It’s a sure thing that lots of so-called tech reporters have been making the rounds predicting what Apple will unfurl at the Macworld Expo next week. While I’m sure some of those guesses are on the money, and I also suspect Apple spread some of those tales for maximum impact, others will be thoroughly off-base.

Now I have often told you long-suffering readers that I am not much at prognostications, nor am I qualified to do industry analysis in the fashion of my friend Ross Rubin of the NPD Group. But my opinions are as good as anyone else’s, otherwise, and so long as you understand I’m probably going to be downright wrong in everything I suggest, I’m going to take a stab at it.

Next week, you can have the pleasure of showing me up for the mistakes I’ve made, even though I’m admitting to them in advance, or you can simply include your own predictions in your comments to this article.

Surely the iPhone is going to get tremendous coverage, even though Apple is apparently hinting that Macworld Expo this time out will primarily be a Mac party. That’s great, since last year’s event might have been subtitled iPhone World or iPod World if you wanted to be more accurate.

So can we expect anything at all about the iPhone? Well, perhaps. I may be premature to expect a upgraded version that supports AT&T’s 3G network, but perhaps you’ll see a higher-end version with 16GB Flash memory. It may even come at the same price as the 8GB model, which will make the low-end iPhone a $299 product. Sorry, folks, no rebates this time; just the standard 30-day price protection.

As to that forthcoming iPhone SDK, the official way for third parties to build software for the iPhone, how about it showing up this month rather than the next, as originally promised? That will create a flurry of excitement and even bump Apple’s stock price by a few dollars.

On the iTunes front, since the mainstream press has already let the cat out of the bag, you can expect the highly-anticipated video rental deal with Fox, and perhaps a couple of other studios will join the party. I just hope, though, that this agreement won’t deliver a lame result, such as paying $2.99 or $3.99 for a 24-hour rental. That’s pathetic, when you consider the value you get from Netflix. How about seven days?

But since this is supposedly a Mac event, I have to admit I can see where there might be a market for a thin and light Mac note-book. This might be regarded for the replacement of the late, lamented 12-inch PowerBook G4, but would owe more in its concept to the original PowerBook 2400 series. That means that it’ll probably ship with Flash memory, either 32GB or 64GB, but require a docking station (perhaps standard equipment) that will contain a standard hard drive and an optical drive. That will allow Apple to provide an ultra-tiny form factor, with a weight of less than four pounds, and battery life of at least six hours under normal use and abuse.

As for the name, how about a MacBook mini or MacBook slim? Yes, this would be a member of Apple’s professional note-book line, complete with discrete graphics card and perhaps sporting one of Intel’s new Penryn chips for maximum performance and low power utilization. Other Mac note-books, and even the iMac, which uses note-book components, are in line for new chips too.

In the original version of today’s commentary, I wrote about the anticipated upgrade to the Mac Pro, containing a pair of the new 3.2GHz quad-core Xeon chips employing the new Penryn design. Well, of course Apple surprised us all by releasing the new Mac Pros a week early, with all models this time sporting a pair of quad-core processors. You can find out more about 2008 Mac Pro from Apple’s site. The Xserve was similarly blessed.

As you might expect, the new chips, combined with Leopard’s enhanced support for multiprocessing, enable this powerhouse workstation to blow the previous model out of the water in benchmarks involving a larger range of applications. Indeed, you’ll see huge performance enhancements almost across-the-board. Apple claims up to twice the speed and better compared to the previous Mac Pro. Even lazy applications, such as Microsoft Office for 2008, will open almost instantaneously.

Missing in action is Blue-ray. Now that Warners is supporting Sony’s technology, it’s high time to ditch HD-DVD and get high definition DVDs moving before other delivery mediums, such as online, take over. So why is Apple still behind the curve, or will be there further announcements next week? What about placing a Blu-ray drive in a revitalized Apple TV?

And one more thing: Apple’s display line is extremely long in the tooth and overpriced compared to the competition from Dell and other companies. They are sadly in need of a revision, and that might come among the various Macworld announcements.

Of course, there’s apt to be a surprise or two from Steve. But that’s all from me, at least for now.

As you know, I’ve been a long-time holdout on acquiring an iPhone, largely because I have never seen the need for a wireless phone that has anything but the basic features, plus Bluetooth for handsfree connections to the car or a wireless headset. So when Apple came out with the iPhone, I was skeptical.

On the other hand, I also regard most cell phone interfaces as pathetic, and I’ll have more to say about that in the next article. So this is one major reason why I have not strayed beyond the basics with my handsets. I have other priorities, and as long as the signal strength is adequate, and audio quality is decent, I have remained happy.

But I’ve been awfully curious as to what makes the iPhone tick, and why it became so popular so quickly. No, it’s not just hype. You see, a healthy majority of the folks who own one adore this wonderful gadget, so I’ve been sorely tempted.

Finally, I got in touch with my PR contact at Apple and he arranged to send me one to review, along with the requisite press review guide.

Now, to be blunt, I have mixed feelings about those review pamphlets. On the one hand, they help you focus on the key features of a new product, and sometimes suggest test scenarios. But the lazy writer may sometimes do little more than summarize that information, and then provide a brief comment on how they felt about the product.

I’m not going to do that, and, in fact, I never did check the reviewer’s guide before writing this review, nor did I read the brief instruction booklet packed with the phone.

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

Four years is an awfully long time in the software business, although Microsoft is good at stretching its software development projects even longer, witness Windows Vista. But I didn’t think, when Office 2004 for the Mac came out, that we’d be waiting so long for its successor.

Of course, a lot has happened to slow Microsoft down, and the key factor is Apple’s move to Intel processors. It meant that millions of lines of that code behemoth known as Office had to be ported to Apple’s own developer tools, known as Xcode. That isn’t like taking a word processing document created in, say, Nisus Writer Pro and saving in Word format, a process than can be done with reasonable fidelity to most essential formatting. When you switch development environments, it may take weeks, months, or even longer to fix the inconsistencies and massage your code so things continue to run properly.

So I appreciate that Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit had a huge undertaking, and this may be a major reason why the software, due out January 15th, was postponed for several months from its original deadline. Talk if you will about Microsoft’s inefficiencies. It’s not as if they could afford to just trash more than 20 years of work and start over.

So now we have it. With Office 2008 for the Mac about to be released, Microsoft arranged for a number of people in the media to get beta copies, and then the RTM version, which is the so-called Golden Master that was released to manufacturing in December. So I’ve been privileged to have an early look at the Mac version of the world’s most popular software suite.

While this is not meant as an extensive review, it’s clear Microsoft has made great strides towards making the whole shebang prettier. From the basic icons to the various toolbars, palettes and so on and so forth, everything shows a lot of attention to detail.

What’s also nice is to see Office run at acceptable speed on an Intel-based Mac at long last. However, for some reason, the launch times have slowed considerably on a PowerPC-based model. Take my PowerMac G5 Quad, with scads of memory. Word can take from 6 to 12 seconds to launch, and the latter behavior is frighteningly reminiscent of the infamous Word 6 debacle, where Microsoft tried to inflict an application with a Windows look upon us.

This isn’t to say that Word 2008 isn’t Mac like. On the contrary, it seems that Microsoft has taken great pains to avoid the silly interface changes of Office 2007 for Windows. Yes, there is that dreaded ribbon, but you don’t have to invoke it, and it actually doesn’t look half bad.

However, the proliferation of toolbars and the ribbon can combine to severely restrict your document writing window, particularly on a Mac with a smaller screen. But a little judicious handling of the extras can go a long way towards making your work environment far more pleasant.

In saying that, Microsoft still persists with some long-term Office annoyances. For example, Word 2008 still doesn’t remember the page you had open when you last worked on a document. That’s something Apple’s Pages and loads of other applications support.

Also, the monolithic database file persists for Entourage 2008, Microsoft’s combined email and contact manager. What this means is that, if something happens to that lone, sprawling file, you could lose some or all of your contacts and emails. Contrast that to Apple’s sensible approach, which is to put your messages in separate files.

As new features go, Office 2008 may come up somewhat short. Sure, the publishing view of Word 2008 might, for example, ease the process of using the application for some desktop publishing chores. It may even be that Microsoft was influenced by Apple’s iWork ’08 in making some of its design decisions, and, speaking with an eye towards conspiracy theories, maybe Microsoft really delayed office to take a few hints from Apple.

Regardless, the real goal of Office 2008 is to make the frequently-overlooked features more discoverable, so you can more easily harness their power. Microsoft claims that its user surveys showed many requests for features that Office for the Mac already had. So rather than add more undiscovered treasures, they made the ones they had easier to access.

On the whole, Office 2008 for the Mac seems a worthy upgrade. I would only hope there will be a near-term revision to address the performance issues I’ve noticed. But I also wonder why I’ve yet to see any other preliminary review mention such matters, so maybe I’m alone in that observation. Or maybe I’m the only one who is concerned enough about Word 2008’s launch times to complain.

No doubt you’ve ready the stories already. On the basis of one set of online measurement samples, Apple’s share of the operating system universe exceeded 8% during the final two days of 2007, whereas Windows Vista scores just over 10%.

The figures were compiled by Net Applications, based on traffic measured at some 40,000 sites. Now I can’t say that those sites would necessarily favor a particular computing platform, but it means that the operating system once thought consigned to tiny niche status has taken huge strides in the past year.

Worse, it appears that Windows Vista hasn’t gained nearly the traction Microsoft expected, although they have surely made lots of claims as to how pleased they are with its reception. Then again, can you believe anything Microsoft says, other than the retail price of a new product, when it’s finally released?

To me, the trend is obvious, although the reality is almost hard to believe. Windows market share is stalling and slowly declining, whereas the Mac OS is growing way ahead of expectations, and even the level of industry growth. Is the slow migration to the Mac going to continue in this fashion, or become a stampede in the next few years?

In the tech industry, everyone, it seems, is looking to Apple as the sole source of inspiration for new consumer electronics gear, and the competition seems largely unable to provide anything more than me-too products that may be almost as good, but don’t set the world afire.

So, as lots of iPhones continue to move into the hands of end users, rival cell phone makers have delivered their own variation of touch screen products. Alas, most seem to think that taking the same crummy operating system and replacing the keyboard with a touch screen will somehow make these second-rate products as good as the iPhone. You almost see the Microsoft approach here, which has traditionally been to ape most of the benefits of a competitor’s product, and then tout the result as an example of innovation, rather than an insincere form of flattery.

With all eyes pointed to Apple, however, the pressure cooker atmosphere has become hotter and hotter. Every single product they produce must be the best of the breed, and a fast-breaking success, for otherwise it’ll be a total failure.

Witness Apple TV, which has been characterized by some as an abject failure, with sales estimated at about one million units. Now, Steve Jobs claims the product was an experiment, and that may be true. However, Apple has already moved more units than TiVo, and it’s quite possible there’d be no TiVo had they not made licensing deals with such cable giants as Comcast and Cox.

But Apple TV debuted with the heightened expectations of setting a new standard for a media center-type gadget, and when it didn’t set the world afire, Apple took a drubbing. To be sure, it may be the fact that Apple TV basically requires a high definition TV — or a costly adapter — to function, and that limits the market very much to the U.S. and perhaps Japan. In Europe, HDTV does have the same amount of market penetration.

So maybe it is truly a product for the future, when Apple figures out how best to provide media center capability without tethering Apple TV to technologies that most customers just don’t have yet. They certainly can’t take their cue from the Windows platform, because the media center TV hasn’t really taken off either. I mean, how many of you really want a big PC box in your living room cheek-by-jowl with your flat-screen TV?

The other question is how much of your TV viewing habits can be handled with an HD digital video recorder from TiVo, or the one you rent for a few dollars a month from your cable or satellite provider. If it’s time-shifting, they all work quite well. Maybe the interface of the knock-off set top box isn’t as pretty as Apple or TiVo could cook up, but they get the job done.

Apple, however, is concerned more with how iTunes will integrate with the TV. Sure, you can take your iPod and connect it to most TVs without anything more than a set of cheap cables, but that’s a bit of an awkward process. Sneaker net went away years ago. The Apple TV was supposed to be the ideal solution for seamless content transfer.

Regardless of how Apple TV turns out, anything Apple delivers in 2008 will be put under huge microscopes. They can experiment, sure, but if they don’t hit home runs most of the time, they’ll rapidly return to the land of the beleaguered. Or at last that’s what some tech pundits would want you to believe.