Almost every time Apple releases a system update, I get calls and emails wondering if they’re safe to install. Why the paranoia? Well, perhaps some of them read an article at one or more of the sites that handle Mac troubleshooting issues, detailing, sometimes with lurid prose, various horror stories, and they’re understandably concerned.

Now at one time, I was a big booster of such places, and I regarded them as credible sources for information about problems with Apple’s hardware and software. Now I’m not so sure.

Take MacFixIt, for example, which I’ll name since it used to be the most prestigious watering hole for well-researched troubleshooting information about Apple gear. Indeed, it was founded by Ted Landau, who became well-known to loyal Mac users because of his large, almost encyclopedia-sized books on how to make your Mac sing and dance.

A few years ago, Ted sold MacFixIt to TechTracker, the company behind VersionTracker.com, a well-known source for Mac and Windows software downloads. So far so good.

But things took a turn for the worse when that venerable tech news site, CNET, acquired TechTracker. Now CNET has not always treated Macs kindly, or even accurately. I worked for them over a period of a couple of years, and fought mightily to make sure that feature articles and reviews contained facts and responsible conclusions.

On one occasion, an editor, best unnamed, added material that I had never approved, or even seen, in order to add to the word count. Now, I wasn’t compensated for the additional wordage, though that didn’t matter so much. Alas, she got some key facts wrong, and, when corrected, refused to update the article that appeared under my byline.

Indeed, it appears they took the same approach with MacFixIt. Instead of vetting reports of problems with Apple’s stuff, they would take emails and message board posts that contained problem reports and publish them, apparently without confirming whether the issues truly existed, or whether the alleged solutions truly worked as presented.

Even though CBS has acquired CNET, it doesn’t look as if they’ve done anything to add any editorial responsibility to this enterprise. In reviewing the Mac OS 10.5.5 update, for example, they refer to “some users” or “several users” allegedly encountering troubles of one sort or another after installation. However, only one or two people are ever actually quoted, so you have to take the existence of other reports on faith.

Out of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people around the world who have installed this update since it was released, this seems a pitifully small number from which to assess a trend.

Worse, there’s no indication that MacFixIt’s editors have actually made any effort to work with these “users” to guide them towards solutions to their problems or even to determine if the problems are genuine or the result of a heavily-used and abused Mac.

No, I am not about to suggest that MacFixIt is making this stuff up. I will grant that all of this material exists and is accurately quoted. I’m questioning their editorial judgment.

More to the point, I’m not saying that every single update from Apple is perfect. That is certainly not the case, and quite often in the software business, the process of fixing one bug may deliver others in its place. It’s a very delicate balancing act.

While some wonder whether Apple is really testing their products before release, it’s clear that they do. However, with so many possible system configurations out there in the real world, there is no way to test every little thing and guarantee perfection. Mistakes can happen, and sometimes big ones. Take that infamous Finder bug that could cause data loss or corruption when you moved (rather than copied) a file to another drive or network share after you upgraded to the original Leopard release, 10.5.

Sure, Apple fixed that issue and others in the 10.5.1 update. But you may wonder how they missed it in the first place, and I do agree that Apple probably didn’t bake Leopard in the development ovens long enough before it was released. As usual, there were serious marketing reasons to have it out by the end of October of last year.

But since that Finder bug didn’t occur each and every time, it may well be that Apple never duplicated the specific combination of circumstances to reproduce the problem consistently. It may have happened so rarely, the bug got a very low priority. Perhaps they did overlook something in the testing process to rush Leopard out the door.

Sure, there are lots of possibilities, and I wouldn’t presume to know what’s actually going on behind the closed doors at Apple. Even if you assume they are making their best efforts to deliver reliable products, humans make mistakes. Ask Microsoft.

My concerns lie with MacFixIt and other sites that are turning themselves into the supermarket tabloids of the Internet. Instead of providing Mac users with reliable news and carefully-tested solutions to their problems, they simply magnify the exceptions and turn them into the rules.

Indeed, I know that people will encounter genuine, repeatable troubles on their Macs even if they keep them in pristine condition, with as little third-party stuff as possible. I wish there was a responsible online resource to help guide them towards a solution. Perhaps Ric Ford’s MacInTouch is a possibility, though its reports tend to be presented intact, without much editorial intervention.

For now, there’s Apple’s support boards and, if the worst happens to you, their own technical support people.

Around the world, millions of Mac users have seen Apple’s latest Leopard update appear in their Software Update preference panes. The vast majority of these folks will simply accept the installation, enter their passwords and click Restart at the appropriate time. They will then get back to work after their Mac has completed the restart process, go off for a meal, or go back to sleep, depending on when the update occurs.

A smaller number of people are eager visitors to certain Mac troubleshooting sites, best unnamed, and will follow a silly set of voodoo procedures to make sure that the update doesn’t somehow bite them or, at worse, consume their Macs in flames.

Well, maybe I’m exaggerating, but it seems to me that Apple has tested all of their downloadable updates to install in the standard fashion, without calling upon ancient deities or throwing tea leaves in a prescribed direction, and everything usually works properly. So you wonder why some people feel it’s necessary to be excessively paranoid about installing such things.

Sure Apple has made its share of mistakes. Sometimes the process of fixing one bug only reveals another, one that has to be addressed in a subsequent update. At other times, people who have done a fair amount of system tweaks will encounter anomalies and need to probably do a clean reinstallation of their Mac OS to get things to behave properly. Or, at the very least, remove the tweaks.

At one time, I was inclined to ask you to observe excessive caution and take such things far too seriously than necessary. Now I’m inclined to be far more casual about such matters, and, yes, I do depend heavily on my Macs to get my work done. I’d be in serious trouble without them.

This rather lengthy introduction takes me to the latest Leopard update, predictably dubbed 10.5.5. According to Apple’s support document, this update contains 34 different fixes and enhancements, but each item may reflect a number of changes, perhaps in the hundreds. There are, for example, over two dozen security fixes addressing an unusually wide range of matters, including a further fix to the infamous DNS bug discovered a few months back. That’s the one, if exploited, would allow an Internet criminal to silently redirect your browser to a bogus site and then do all sorts of nasty things.

A prior fix, part of a recent security update, supposedly resolved the issue with Mac OS X Server but not with the “client” version of Leopard. Now that’s evidently addressed too, though, to be fair about the whole thing, I don’t know of anyone, anywhere, who was actually affected by this particular issue.

In fact, that takes us to the larger question. Throughout 2008, Apple has fixed dozens and dozens of security issues, any one of which may, in theory, be exploited at one time or another. As a practical matter, they are potentially serious, but I’ve yet to see a confirmed report that Mac users have succumbed. In large part, the issues involved affect the open source applications that Apple bundles with Mac OS X, so many of the fixes come from third parties, and it’s only a matter of building them into the OS.

After all was said and done, I did run the 10.5.5 update, sans the voodoo, on three different early 2008 Macs, including a MacBook, a 17-inch MacBook Pro and a Mac Pro. In each case, the upgrades went flawlessly. After the restart, things settled down quite nicely.

That doesn’t mean you should be cavalier about such things. There are a few minor cautionary notes I’d offer up for any update that impacts the operating system. First and foremost, keep current backups. Thousands of files are being updated or replaced, and if something goes wrong during this process, you would certainly want to be able to return to what you had previously.

The other considerations are of lesser importance. While you don’t have to, I generally quit all running applications. It’s also rumored that the Mac OS X installer may not be able to replace some of the bundled applications, such as Mail and Safari, if they are moved from the standard Applications folder. In practice, the installer ought to be smart enough, by now, to figure that out and find them anyway. But just think twice before you switch things around.

Some of you may prefer to go to Apple’s site and get the Combo updates, which are much larger, but cover everything that was changed since the original 10.5 release. If you’ve missed 10.5.4, that’s what you’ll get anyway. Otherwise, there’s no need unless you encounter troublesome issues after the update is applied.

If you are still concerned, let a few days pass for things to settle down before you run the updates. That way, you can see if any genuine show-stoppers emerge in the online chatter, but don’t take scattered complaints that don’t have verification seriously. Regardless, nothing forces you to let Software Update do its thing the first time it prompts you. The updates will still be there next time you check.

And one more thing: If you read about any especially unusual procedures about handling such updates at a Mac troubleshooting site, just ignore the advice. You’ll save yourself lots of aggravation.

Right after Apple’s new product presentation last week, Apple’s stock continued on its progressively downward spiral. Now in all fairness to Apple and the financial community, it may well be part of a general trend. Things on Wall Street are pretty shaky these days, and most companies are apt to suffer, regardless of their actual financial condition or sales performance.

However, Apple’s new iPod lineup seems surprisingly predictable. The rumor sites had already suggested a return to the tall and slim profile for the iPod nano, and perhaps a few features cribbed from the iPod touch. The latter received the expected modest redesign to bring it more into conformity with the iPhone 3G, and the prices dropped somewhat.

That and the introduction of iTunes 8 didn’t light too many fires, I suppose. The larger question is the fate of the major product transition promised by Apple’s financial executives during the last conference call with the analyst community. That was the one that would supposedly hurt the company’s profit margins.

What Wall Street may fail to realize, and what I only mentioned in passing in this week’s newsletter, is that there is no reason to consider last week’s announcement to be the only one that’ll happen this year. I can understand Apple’s logic in wanting to sharply focus it towards music and media players, although I was disappointed at the lack of the famous “one more thing” product introduction.

It may also be that the rest of the revised lineup just wasn’t available for release in early September, although wanting to focus more heavily on their scope and meaning with a separate presentation might be a better option from a marketing point of view.

Since I don’t pretend to know anything about such things, I’d rather just consider where Apple might actually raise the bar during the remainder of this year.

I suppose we could see an iLife ’09 and an iWork ’09, although they would seem to be products that are more suited to introduction at Macworld 2009. Instead, I would expect more hardware, and that’s where there’s lots of room for reasonable speculation and otherwise.

Certainly, any new Macs that appear from here on have missed the back-to-school season, but does that really make a difference? After all, industry analysts have already weighed in with surveys that demonstrate that Mac sales are going through the roof and then some. Some are even suggesting that at least three million Macs will be sold before the present quarter ends, and that would be an all-time record for Apple.

So there was no incentive to change things immediately. On the long haul, Apple is certainly expected to continue to add speedier chips to Macs as they become available, and maybe even graft more of the MultiTouch capabilities that premiered in the MacBook Air and later in the revised MacBook Pro.

One suggestion is using an iPhone-style LCD as a trackpad, complete with virtually all of the smart touch capabilities of Apple’s super-successful smartphone. You may ask why Apple doesn’t just provide a standard full-size touchscreen, and perhaps that could be considered as a custom-built option, but it may also add hundreds of dollars to the purchase price, whereas a tiny LCD display would be fairly cheap. In fact, Apple could keep prices as they are without seriously hurting their profits.

But does that truly constitute a major product transition? Perhaps, but I’m expecting more. To some, in fact, such a feature might be regarded as more of a gimmick than a genuine productivity enhancement. So clearly there’s more afoot.

I suppose there will be an iMac refresh too, but that particular form factor has proven to be highly successful already, and the all-in-one competition from the Windows box makers doesn’t even come close in price or specs.

So where does that leave us?

Well, what about the always-ignored Mac mini? Sure, Apple could make simple revisions, with speedier Intel chipsets, larger hard drives and perhaps more standard memory. Maybe they can even graft a simpler upgrade method, so you don’t have to resort to putty knives or similar tools. But none of that would require a huge amount of development expenses, and it wouldn’t amount to a major transition either.

To be sure, there are other possibilities. One is the so-called “Mythical Mac Midrange Minitower” or headless iMac, a simple, expandable computer in the tradition of the venerable IIci. It would come without a display, and give you the capability of adding a second hard drive and perhaps a second graphics card or other peripheral. At a purchase price of, say, $999 for a basic configuration, it would be a killer product that would attract a lot of potential Windows switchers who regard the iMac as too much of a computer. That’s particularly true if they already have a perfectly good display and don’t need another one.

Another potential Mac product segment is the tablet computer. One company has already grafted a custom-built tablet-style screen onto existing Mac note-books, but will Apple choose to move to the real thing? The big question is whether there’s a real market for such a device? I know of only one businessperson who actually uses tablet PCs, in this case Fujitsu note-books, and that’s our family doctor. To him, they are significant repositories of online patient records and other important data.

But would such niche markets provide enough of an incentive for Apple to add tablets to its lineup? I remain skeptical.

Anything left? Probably lots of possibilities. One might be to take the Mac mini, marry it to the Apple TV and build the first media center computer “to die for.”

Regardless of what Apple is working on in the hidden recesses of its development labs, it won’t be very long before we all know the answers.

Well, I have to play the cliché game again. You see, three times may indeed have been the charm for Apple’s efforts to repair the most irritating bugs in the current generation of iPhone software.

The misery for Apple began on that fateful day when they tried to achieve three holes in one, simultaneously introducing the iPhone 3G, the new 2.0 software, and reinventing .Mac as MobileMe.

In retrospect, I would call it one home run and two outs. Yes, there were some activation issues early on for the first few hours the highly-anticipated iPhone 3G went on sale. Perhaps that was a combination of the overload experienced by both Apple’s and AT&T’s servers in the states, and similar issues around the world where the hot-selling gadget first went on sale.

Regardless, lots of iPhone users complained, and quite loudly. They reported a litany of problems, including application crashes, excessive numbers of dropped calls, poor broadband speeds, and slow user interface response, particularly when checking your contact list. A few pundits suggested the software reeked of beta, even though it was supposedly a final release.

The 2.0.1 and 2.0.2 updates, offering “bug fixes,” evidently failed to resolve the most serious issues. The latter supposedly addressed 3G connectivity issues with wireless phone networks, but results proved to be a mixed bag.

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