I’m pleased to announce that The Mac Night Owl has partnered with Dennis Sellers and Macsimum News to form a new media partnership. The full story is described in an article Dennis posted Wednesday morning. Basically, what this means is that we will work together not just on providing cutting-edge content to a wider audience, but we’ll be able to offer an expanded variety of advertising packages specially tailored to specific needs. We hope this is but the first of many ongoing projects Dennis and I will be involved in.

Apple has continued to raise the bar for cutting-edge industrial design, but little has changed when it comes to appearance in the Mac lineup in recent years, other than the strikingly individualistic beveled shape of the MacBook AIr. As my friend Rob Griffiths, of Macworld, observes in an intriguing commentary this week: “But then, I came to a startling conclusion: it seems Apple has perfected the design of its Mac cases.”

I think he may be stretching a little bit to come to that conclusion. But there was, at least at one time, an elegant and surprisingly-practical logic to Apple’s choices for the way Macs look. Take the Power Mac G5, which featured an extremely hot-running processor configuration. Apple’s design crew fashioned an extraordinarily sophisticated cooling system with multiple fans and even liquid cooling on the most powerful models. It certainly made sense to have that famous (or notorious) cheese-grater look at the front and rear, which greatly enhanced ventilation.

For two years, I had a Power Mac G5 Quad situated below my desk, and I have to tell you that I did look on occasion for evidence of coolant leaking, in the same way you look under your car in search for evidence that some unsavory substance is dripping.

When the Mac Pro arrived in the summer of 2006, the case was, from outward appearances at any rate, precisely the same. But that was essentially in keeping with Apple’s ongoing design motif, which was to change as little as possible, except what was required for new or changed functions.

Now in the case of the Mac Pro, the internals are more friendly to expansion, since only half the number of cooling fans are needed. So you can add four internal drives rather than two, and an extra optical drive too. Yes, the ports and port layouts are altered too, but you have to look carefully to see that.

Some of you probably expected that Apple would use the occasion of its switch from PowerPC to Intel processors to reinvigorate Mac designs. But clearly that didn’t happen. One reason I voiced at the time was that Apple wanted to reinforce the feeling of continuity. A Mac is a Mac even if the electronics inside, particularly the processor, are built by different manufacturers. It still looks and works the same — or at least better because of ongoing improvements not just in the processor, but in the supporting chips.

But with the Intel transition long since past, what is stopping Apple from making major design changes now? Do we still need the grated look to enhance cooling on a Mac Pro? Well, I suppose with a couple of graphic cards, all RAM slots occupied, and lots of intense 3D rendering on, it could enhance the reliability of what is basically a workstation rather than a personal computer.

However, where does that put the MacBook and MacBook Pro, which emerged from the Intel transition with minor size adjustments, but were otherwise similar to their PowerPC predecessors? All right, there’s the Multi-Touch touchpad on the MacBook Pro, shared with the MacBook Air.

The iMac? Well, beyond basically taking the externals of Apple’s aging display line and grafting them onto an all-in-one personal computer, not much really changed.

I won’t get into the tragic tale of the Mac mini, which remains unaltered, but still available, despite falling under the radar for quite some time.

Indeed, for the most part, Apple has made only minor external changes to its products, concentrating mostly on enhancing the stuff that really matters, and is most responsible for its functions and performance.

So are we to conclude, as Rob Griffiths no doubt does, that Apple has reached the pinnacle of its design expertise as to personal computers, a nirvana of sorts? Does this mean that they can retire their Mac design crew, or just redeploy them to work on future iPods, iPhones, Apple TVs and other products that, so far at least, we know nothing about?

That’s a really good question, and my response is probably no. At the same time, Apple’s creative team is focused in lots of different areas, and it can’t just make changes for changes sake. Right now, Macs are hot, and appear destined to continue to fuel the growth of Apple for quite some time, particularly as iPod sales begin to taper off — or appear to be tapering off. None of that growth has required Apple to change the look of its computers in any meaningful way, though you could argue that an aluminum-clad iMac is certainly different when compared to the plastic version.

So there’s no incentive at this point to focus development dollars where they are clearly not needed. In fact, Apple has in the past also kept basic case designs in production through multiple model changes. Consider the original compact Mac, which eventually morphed into the Mac Classic. The Mac IIcx became the IIci, and then, with slight external changes, the Quadra 700. I could go on.

However, even with incremental changes, you might still find that the Mac of 2012 will look quite different from the one you bought in 2008. What do you think?

Once the part numbers were revealed in the Mac rumor community, it was inevitable. On Tuesday morning, Apple announced the expected refresh to its ever-popular note-book line. The main improvements for both model lines include the newest 45 nanometer Intel Core 2 Duo processors known as “Penryn,” which promises better performance and longer battery life. MacBook Pros also receive spiffier NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processors with up to 512MB of RAM and the Multi-Touch trackpad that first made its debut on the MacBook Air. Apple also claims the MacBook Pro is up to 74% faster than the original version, which came out two years ago. Otherwise, they look the same as the models they replace, and they are reportedly shipping now. Indeed, not too shabby, but, you’ll have to wait for the reviewers to get their hands on these babies to determine how well they operate in the real world.

Imagine this scene: You set up your new Mac and, like millions of your fellow Mac users, everything works fine, or the problems that you do have are easily solved. Now would you post a message to a troubleshooting site or one of Apple’s forums and say everything is just peachy?

Not likely. You are probably too busy getting on with your life, doing real work on your computer, and perhaps having some fun doing it.

On the other hand, if something goes terribly wrong, as it sometimes does with almost any tech product, you will be upset, particularly if a solution isn’t quickly found. You may complain to your friends, a tech support person, or go to the most convenient Mac troubleshooting site to voice your frustration. More than likely, you’ll do all three plus anything else that you feel necessary to find help or vent your spleen.

Now I am not going to cast any nasty aspersions towards the decision to make your views public. That’s your right, as is your choice of where to express those views. It may indeed be the best way to find the answers you seek, particularly if you don’t get a glad hand from tech support and a ready solution.

What this means, of course, is that troubleshooting forums and even Apple’s own discussion boards are going to be heavily weighted towards problem reports. That’s the nature of the best, and it’s easy to read that stuff and get thoroughly frightened about the dangers of installing anything, simply because something nasty is going to happen.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that these issues affect only an unfortunate or unlucky few. Sometimes a company, and that surely includes Apple, will release something with serious defects that impact a lot of people, and it’s good to know about it before you get bitten by the same bugs.

However, the problem I have is that it’s not always easy to separate the wheat from the chaff when you peruse those messages. In fact, without a very skeptical eye, it may sometimes be downright impossible.

Worse, some of those troubleshooting sites really don’t seem terribly alert about trying to verify a report before simply posting it virtually unedited. The end result is that a problem that might be exclusive to a well-worn system, with lots of third-party system toys, ends up reflecting an issue that is, unfortunately, wrongly blamed on Apple or some other company.

Now in the past I have been a huge booster of MacFixIt, simply because I felt that they were careful about making some effort to look for trends rather than take one or two isolated problem reports at face value. However, I am a little concerned that, since being acquired by CNET, notorious for bad reporting about Macs for far too many years, the quality of their coverage has taken a turn for the worse.

This is particularly true with recent Apple updates, where you come away with the impression that the company can’t do anything right, that every single thing they produce is fatally flawed and should never have left the development labs.

In all fairness, Apple certainly has done its share of rush jobs, and has had to push bug fix updates out the door at a fast clip. Initial releases of Mac OS X have been known to be particularly troublesome. One upgrade, for example, was blamed for wiping out some FireWire 800 drives. Apple’s share of the problem was fixed quickly enough, although third-party firmware also required updates.

The initial release of Tiger broke third-party VPN and other networking utilities, and similar troubles are still said to afflict Leopard, even as of 10.5.2. Also, 10.5, itself, had a notorious file system bug that could corrupt or zap files if the process of moving — rather than copying — across drives or networks was interrupted for any reason, such as a crash or power outage. Now it may well be that this singular bug was present in earlier Mac OS versions. Regardless it was fixed in a matter of weeks.

In a positive light, when there are indeed problems with a software or hardware release, then certainly a troubleshooting site, at its best, will help alert you to the issues and aid you in finding a solution. So certainly they are needed to shed needed light on important matters that you need to know about.

At the same time, it’s easy to turn a reliable source of information into just another tabloid publication that exists solely to spread fear about doing anything with your computer without going through all sorts of silly voodoo preventive steps that can waste hours of your time without proven benefit.

Now I realize none of you have the time to verify every claim you read on one of these sites. What you might consider, though, is whether the complaints seem to be limited to a very few problem reports or reflect an issue that can affect a wider number of uses. Be skeptical of anecdotal claims, and look for efforts to verify before publishing.

That’s a basic common sense editorial concept, by the way, that separates a simple message board from a full-blown online publication. And also consider what I wrote at the outset of this article, that people who have no problems whatever are rarely inclined to waste time online saying so.