears its ugly head over and over again? Well, for one thing, it’s really all Apple’s fault, because they are not giving the facts the media needs to put this claim to rest once and for all.

What do they need? Well, a few photos of Steve in action in his office at Apple, or perhaps even a quick appearance on his favorite cable TV news channel, MSNBC, to talk a little about Apple’s stellar year and prospects for 2009. It doesn’t have to be a long interview. A fast four or five minute segment showing a vigorous-looking Jobs would be sufficient to satisfy everyone, and it can be taped at Apple’s campus, so he wouldn’t even be forced to drive to the studio.

So why isn’t that happening? Sure, I agree that his health is essentially a private matter, except insofar as it prevents him from fulfilling his responsibilities at Apple. If that’s what’s really happening, the board of directors bears the responsibility to make that fact public and to set forth their plans for his successor. If they fail to do so, they might face the wrath of the SEC.

Now maybe the present SEC leadership doesn’t care about such things. It’s not as if they did very much to stop a certain Ponzi scheme peddler from stealing $50 billion from unwary investors. But with a new administration about to take office, maybe the standards won’t be quite so lax.

The problem with a sudden announcement about Steve’s departure, however, is that Apple’s stock price, already at its lowest levels in quite some time, would completely tank. How much it would be impacted is anyone’s guess. I’ve heard estimates of 25% to 40%, and these estimates might indeed be conservative.

In the end, a post-Jobs Apple might not change all that much, but the psychological impact would be severe and it might take months or years for the stock price to recover, along with confidence in the company.

On the other hand, what if Apple’s board, observing the apparent failing health of their CEO, and the fact that he’s spending less and less time at the office, devised a gradual succession scheme?That way, while there would be a negative impact once the truth gets out, but it would not be quite as severe.

So let’s look at the obvious conspiracy theory as we move into 2009.

Apple’s decision to part ways with the Macworld Expo was not because they just didn’t care about doing trade shows anymore. It was meant to cover up the fact that Steve was unable to participate. So putting marketing VP Philip Schiller in his stead to deliver the keynote may strike people as a natural reaction to the lessened importance of trade shows to the company. Maybe they really didn’t have any trend-setting products to introduce, just the widely-expected updates to the iMac, Mac mini and a few other products.

That keynote would serve as an introduction to a long-range campaign to demonstrate that Apple is really all about its products, not its CEO. Subsequent product introductions, in fact, could come in the form of online video presentations and press releases, the better to drive this point home.

After all, unlike some companies, such as Sprint, Apple has never placed its CEO in one of its TV ads. The image you see is that of the Mac and PC comedy duo; the Mac, portrayed by actor Justin Long is, I suppose, the true face of Apple since his is a recurring presence.

If this sort of scheme is truly playing itself out, no doubt Apple will continue to refuse to comment about Steve’s health. Of course, Wall Street analysts will ask the same questions during the next briefing about Apple’s quarterly financials, but the response would be similar to what you’ve heard so far, that this is a private matter.

Assuming Steve is capable of participating, perhaps he’ll make a brief appearance to calm everyone’s fears. So long as his voice and demeanor seem robust, there would be few concerns about whether they actually propped him up sufficiently to keep it together for an hour, and then it was back to his hospital bed for the duration. It’s not as if you’d really see him in action.

Somewhere in the spring, Apple would officially announce that Steve is stepping down, at which time his successor would be officially named. The reasons given might have nothing to do with health problems, but with his desire to spend more time with his family and get out of the rat race.

Sure, Apple’s stock would take a beating, but buttressed by continued stellar earnings, even in a down economy, the negative impact might not be as severe.

Now to be perfectly frank, I do hope Steve Jobs is healthy and happy and that all these rumors about his health are completely false. To be sure, Apple can easily quell the ongoing concerns, but they’ve not chosen to do so, at least so far. So the rumors will simply persist until they come clean, one way or the other.

A large part of the speculation about Apple Inc. for 2009 covers the hardware. You just know that the iMac is overdue for a refresh, and the long-neglected Mac mini is likely to get one as well. Beyond that, perhaps there will be a unibody version of the 17-inch MacBook Pro, some new Apple displays and maybe some new variation on a media center. That is, of course, if the revitalized mini doesn’t suit that purpose.

The prognosticators are also talking in terms of the introduction of a netbook, a “nano” version of the iPhone and a few other tidbits. Maybe there will be that famous headless iMac, or mythical midrange minitower that many of you have on your shopping lists if such a beast ever appears.

However, at its heart, Apple is a software company. Everything they do revolves around that essential characteristic. Indeed, it’s not just elegance that sells Apple gear, but the ability to master most of the important functions and installation routines without having an IT person at your beck and call.

On the top of the software list is, of course, the operating system. Although Apple promised that Mac OS 10.6 — better known as Snow Leopard — would appear within a year as of last summer, there are hopes and dreams that it might actually arrive sooner.

The logic for this is that Windows 7 appears to be on track for release later in 2009, well in time for holiday sales. The late introduction of Vista was a lost opportunity, although I don’t think anything could have saved it.

So to stay ahead of the game, some say, Apple has to push Snow Leopard out the door by the end of the first quarter. The only support for this possibility is a certain slide presentation by an Apple executive a few weeks back at a conference in which the first quarter 2009 was indicated as a release date.

Officially, Apple hasn’t changed a thing. The slide could have been a mistake, deliberate or otherwise. If deliberate, Apple just wanted to fuel some speculation, knowing that they could always deny all official responsibility for the premature announcement. Call it a case of implausible deniability.

But Snow Leopard, pardon the pun, is a different breed of cat. It won’t be feature-laden, and what it does offer may not mean much to most Mac users; that is, unless you ask your Macs to perform tasks that stretch the limits of RAM and CPU horsepower. Then things are apt to change for the better.

Enterprise customers who depend on Microsoft Exchange for corporate email and collaboration may also be pleased that they aren’t saddled with the flaky, bloated Microsoft Entourage as an email client.

For everyone else, Snow Leopard might just be a non-issue. Of course, Apple could stoke demand by simply giving it away, or charging a modest upgrade fee, largely because it is not a traditional OS upgrade. Certainly Apple’s bottom line would not suffer severely. With a shaky economy, free or almost free has its undeniable attractions.

Past that, I haven’t seen much in the way of wish lists for the next version if iWork. Now that a spreadsheet module, Numbers, is present, what about a database component, perhaps derived from Bento, the consumer-grade substitute for FileMaker Pro? It’s not that this would be something unique. After all, AppleWorks had a database feature — sort of a FileMaker Lite — long ago. iWorks clearly has some catching up to do.

The real question is how far Apple wants to go to match or exceed the features in Microsoft Office. It’s not as if iWork has taken huge chunks of market share away from the leader in office suites. But most Office users harness a mere fraction of its features, so having just the ones most essential to getting your work done ought to be sufficient.

While they’re at it, it wouldn’t hurt to see some fixes to some of the existing iWork glitches. One that comes to mind is that you always have to save your open documents when closing Pages, even when nothing actually needs to be saved. That sounds like a Mac programming 101 issue that should not have happened in the first place.

With the next version if iLife, I should imagine Apple would want to exploit the sizzle of Snow Leopard and speed up iMovie correspondingly, by harnessing the enhanced multicore processor support and the ability to offload computational tasks to the graphic chips. That could deliver instant gratification for most or all of its rendering functions.

iPhoto could, I suppose, be enhanced to more closely match the feature set of Photoshop Elements. It is not as if Apple has traditionally had a problem competing with Adobe.

As far as the rest of iLife is concerned, I can’t say. I really don’t use it all that much. I suppose iWeb might get a boost as well. That would be expected.

Is there any other consumer-grade software that Apple might introduce? Well, there is the possibility of an Apple TV application with full-bore digital video recorder capabilities that would work on all Macs. It would possibly kill the Apple TV hardware line, unless that migrates to a revised Apple mini.

And what would you readers like to see?

When you’re number one in a market, the pressure is always on to somehow remain on top, or even expand the difference between you and number two.

Apple has to worry about that primarily with the iPod and iTunes. But since both are so far ahead of the rest of the market, it doesn’t seem likely that a true competitor will arise before the entire segment becomes over-saturated and irrelevant, and that’s probably already happened. The iPod touch did well at Amazon, and that an obvious bridge product that takes the digital media player concept to the next generation.

What’s that next generation? Likely some sort of netbook-style device. It appears that such things are doing pretty well right now, if only because many customers simply cannot afford a full-featured note-book. For simple email, Internet surfing and word processing, a smaller portable computer with a slower processor and tinier hard drive might be an adequate solution.

I am, though, assuming that most of the people who bought those netbooks this holiday season are actually going to be reasonably satisfied with their purchases, and aren’t even now returning them in droves because they just weren’t up to the job.

When it comes to Apple, you just know they are watching this state of affairs closely and they may have already decided what direction to take. Indeed, the iPod touch is essentially a netbook, except that it’s saddled with a touch keyboard and tiny screen. I don’t know what Apple has in their test labs, but a grown up version, perhaps a modern-day successor to the eMate 300, might be the perfect solution; that is, if they can deliver one for a reasonably low price.

The top-of-the-line touch retails for $399 with a 32GB Flash drive. That is pretty much in netbook territory already, so you have to wonder how much Apple can add to the price and still keep it competitive. More to the point, how expensive can it be before it encroaches on MacBook territory?

My feeling is that $599 is as far as Apple can go. The question is what room does that give them to expand the “touch” concept into something that more closely resembles an actual note-book computer? Well, certainly larger LCD displays are always costly, but moving from a Flash drive to a standard hard drive can save a bundle. Consider that the iPod Classic, with a 120GB traditional drive, is $249, $150 cheaper than the high-end touch.

Taking that same drive and putting it into a variation of the iPod touch with a larger screen may be quite feasible, and Apple could no doubt bring it into the marketplace at $599, fully outfitted with 1GB of RAM and all the standard Mac goodies, such as iLife. There will not, however, be an internal optical drive, although, as with the MacBook Air, you’ll probably be able to hook up external peripherals via a USB port, perhaps a miniature one to reduce space.

Does that mean that customers will ditch the MacBook in favor of the new Apple netbook? Perhaps to some degree, but a “touch Pro” might attract a whole new class of users who are right now spending their hard-earned money — what little there is of it — on PC netbooks.

Now I realize that Steve Jobs is on record as saying that Apple doesn’t plan to play in the cheap PC sandbox, that they will not produce “junk” simply to grow volume. I respect that decision, but certainly a grown up mobile device based on the iPod touch or even the iPhone won’t be a peace of junk — far from it. As with any Apple product, it’ll be sleek, with a typical understated elegance that will surely look great when you have the pleasure of carrying one around.

As regular readers of this column have seen, the unheralded Mac mini also has a fairly decent share of fans. It would be a mistake to discontinue this product, and I’ve already speculated that a souped up version will make its debut during Philip Schiller’s Macworld Expo keynote next month.

Now it may well be that the new mini will look the same as its predecessor, and simply carry more powerful parts and sell for essentially the same price. That, and a decent ad campaign, ought to be sufficient to move a fair number of units. It’s also quite possible that Apple will slim it down even further, taking it closer in size to the Time Capsule.

It’s almost a certainty that there will be a new wrinkle on the iMac lineup, although most of the changes will no doubt be internal. Some are talking about a four-core processor, along with the higher-grade NVIDIA graphics chips that debuted this fall in the MacBook Pro. A Mini DisplayPort for external monitors seems a given.

Beyond this, there’s a published report now that Apple might provide the Apple TV software for all Macs — at a price. If this is true, would it indicate that the Apple TV itself is going away? Perhaps. Then again, a new Mac mini with similar capabilities would be a worthy replacement, don’t you think?