Last year, we all know that huge crowds awaited the arrival of the first iPhone, as customers hoped to be the first to get theirs before Apple and AT&T ran out of stock. They needn’t have bothered, of course, since there were ample supplies available. So whether you waited a week or an hour, it didn’t make a difference. Except for your patience, and perhaps the weight you gained from sitting around eating hot dogs and drinking colas.

With iPhone 3G imminent, again the tech press is checking out various Apple stores to see how many people are hanging out waiting to get first diggs. This time, stores are opening not at Apple’s usual 6:00 PM product intro time, but at 8:00 AM, local time, simply because of the extended activation process. Each sale is expected to take roughly 10 minutes, and I expect Apple’s own employees might need some extra time during the first few days to get the process down pat. Here you can expect that the cashiers at the AT&T outlets will have the advantage, since they are experienced at this sort of thing.

Regardless, published reports claim that Apple has ordered huge supplies of the new iPhones and that nobody will be forced to go home without one. Now I’m sure high initial demand could result in spot shortages for a few days, but that’ll be rectified before long.

In my case, I have to get one right away, since Craig Crossman, host of the nationally-syndicated Computer America radio show, has asked me to appear as a guest on the show on the evening of July 11th to talk about iPhone 3G. So obviously I’m going to have to acquire one to speak knowledgeably on the subject.

I suppose I could fake it, of course, but I am tempted to invest in the new device strictly because I’m not at all happy with Internet performance on the current model when I’m not in a Wi-Fi hot zone. While a five bar signal is usually sufficient for AT&T’s Edge network to deliver adequate performance for email and browsing, if the signal strength falters to any extent, download speeds fall off considerably.

Indeed, when I’m out doing errands, or just having lunch or dinner, I will stop and consult the iPhone for messages and to keep tabs on these sites to make sure nothing is amiss. A long wait can become highly irritating, although it took a while for me to arrive at that conclusion. Originally, I was just happy to have decent Internet access while on the go, without having to take my MacBook Pro along with me.

How easily one’s standards of acceptability change.

It all comes down to this: People who want to be early adopters will no doubt rush into the stores on Day One to acquire Apple’s latest and greatest. Of course, when it comes to the iPhone, those who paid $599 for theirs last year must have felt mighty irritated when the price dropped $200 just a few months later.

This isn’t to say that the iPhone you buy this month for $199 will cost $99 this Christmas, but don’t be surprised if it does. By letting wireless carriers subsidize the purchase of your new iPhone 3G, Apple has accepted the standard industry pricing policy. That means that the cost of acquisition will only go down over time.

Remember, for example, when a Motorola RAZR cost several hundred dollars? Today, they are given away, or sold for a token payment in exchange for the requisite two-year contract.

In the scheme of things, then, it probably doesn’t make a whole lot of sense for most people to set aside their daily routines and spend endless days trolling in front of an Apple Store in hopes of getting their iPhones first. Once the product spreads into the marketplace, your initial status won’t count for anything, unless you get your picture in the paper or on YouTube, so you can boast about it to your friends or family.

Or perhaps endure their pity for wasting so much time in such a silly pursuit.

But if the crowds aren’t so large this time out (and who can predict), how will this extend to other Apple products? What about those late night parties to celebrate the arrival of a new version of the Mac OS?

Consider that Snow Leopard is expected to arrive a year from now, or thereabouts. Unlike previous releases, it won’t be chock full of new eye candy or whiz-bang features designed to tempt your eyes and your wallet. Native support for Microsoft Exchange, for example, carries very little sex appeal. And having an operating system that takes up fewer gigabytes on your hard drive, and runs faster owing to internal improvements, isn’t something to shout about.

Well, maybe you will have high praise if you suddenly find yourself getting your CPU-intensive tasks done more quickly. That, in the end, might have far more appeal than a new Finder feature, Dock design overhaul or other snazzy interface revision.

So I don’t expect the crowds to be lining up around the block for Snow Leopard, unless Apple springs a few surprises on us and packs in some extra fancy features to entice you to buy your upgrade.

On the other hand, while outside waiting in line for new tech products doesn’t seem terribly logical, there’s nothing wrong with having fun. But it’s not something I care to do during the summer here in Arizona, particularly when the temperature exceeds 110 in the shade.

Although Steve Jobs and Bill Gates at least pretend in public to have a friendly relationship of several decades, you know that Apple and Microsoft have been fierce competitors for years. Of course, in the business world, you may have to make a deal with the devil to survive.

So, indeed, Apple has also worked hand-in-glove with Microsoft on some projects. It’s also noteworthy to recall that Microsoft Excel and Word actually debuted on the Mac platform a long, long time ago, before they went to Windows. Sometimes, when you look at these programs, you can easily believe it was really the other way around.

These days, Apple needs Microsoft Office as much as they ever did. Despite its girth and glitches, the world’s number one office suite is a requirement for companies to take Macs seriously. They need files to be all or mostly compatible with the Windows counterparts, and it also gives Apple credibility as a maker of business computers.

Certainly a major enterprise initiative seems to be behind Apple’s decision to license ActiveSync from Microsoft for the iPhone, and provide full support for Exchange servers beginning with the iPhone 2.0 update and Snow Leopard.

Indeed, when you watch the Mac versus PC spots, you might never have believed it possible.

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

Before Mac OS X took over, I wrote a book about Microsoft Office 2001. When Mac OS X arrived, Microsoft ported their office suite over, as Office X. Although they charged their standard upgrade fee for the suite, there were actually very few new features to talk about.

One, as you recall, was “multiple selections,” which allowed you to choose snippets of text from separate items in a document. While Microsoft was all over this one as a great new feature, other software had it for years. But this was the sort of thing Microsoft pulled with Office X. Touting all the work that went into the upgrade, they skimped on features. It was all about the Aqua look and not a whole lot more.

I’m sure a lot of you were upset about this little stunt, although Microsoft redeemed itself in large part with Office 2004. The jury is still out on Office 2008, which ditched Visual Basic for Applications. Yes, VBA will be back some day, but it does appear Office 2008 is selling decently anyway, from what Microsoft is telling us.

In any case, other companies have pulled what some consider the same scam from time to time. Way back in the ’90s, QuarkXPress went from 680×0 to PowerPC and again you paid for a new version that was short on features, but at least it ran native in current machines sporting the new processors from IBM and Motorola.

In the case of Quark Inc., customers have always been upset with the company for one reason or another, although the new management claims to have worked hard to repair their tarnished reputation in recent years. Right now, they are boasting that the forthcoming QuarkXPress 8 will blow the market away, but it will be interesting to see if Adobe does something in InDesign CS4 to continue the great game of leapfrogging. But at least, when you upgrade to the latest and greatest from Quark, there will be little doubt you are getting a feature rich upgrade. Indeed, I’m sure that Adobe CS4 will also offer lots of compelling reasons to entice you to get the new version also.

To be sure, with rare exceptions, customers on both the Mac and PC platforms have come to expect that a software publisher will promise lots of fancy new features with a major version upgrade. It doesn’t count that they might be spending millions of dollars recoding a product for a new platform, or at least a faster one. Saying a product has fewer bugs and runs faster isn’t enough to entice the public to buy.

Or at least that’s been the psychology of software updates for a long, long time.

In fact, some companies are often criticized for adding bloat and fluff to their applications rather than getting down and dirty and fixing long-term problems. Take Microsoft Word 2008, which, though it was transitioned to an entirely new programming environment in order to be available in a Universal binary, still has problems with window management that have persisted for years.

And a few shortcomings too. I mean, is it so much to ask Microsoft to let you open a Word document on the page that you were working in when you quit the application? Why must you start from page one all over again. This may not mean something for a small document, but when you’re dealing with hundreds of pages, you also have to wait for the text to be repaginated each and every time. That can also add a minute or two to the process, even on the very fastest Macs on the planet.

There was an article in the late, lamented Byte magazine years ago in which the author complained, fruitlessly it turned out, about software bloat. One of the prime complaints was that developers piled features on high, and relied on faster computers to keep the performance levels constant, or even deliver a little more snappiness.

Certainly, Microsoft Vista is notorious for being the ultimate — and certainly tragic — exercise in bloat. It runs measurably slower than its predecessor, XP, and may not even deliver the full range of graphical niceties even on current hardware.

This is not to say Apple is immune from such criticism. Back when Mac OS X was first being demonstrated, one of Apple’s product managers boasted to me that it would run on an original iMac with “good performance” with no increase in RAM. We all know none of that was true, of course. Mac OS 10.0 was a slug, and 10.1 was only a hair better. It took quite a while for performance to hit parity with the Classic environment, and it’s a sure thing that a lot of those improvements come from the hardware. Intel-based Macs, even from the beginning, ran Mac OS X faster than PowerPC models of supposedly similar performance. Curious!

So I suppose Apple is to be commended for taking pause and doing what they can to trim the waste and froth from Mac OS X in delivering Snow Leopard. A smaller footprint appears to signify that code will be optimized and perhaps dead wood will be discarded. Not being a programmer, and the ones who have copies of Snow Leopard are under nondisclosure contracts with Apple, I couldn’t say what Apple is doing, other than the limited details being offered online. I presume we’ll get more information closer to the release date next year.

This little exercise makes me feel optimistic that Apple is making a concerted effort to improve its flagship software from the ground up, rather than touting another 300 features, most of which will be useless anyway.

Microsoft? Well, they promise Vista’s successor, dubbed Windows 7, will arrive at the beginning of 2010. They won’t claim it’ll be a leaner, meaner operating system. Instead, they have already begin to tout some of its spiffy new features. They’ll never learn.

Since I wrote my first article suggesting whether Apple should just give away Snow Leopard or make it a low-cost upgrade, many of you have written some cogent comments on the subject. You see value in what Apple is doing to improve Mac OS X, even if there aren’t a lot of surface changes or enhancements.

Indeed, I’m sure Apple is probably spending as much in developing 10.6 as they’d routinely invest in a standard feature upgrade, and some of its new capabilities may be far more meaningful in the areas where it counts, and that’s being able to get your work done faster, with greater stability.

Besides, with Mac OS X taking up more and more gigabytes of storage space, it would be real nice to save some of that and use it for other purposes. If you have a MacBook Air, for example, you have to watch what you’re doing as the hard drive can fill up real fast. In fact, one of the reasons my son didn’t consider one as a graduation gift was the storage constraint. His original note-book, a PowerBook G4, suffered through 80GB and he had to work hard to archive old files on a fairly frequent basis.

Then again, even if Apple manages to save a gigabyte or two, that won’t be a significant issue, unless your MacBook Air has the solid state drive, which currently tops out at 64GB.

More important is the promise of superior performance. Although Mac OS X has gotten faster over time, the performance differences among the last three releases haven’t been significant. Some of you feel Leopard is actually slower in some respects, though that’s not been my experience. Maybe on a PowerPC Mac, but that’s becoming yesterday’s news faster than you might have expected.

However, even though I only went all Intel this year, I don’t think Apple is going to suffer severely if they truly ditch the PowerPC with Snow Leopard. Understand, though, that even if the reports about the system requirements of the developer preview are true, that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t going to roll in PowerPC code between now and 10.6’s release date.

But I doubt it. This no advantage in spending extra millions to incorporate support for an older processor platform that can scarcely benefit from Snow Leopard’s enhancements. Not a lot of multiprocessor Macs were sold in those days, and the only dual-core G5’s arrived real late in the game. The numbers just aren’t significant, and the people who bought those G5 workstations will probably move to Mac Pros by this time next year, assuming they even do the sort of work that benefits from multicore processors.

Besides, just because Apple will deliver the tools to allow developers to build faster apps doesn’t mean you’ll much action right away. Indeed, one set of software that would benefit greatly, Adobe’s Creative Suite, will hit its CS4 cycle way before Snow Leopard is released, so you’d have to wait until CS5 or later to benefit. That assumes, of course, that Apple will make it easy for programmers to harness these extra features and that stuff that depends on standard Mac OS X functionality will benefit automatically.

The same holds true for OpenCL, the emerging standard that will hand off some processor-intensive tasks to the graphic chips, to allow them to crunch the ones and zeros a whole lot faster.

In short, Snow Leopard is, in large part, a harbinger of the future. As more and more Mac users have it installed, the developer community will be more inclined to update their products accordingly. Unless the release date coincides with a publisher’s own release cycle, the key benefits may still be months or years away.

That assumes, naturally, that Snow Leopard will arrive in the middle of 2009, and not a few months later. Indeed, Apple is being especially vague about the release, saying it’s “scheduled to ship in about a year.” So if it takes a few more months, Apple’s reputation won’t be seriously injured. It’s not as if the delay in the original release of Leopard — ostensibly to finish iPhone development — hurt Apple’s sales much. In fact, the conventional wisdom is that there was no impact whatever. People still bought Macs in droves.

When it comes to the Snow Leopard upgrade policy, commentator Daniel Eran Dilger had it right in his blog in a recent commentary. You see, Apple’s main business is selling hardware. So even if a lot of you don’t buy 10.6 upgrade kits right away, it’ll be rolled into newer generations of Macs and millions of you will be using it before long. Even then, the lure of a new Mac OS would surely be sufficient to encourage some of you to pay full price even if the upgrade doesn’t have a whole lot of fancy new features.

Personally, I still think Apple has to cope with user psychology. For years, new versions of software that exacted a full upgrade price contained new features to justify the purchase price. While the work Apple is doing admittedly carries equal or better value, I expect many people won’t agree.

If Apple were to provide Snow Leopard free, almost free, or for a modest purchase price, say $59 or $79. it wouldn’t diminish the Mac OS value equation. Apple would simply deliver the appropriate spin, claiming it is their gift to millions of loyal customers who have embraced the Mac platform over the years. And they’ll still make a bundle regardless.