Some people suggest our headlines don’t always match the content, but I don’t agree. In this case, the headline results from the fact that I made three attempts to buy an iPhone 3G before I succeeded. I hope you appreciate my dedication to the task, or my stupidity for wasting so much time before I was actually able to buy one.

It all started early Friday morning. I had assumed that the nearby AT&T factory store wouldn’t be inundated with shoppers waiting to buy one. That would seem to be the province of an Apple Store.

But I was totally wrong. When I arrived at the nearest AT&T outlet, nearly 150 people were waiting in line. I walked casually to the rear, asking someone offhandedly if this was the “Star Wars” line? My foolish remark earned a few chuckles and perhaps a number of episodes of rolling eyes.

An AT&T salesperson came by shortly thereafter. He said that they had 80 phones in stock, but nobody budged.

Except me, after I asked the location of the next nearest store.

There, the situation seemed more promising. The crowd was closer to 100, and had begun to shrink rapidly. But nobody from AT&T showed up to reassure anyone that they could actually take an iPhone home. So I had someone reserve my place, walked to the entrance and had a brief conversation with the sole AT&T employee in evidence outside.

As I feared, they said they didn’t have near enough product to fill the demand, but they could take the order and have it shipped directly to the store “in a few days.”

At this point, I was tempted to simply give up the quest, at least for that day.

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

First of all, The Night Owl will never write a story about beta software that isn’t supposed to be distributed to the public. I won’t report on something acquired illegally either, because I don’t do that sort of thing. However, it is also true that the iPhone 3G and iPhone 2.0 software were both released around the world on a staggered rollout schedule, depending on your local time. So, for example, residents of, say, New Zealand, got theirs the day before customers in the U.S.A.

Of course, once the firmware update became available, you were readily able to locate a number of direct links, so you didn’t have to wait for it to arrive in your city. It’s all been well publicized, and I won’t tell you specifically where you might find your copy, as it’ll be available in your country by the time most of you read this article.

So for once I didn’t have to feel tempted to impersonate Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal or my old friend David Pogue of The New York Times to get an early look at something new from Apple. Or simply felt a little left out, because my skills at impersonating anyone are extremely limited. Even better, I didn’t have to violate any laws by using pirated software, and that makes me happy.

However, this update I installed wasn’t automatically located by clicking Check for Update in iTunes. Since I downloaded the file directly, I had to use the Option key shortcut when activating the Update function, which let me locate the file on my Mac’s hard drive.

In any case, I still did the iPhone 2.0 upgrade with not a little trepidation, fearing that, perhaps, using a firmware upgrade designated for another country might do my iPhone in and create problems. Happily, this is a world phone and that didn’t happen, although the default time zone was clearly way, way off. That oddity, however, was readily fixed.

Otherwise, the installation process, while far more lengthy than any 1.x version, was uneventful, and I didn’t babysit the process, other than to OK restoration of my previous settings and data.

The number of surface changes in iPhone 2.0 are fairly limited, actually, although some of them are quite significant. According to Apple’s site, which may be updated from time to time, the arrival of the App Store holds the most promise, because it means that you’ll be able to download and install hundreds or perhaps thousands of third-party applications to expand the scope of your iPhone.

Before I get to the other features, I did try a single application, AOL’s Instant Messenger, a free app that was first on the App Store list when I checked it after the firmware update. Download and setup was quick. I clicked the Free button and, on the next screen, Install. Within a few seconds, the telltale AIM icon was on my iPhone’s home page.

Now one of the concerns that have been voiced is the fact that application’s can’t run in the background on an iPhone, according to Apple’s strictly-enforced guidelines, because it would suck up huge chunks of battery power. And with a sealed battery, it’s not as if you can just change it.

However, as I moved back and forth through different applications and returned to AIM, it actually seemed as if I was still signed on. So I suppose it’s a matter of somehow suspending your connection to the AIM network when the application is quit, so you’re rapidly restored when you launch the application again. This is something that the programmers in our audience can better explain. Meantime, there will be a further update for the iPhone that will better tackle this dilemma in the fall.

One of the key features Apple touts for iPhone 2.0 is native support for Microsoft Exchange. This may not hold out much significance for most of you, but if you require seamless connections to your office’s Exchange server for email, events and so on, it’s extremely significant. It also makes the iPhone a powerful player in the enterprise, an area where it can really excel.

The other features don’t seem quite as outstanding. You can search your contacts, do a mass delete of your email, and view iWork and Microsoft PowerPoint attachments. You’ll also be able to rotate your iPhone with the Calculator app running, and have it turn into the scientific variety. As to MobileMe, well since it made a largely unflattering debut, because of constant outages, I’ll leave that for another article.

A lot of critics have already voiced concerns about the features that didn’t make the cut. You can’t, for example, do voice dialing natively, even though that singular feature is available on the cheapest cell phone with Bluetooth capability. You also cannot use the standard Cut, Copy and Paste functions that have been part of the Mac OS since Day One. Of course, doing the latter with a touch keypad my be a trifle complicated, and Apple wants the interface to be seamless.

I would look for some of these features to appear over time in future Apple updates. Meantime a third party is already touting a solution for voice dialing, but it’s not something I need. I use a car-based Bluetooth system that has its own voice capability, and it had no problems interfacing with iPhone 2.0.

Right now, however, this is just an early look at the upgrade. I expect that most everyone with the original iPhone will install the new firmware within the first week, and then we’ll know about any bugs, such as crashes or performance anomalies.

So far, however, things are rock stable, and I haven’t seen the return of those occasional browser crashes that afflicted my iPhone with the older firmware. However, frequent browsing could likely change that. Or not.

In 2007, for a time you had to feel that Apple was neglecting the Mac. At the beginning of that year, the famous Steve Jobs keynote concentrated very little on Mac-related developments, and mostly on the iPhone. A few months later, we learned that the next major reference release for Mac OS X, Leopard, would be postponed a few months to give Apple’s engineers time to finish up the iPhone software, based on the same fundamental code base.

Where Macs were upgraded, for the most part, those changes represented the faster processors released by Intel, and perhaps boosting hard drive storage to take advantage of model upgrades. The actual designs remained pretty much the same, with the possible exception of the hugely-successful iMac. But in that instance, it was a matter of switching the case from plastic to aluminum and sourcing a glossy rather than matte flat panel.

I know some tech pundits must have had a field day writing lurid copy about how Apple was really abandoning the Mac, and moving on to such consumer electronics products as, of course, the iPhone and the iPod.

However, the facts were, as is often the case, different than the predictions of those alleged tech pundits and industry analysts. Some are really, really astute, but a few — well you wonder if they have a day job to fall back on, because the don’t seem to be all that skilled at interpreting what Apple is doing using simple common sense.

It’s certainly difficult to predict what’s really going to happen in Cupertino, CA, except for the favored few who get early looks at new Apple products, or perhaps a few “off the record” briefings they can use as background material for their articles. But even fortune tellers can often do better when it comes to where the market is heading.

The reality is that Mac sales continue to soar, and the prospects for the iPhone remain excellent. This isn’t The Night Owl talking, but a simple look at the trends that everyone is able to observe. So we also know that the digital music player market — at least the market for dedicated devices of that sort — has clearly topped out and is on the decline. So while iPod sales continue to increase, it’s certainly not at the previous rate.

It would also seem that the iPod touch is a great bridge to new technologies, since it is basically a handheld computing appliance, sans the telephone of course. Where the touch will go next, though, is an open question, since a supposedly cheaper iPhone 3G leaves it as a seemingly product. Why pay so much more for something that lacks the phone capability?

Of course, that impression is purely psychological. When you add up the real cost of the iPhone, which includes the contract with your wireless carrier, it cost many times more than even the top-line iPod touch. That situation applies regardless of which service you select, although it’ll be just one in most countries that were authorized by Apple.

But the iPhone is not a viable option for everyone. Here in the “states,” maybe your company has a business contract with Verizon Wireless or another carrier but doesn’t deal with AT&T. Perhaps you have a contract situation with your existing carrier that would make it costly to drop out and embrace the iPhone 3G and AT&T or whatever carrier you’re using in your country.

And despite the claims of fewer dropped calls in their ads, the fact of the matter is that AT&T isn’t the ideal solution for everyone. I know some people live in neighborhoods where reception is poor, and 3G support won’t exist for a while if at all.

In Apple’s defense, it’s quite possible that ditching a metal case for plastic may actually be a smart move in areas where wireless phone service is mediocre. Without the metals to contend with, the built-in antennas will work more efficiently, and reception might improve from perfectly awful to at least acceptable.

That, of course, remains to be seen. Early reviews appear to be a mixed bag.

While we know that the iPhone is poised to break sales records, it still seems that the Mac powers Apple. With Windows Vista faltering, and not gaining business acceptance as quickly as Microsoft hoped, the Apple Store sales picture reportedly indicates that half of the people buying new Macs are also brand new to the platform.

While all this has been happening, really there haven’t been major changes in Mac hardware, other than, of course, the arrival of the MacBook Air. In that case, though, the design and tradeoffs were simply logical extensions of moving to a slimmer form factor that had to be real light and power efficient.

Yes, deal reader, Apple is getting an awful lot of attention for the iPhone these days, but the Mac keeps growing and growing beyond what anyone may have expected. It is really taking market share from Microsoft after years of stagnation. So don’t count the Mac out. The best may be yet to come, and nobody — except for Apple — knows where it’s all going to go.

As Apple is poised to launch MobileMe this week for an unsuspecting public who may not have even asked for it, you have to wonder whether this is a key move to help Macs penetrate the Windows market big time.

You see, Apple seems to have done its level best to make .Mac’s successor look platform agnostic. You get basically the same features whether you’re using a Mac or a PC, which is in keeping with Apple’s larger strategy throughout their product line. In fact, some of you feel the new interface for MobileMe (and even the name, in fact) is reminiscent of Windows, so it’s clear what Apple is doing here.

You see, before our very eyes, Apple has made all of its hardware Windows-compatible. I can’t imagine anyone would have expected such a thing, but it’s true.

Certainly, the iPod was the first entrant in Apple’s cross-platform strategy. The large Mac + PC labels on such products as Apple TV are also indicative of this approach. When Macs were moved to Intel processors, it didn’t take a lot of effort on Apple’s part to deliver Boot Camp, to allow dual booting into the Mac or Windows environments, and it spurred the development of such virtualization solutions as Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion.

It doesn’t take much of a stretch to also put the Mac + PC label on a Mac nowadays. Yes, it’s true that Apple did offer DOS cards for some Macs back in the 1990s, using Intel-designed chipsets, which allowed you to use either the Mac or Windows environment. But they were poor performers, and serious bugs were legion.

But today’s Intel-based Macs make your choice of computing platform a secondary issue, because, under Boot Camp, the Mac runs Windows as fast as any comparably-equipped Windows box, and the virtual machine solutions come close enough that you won’t notice the difference unless you play heavy-duty games or require full processor performance for 3D rendering without any overhead.

Indeed, a recent deal made by a European publisher to acquire 12,000 Macs over the next two years will give employees the right to choose booting under the Mac OS or Windows environments, depending on their preferences or the needs for their particular role in the company.

All this seems to be happening under the radar as far as Microsoft is concerned, or in a way that actually helps the world’s largest software publisher. Obviously, when you acquire Windows to install on a Mac, Microsoft makes a big profit, far more than they earn from any OEM manufacturer. The new support for Exchange means that Microsoft can sell lots of Exchange server licenses for the Windows platform, from which they earn large profits.

Just to voice an off-center possibility, what if one of the reasons Microsoft is hiring people for the Mac Business Unit is to port Exchange to the Mac? Sound odd? Well, certainly, with Apple providing full support for Microsoft’s groupware software in both their mobile and desktop platforms, Microsoft is in a good position to make even more money from this state of affairs.

However, Apple is also considering the needs of consumers and small businesses for whom Exchange is not just a costly option, but one entirely inappropriate for their needs. That’s where MobileMe comes in and that’s why Apple calls it “Exchange for the rest of us.” They know where their bread is buttered, and offering push email, calendaring and other important features wrapped in a friendly package for a wider audience may actually take the former .Mac into areas where it never was seriously considered previously.

What makes all this even more fascinating is how well Apple has crafted online versions of key Mac OS X applications to function seamlessly on popular Mac and Windows browsers, even the latest various of the notorious Microsoft Internet Explorer.

When the Windows users connects to MobileMe, they will be entering an entirely Mac-oriented universe, where such applications as Address Book and Mail will deliver a fully-formed Mac-like veneer.

Of course, there’s poetic justice in that, since Mac users have long complained about bad Windows ports, where applications looked too much like their Windows counterparts. The first efforts of the failed WordPerfect for Mac initiative were typical of such poor planning, and who can forget the infamous Word 6? What was Microsoft thinking then.

Today, Microsoft continues to tout Mac-exclusive features and user interface elements that are more consistent with Apple’s user interface guidelines. Even Mozilla has tried to design the look and feel of Firefox 3 to be more consistent with the operating system on which it’s installed, although that move is only partly successful. Take a look at the lack of support for the Leopard-style Print dialog box and its built-in preview feature, for example.

Whether or not MobileMe will live log and prosper in its new guise is anyone’s guess. More important to me, though, is just how long Apple will allow existing members to continue to use their mac.com email addresses. I don’t know about you, but me.com just isn’t my cup of tea.

For now both addresses will coexist, but with Apple things can change, often without a lot of notice. So I am willing to predict that you better start sending out those change of email address notices.