Among the rampant rumors in anticipation of the WWDC are claims Apple plans to seriously rejigger the case designs of its Mac note-books, possibly a reflection of the flourishes that debuted in the MacBook Air.

The main fly in the ointment is that Intel’s newest chipset has been postponed for a few weeks for various reasons, which means there’s little incentive to introduce any new models until then. Then again, Steve Jobs could conceivably announce the product revisions, blame Intel for the delay, and then explain they’ll ship some time in July. I can see that.

However, the real question here is whether it makes any sense at all to alter the highly-successful form factors of the MacBook and the MacBook Pro. Some suggest that the plastic casing of the former might be less than robust under hard use, and, being a note-book popular among students, aluminum might prove to be more reliable. Then again, my son spent several years using an aluminum-clad PowerBook G4, and the case suffered from bumps and dents, things that might never have harmed a hard plastic shell.

Regardless, are Apple’s note-books in dire need of a case refresh? It’s not like an iPod, where Apple has been known to toss away the mold of a successful model and deliver something brand new. Yes, I understand the MacBook Air looks refined compared to the relatively conservative shapes of its siblings. However, those beveled corners may have, in part, been required as a result of the internal chassis layout. Maybe not all, but a MacBook Air, aside from its obvious utility for road warriors, is also a first-class “Sharper Image” device that people might buy for its looks.

It may even be that Apple wasn’t fully convinced that a thin and light note-book would succeed without a spiffy design to go with it. The incredible successes of the MacBook and MacBook Pro come despite the rectangular shapes, and squared-off corners. They impress you as elegant compared to the stodgy look of most PC note-books. Why mess with success?

That’s a good question that I wouldn’t presume to answer. Maybe Apple has found ways to miniaturize the components and layouts still further, with more integrated chipsets, and thus they can shave weight off their mainstream note-books. Imagine getting the 17-inch MacBook Pro below six pounds. While I don’t travel enough for mine to disturb, I can see where frequent journeys can cause shoulder pains unless you choose the backpack route.

Actually, I do have a backpack in the closest, but I have never actually used it. Since it also has enough space to also serve duty for overnight travel, I might take it with me to a future Macworld Expo.

When it comes to Apple’s desktops, the iMac, an unexpected sales success, looks just fine as it is. It is refined to the basics, a computer display with minimal overhang and depth, a true marvel of form following function, after Apple’s excursions with pear shapes, flower pot-style bases and articulated arms. There are no complexities to consider, so, aside from making it thinner over time and reducing the extra girth at the bottom, I don’t see any pressure on Apple to change things here either.

That takes us to the Mac Pro, another aging design that owes an awful lot to the 2003 Power Mac G5. At five years of age, do we really need the cheese grater grill now that cooling needs aren’t as severe as they were in the days when a G5 had eight or nine cooling fans, and embedded liquid cooling for the fastest versions?

The real question is whether or not it makes sense to alter the tried and true minitower motif, and why. It’s not like the days of the IIfx, when far smaller displays would sit atop an elongated desktop computer. The base of a large monitor, say the 24-inch or 30-inch style, are sufficiently high not to require placement on top of an actual computer, so the latter can exist perfectly fine on the floor.

But imagine if Apple turned its professional desktop on its side, say a thickened version of the Xserve? That would, in fact, return us to the era when the IIfx reigned supreme in creative departments around the world. It wouldn’t be so deep as to cause a problem with a display placed on it.

Of course, that sort of design is one I’ve considered for that “mythical” midrange desktop, the so-called “headless iMac” that would fill the market that some believe exists between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro. A thinner version might recall the IIci, although some have suggested a double-sized mini, although that might harken back to the Cube, and I think Steve Jobs had his fill of that.

However, such exercises in desktop computer redesign are really unnecessary. The Mac mini probably isn’t selling a whole lot simply because Apple isn’t investing sufficient marketing dollars to move it, and it hasn’t been updated in an awfully long time. Besides, it looks just fine, witness the fact that Apple has emulated that shape with Apple TV, AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule.

In the end, maybe Apple will refine casing here and there in the months to come, but a serious alteration is probably unnecessary and it’s questionable whether such redesigns would really boost sales to any significant degree.

Widely anticipated, the 10.5.3 update made it unheralded arrival Wednesday morning with an advertised 68 fixes and enhancements to Leopard. However, that may be only part of the picture.

You see, some sites that have allegedly seen Apple’s developer documentation on 10.5.3 claim there were over 200 changes made, and that doesn’t make much sense either, since a single bug fix or enhanced feature can mean that many files have to be altered with lots of interrelated elements required to produce the desired result. So 10.5.3 no doubt contains tens of thousands of updated files when all is said and done.

Certainly, this is one huge mother of an update. If you’re a Leopard user, you’ll find a copy waiting for you in Software Update. The size will vary depending on the number of files that Apple deems appropriate for your Mac. The official Delta version, a strictly 10.5.2 to 10.5.3 update, weighs in at 420MB. If you never went for 10.5.2, or you want to take as few chances as possible, you might try the Combo updater, which contains all the alterations from the original 10.5 release, at 536MB.

I’ll just cover what I consider essential points here, at least to me. You can find the rest of the story in Apple’s official Knowledge Base document on the subject.

Certainly if you’re still hot and bothered over apparent AirPort problems with Leopard, the fix that, according to Apple, “Improves 802.1X behavior and reliability” will appeal to you, though it would be useful to know precisely what problems were addressed. Time Capsule is also reportedly more efficient with 10.5.3.

My personal bugaboo with Leopard has been Spaces. One of the most troubling problems involved applications with multiple palettes that seemed to lose track of which desktop they were in. In fact, that specific oddity and some others made me eventually turn off Spaces and revert to a utility that automatically hid all applications except the one you’re working in, sort of a single window or single app mode.

I’m pleased to say that I’ve turned Spaces on again, and, for the most part, it seems to work considerably better, though newly launched applications still occasionally spawn different windows in different spaces. But the problem is now mostly manageable and maybe 10.5.4, or perhaps a change to the affected applications themselves, will set things right.

Such key system apps as Address Book, iCal, iChat, Mail and TIme Machine have also been extensively cleaned up, and again it was a matter of making features work properly and get rid of an assortment of performance oddities, some subtle, some otherwise.

One example involves “issues with echo cancellation that may occur on portable Macs” in iChat, which would surely affect the quality of your audio conversations. However, when all is said and done, I still think Skype sounds better and I continue to wonder when or if Apple might allow you to send and receive calls from traditional landline and wireless phones, perhaps in partnership with a telecom carrier.

You’ll also find some choice tidbits in a category labeled “new,” such as a fix for “stuttering video and audio playback in certain USB devices,” which may impact add-on mixers and other gear. One that sounded particularly troublesome, although it never happened to me, is a fix for “an issue in which certain attached hard drives may not show up in the Finder.”

There are also repairs to Active Directory defects that may explain why there are still reports of trouble in cross-platform installations.

All in all, I am concerned with the sheer number of bugs Apple had to fix as much as I am pleased that they were, at last, addressed in one hopes is a satisfactory fashion. While my troubles with Leopard have been relatively minor in the scheme of things, I’m well aware that some of you have been engaging in long hair-pulling sessions as a result of your close encounters with 10.5.

Yes, I still feel certain Mac troubleshooting sites have been way overboard in taking minor problems or issues that may impact only a small subject of users, and presenting them as proof that Leopard is a buggy mess that should never have seen the light of day.

I’m also certain that, within a few days, you will see a number of reports claiming that the changes in 10.5.3 do not fix certain problems and may, in fact, create others.  It is clear to me that Apple will never please some people no matter how hard they try.

Certainly, an awful lot of engineering efforts led to 10.5.3, and my experiences have, so far at least, been quite good. But the same was true with 10.5.2 and 10.5.1 for that matter.

So what should you do about 10.5.3’s persistence in your Software Update app? I suggest you wait a few days for the dust to settle and then, barring any show-stoppers, go for it.

To get ready for the update, you should not have to engage in any mystical practices, such as repairing disk permissions. But you might want to quit your open apps before you run the update, and do a little online research to confirm that any system enhancements you’re using won’t stop functioning after 10.5.3 is installed.

Beyond that, you’re on your own, of course, but I don’t see any reason to be terribly concerned.

This isn’t going to be your standard WWDC prediction article, because so much of that so far has focused on what form the next iteration of the iPhone will take, and what apps will be available for it on day one. What’s more, I’m sure you’ve heard quite enough on that subject already, and you’d rather wait for the main event, and discover the truth or falsity of the expectations.

That’s true even if you have given up trying to locate an iPhone for sale now. In fact, I suggest you wait for the  new model before you decide whether a possible closeout on the original — if you can find one — makes any sense.

There is also some speculation that Apple might debut new form factors for the aging MacBook and MacBook Pro note-books, but they are incredible sales successes, so where’s the incentive? But even if new models appeared for the summer and fall buying seasons, the internal hardware wouldn’t be all that different, so it wouldn’t be so revolutionary.

However, there is one element of Apple’s product portfolio that analysts and rumor sites just aren’t talking about, and I think you see where I’m going.

As we all know, Leopard went on sale at the end of October of last year, a few months late, allegedly because Apple needed to move a fair amount of its development resources to the iPhone.

Regardless of the truth of the announced reasons for that delay, Leopard came out approximately 30 months after Tiger, which is rather longer than Apple has separated its operating system reference releases in recent years. It was meant to be a 24 month gap originally.

If Apple were to return to that schedule, it would mean that Mac OS 10.6, with an unknown feline designation, would appear in the fall of 2009. Now Apple has to give developers a fair amount of time to play with prerelease versions, and three or four months from WWDC to possible release is far too short for a proper development process.

So, if that schedule is truly being considered by Apple, when would they first deliver preliminary information to developers?

Yes, it would come at the prior WWDC, which just happens to be debuting the second week of June of this year!

So if this schedule passes the logic test, it would mean that Apple is poised to unleash the next great version of Mac OS X upon developers who are simply not expecting that news. Now I wouldn’t expect it to get more than a very basic presentation, with a profile of some key new features, and perhaps less than an hour of keynote time. It is quite possible, in fact, that the actual developer’s releases wouldn’t arrive until the fall, but Apple needs to prepare WWDC members to be ready to consider the wealth of possibilities.

Certainly it would be presumptuous of me to suggest what features Apple might be considering for 10.6. I’ve made some references to improved Help systems and other elements that are missing from Leopard. The improved use of 3D in the standard interface is another idea that ought to be considered, since Apple’s enhanced graphic support could be readily harnessed and exploited on any recent Mac, even the Mac mini.

Beyond that, I just don’t know whether 10.6 should be just a general refinement of the features that first debuted in Leopard, such as Time Machine and Spaces, or offer something far more compelling.

Certainly, the pressure isn’t so high on Apple when it comes to operating systems. Windows Vista hasn’t done the job for Microsoft, and its successor, known as Windows 7, is not expected to arrive until 2010. As far as new features are concerned, Microsoft has already demonstrated their own version of Apple’s Multi-Touch capability, which appeared on the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro after originating in the iPhone and iPod touch, and even a Dock alternative. I suppose Microsoft’s imitative tendencies don’t need any explanation. Maybe they still call it “innovation” because they live in a bubble.

However, the scope of the new features publicized so far seems mostly limited to wizzy special effects. MIcrosoft, after seeing many of its key features depart from Vista during its over-long gestation process, is evidently trying, for once, not to make promises it cannot deliver. Today’s Microsoft cannot get away with such shenanigans as easily as in the past, when they delivered demos of new technologies, only to cut back on features or abandon them altogether before they ever saw the light of day.

Does anyone, for example, remember Cairo?

Apple, however, isn’t in the business of delivering less than it promises, and it usually manages to keep close to the timetables it publicizes, with a few rare exceptions that we all know about. So while I really think there is a decent chance that we’ll get the first digs on Leopard’s successor at WWDC, the new iPhone will still be the star of the show.

Or am I just way, way off the mark here?

Long, long ago, someone referred to a specific attempt at reforming the state of the U.S. economy as “voodoo economics.” Maybe they were right, maybe they were wrong, but when it comes to the often-aggravating problems that occur with technology-related products, you sometimes wonder whether a little magic might be called for.

Back on the heady days of the Classic Mac OS, when something went wrong, there were always a few pat steps to resolve your problems. Restart and disable Extensions, remove preference files, rebuild the desktop and check your hard drive directory. It didn’t matter what the real cause of the problem might be. It was easier to repeat the standard repair methods by rote than to think about it.

In fact, I remember getting into a few arguments with people who recommend the foregoing remedies even when the problem clearly had nothing to do with any of them.

With Mac OS X, of course, the things you do to repair problems can be both easy and complicated, depending on the kinds of solutions you employ, and some of the Mac troubleshooting sites make the situation all the more confusing by posing draconian measures that may create additional complications.

Let’s look at the normal before the abnormal:

It’s perfectly true that hard drive damage can be the cause behind all sorts of ills. Certainly if data is being corrupted as it’s written to your hard drive, that can cause a load of problems when you try to run an application or perform some system-related chore, such as using the Finder. However, unlike latter versions of the the Classic Mac OS, Disk First Aid’s successor, Disk Utility, is not able to repair a startup drive without rebooting from another device. Yes, I know about the FSCK command you can use when you restart, but we’re talking about something real people can use without going through command line hoops.

However, it doesn’t seem that drive related difficulties occur so often with Mac OS X, unless it’s actually a failing drive. Other than FireWire and USB devices, Disk Utility will report a drive’s S.M.A.R.T. status, which reflects the condition of the hardware and whether it might be poised to fail.

Understand that drive failures can happen at any time, even if you’ve only had your computer for a few months. Here Mac and PC users are on an equal footing. Drives are cheap and, despite the promise of greater longevity, the mechanical innards can go at any time, and not always with adequate warning. So keeping tabs on the health of your hard drive is naturally a good idea.

Need I say that defective RAM can also cause the unexpected. So I always recommend you buy from a respected vendor or manufacturer, even if you have to pay a little extra. RAM is never something you select on price alone.

Preferences can also be an occasional cause of difficulties, but usually such ills will be centered on a single application with a corrupted .plist file, Mac OS X’s parlance for the settings file. That’s one reason why, after repeated crashes, you’ll be given the option to relaunch an application with default preferences to see if that helps resolve your unexpected quits or performance anomalies. Of course, if you’ve carefully crafted application settings over time, you may not be too keen on recreating them, but that’s what backups are for, and Time Machine is ideally suited for recovering an older version of a preference file that, one hopes, will be less troublesome.

Forgetting the common sense issue of a basic incompatibility between an application and the Mac OS you’re using we come to an alternate universe where, if the simple doesn’t suit, it’s time to stretch the boundaries.

How so?

Well, consider the Repair Disk Permissions function. What’s it for? Well, each of the hundreds of thousands of files you have on your Mac has a specific range of read and write permissions. The theory goes that if the permissions become messed up for some reason, you will encounter a standard range of system or application troubles, such as sudden quitting and inconsistent performance.

In practice, this particular troubleshooting method seems little more useful than rebuilding the desktop in the previous Mac OS generation. I have worked with Mac OS X since day one, when I got the Public Beta in 2000 direct from Apple. I cannot recall a single instance where the Repair Disk Permissions function did any good. Maybe your experiences are different, but I regard this as one of those voodoo schemes that seldom has any value.

A certain Mac troubleshooting site also suggests mixing and matching system files from different system versions, supposedly to address bugs in a current version. While I have no doubt such things may, on occasion, fix a particularly irritating problem, consider that certain files are dependent on other files, and if you use some sort of system-hacking tool to mix and match, you may create more problems than you had before.

One solution I would support, however, is to use the so-called Combo system updater — the one that carries all the changes from the last reference release — to see if that helps resolve an issue. Not to be paranoid, I would also suggest you quit open applications when you are installing any Apple system update. Yes, it may work anyway — and I haven’t run into any problems — but this is just a simple, painless precaution.

At least it can’t hurt.

However, when you read suggestions that take you beyond Apple’s normal troubleshooting steps, and seem to involve a little file movement legerdemain, I would be extremely skeptical. Yes, it’s all right to, on a rare occasion, rush to Terminal and enter a few command line instructions. Beyond that, and you’re in a paranormal world, where the laws of psychics just don’t seem to apply. Don’t fall for nonsense.