As soon as Apple contacted selected members of the media and summoned them for a briefing at its corporate campus in Cupertino, speculation mounted as to what new developments have been wrought. For the most part, that speculation was, amazingly enough, almost right on the money, close enough that you begin to think that maybe a few of the rumor sites actually had advance information. Or that the changes were so expected, that little came as a surprise.

But first, let’s start with what didn’t happen. There was no mid-range Mac minitower, to fill the gap between the Mac mini and the Mac Pro, no slim and light note-book, nor was Apple’s display line refreshed. Instead, the iMac simply adopts the latter’s basic design.

Out are the fashionable white plastics, and in is industrial strength aluminum, with slightly speedier processors from Intel’s Santa Rosa family, larger hard drives, and the rest of the standard array of speed bump niceties. Also history is the 17-inch version, with a 20-inch variant moving into a reasonably-affordable $1,199 slot. Oh yes, for business users, Apple added support for FireWire 800.

With but a single comment on the subject during the question and answer session, the Mac mini received a new lease on life and a minor speed bump, with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor topping out at 2GHz. This minor upgrade also means that all of Apple’s computers now have 64-bit processors, but clearly it’s the all-in-one computer that lights Steve’s fire these days, witness the rapidly growing sales of Mac note-books.

The other three developments were essentially telegraphed in advance too. Subscribers to .Mac get a few more features, including iPhone integration, and online storage is now expanded to 10GB from 1GB, the better to compete with free offerings from Google and Yahoo.

At long last, iLife is revised, with the ’08 version receiving major enhancements to GarageBand, iDVD, iMovie, iPhoto and iWeb. There’s little to be said other than the fact that nothing on the PC platform was able to match the power and simplicity of iLife ’06, and iLife ’08 will only raise the bar.

Another confirmed rumor had it that Apple would release a spreadsheet component for iWork ’08 known as Numbers. Well, they had it right on the money again. This iWork revision hits four-square into Microsoft Office territory, with substantial Excel import and export support in Numbers, a track changes feature in the word processor and desktop publishing application, Pages, and more tools for your Keynote presentations.

Both applications will continue to sell for $79 each, which retains their bargain status. Oh yes, they will fully support Leopard, but will also be fully functional with Tiger. So much for my theory that iLife ’08 would become a free value-added extra in Mac OS 10.5.

The Mac revisions come at an opportune time. Aside from the Mac Pro, which hasn’t had a change since last year except for that dual four-core processor configuration, all Macs are current, and Apple’s consumer applications have now left the starting gate. This puts Apple in good stead for the back-to-school season, and establishes the climate for plenty of holiday cheer.

With sales of new Macs increasing three times faster than the rest of the PC industry, the Windows-based competition has been left flat-footed once again. Sure, Dell is pushing a new line of PC boxes that sport new names and new colors, but that doesn’t change the fact that they remain hobbled by Windows Vista. Microsoft hasn’t done as well with Vista as the industry hoped, and now that Apple has a major operating system upgrade slated for October, this may be a ripe time for Windows users to serious consider jumping ship.

This is not to say that Apple is through revising computers for the rest of the year. There is still time to see a Mac Pro upgrade of one sort or another, for example. And I would not count a slim and light note-book out of the running. Maybe it is still being worked on, but simply wasn’t ready for a late summer introduction.

Then, of course, there’s the iPod and the iPhone. The former will likely come in for some big changes in a few weeks. Some are betting that the iPhone’s touch screen will appear in a high-end iPod with either Flash memory or a hard drive, or perhaps both.

Oh, and in case you’re curious about the other unannounced changes, it seems the AirPort Extreme is now available with gigabit Ethernet ports, while remaining at the original price of $179.

The iPhone? Well, my crystal ball doesn’t see any major changes for 2007, though I suppose Apple could pull a surprise on everybody and introduce a 2.0 version by November, or just confound the critics and cut the price by, say, $100. But then what do I know about marketing, right?

All right, you are probably wondering if The Night Owl hasn’t gone off his rocker again. After all, if you want to buy an iPhone, all you have to do is visit your nearest Apple or AT&T store, or place an order online. Even if the model you want isn’t in stock, you’ll have it in a few days.

So what could be simpler?

Well, there is one other factor that folks who are living in iPhone heaven may conveniently forget, but it is quite likely to come home when they get their next wireless bill; that is, if it’s not from AT&T. Yes, that’s the one factor that you may not think about when you succumb to those offers of free phones and big buckets of minutes. It’s the one-year or two-year contract you signed, which ties you to your existing cell phone provider unless you want to pay a fairly hefty early termination fee, which may be multiplied by the number of handsets you have.

If you are truly desperate for an iPhone, perhaps you’ll be willing to endure the final bill from your previous service, but I would hope you’d show a little patience. Whether its six months or two years from now, you are likely going to find a much better iPhone to purchase if you’re prepared to wait till your contract has expired.

Or maybe not.

You see, according to AT&T, some 40% of the initial iPhone activations were to new customers. Now perhaps they were in the clear, and had no obligation to their previous carrier. Or perhaps it just didn’t make any difference.

This isn’t to say that you are necessarily stuck in your present contract. There may be ways to get out of it without having to pay financial tribute to the cell phone company. For example, if you are having critical service problems in the areas you use for personal or business calls, such as poor quality audio and dropped calls, you may have a good excuse to break your contact without any cost or other obligations.

Of course, there’s no guarantee they’ll listen to you, but since Sprint is busy dumping customers for calling them too much — even if it’s really their fault — that might be a solution, at least for that carrier. I suppose if you earn a reputation as a constant pest, any wireless provider will only be too happy to allow you to depart without having to write a check.

If that strategy doesn’t bear fruit, what do you do to ditch your wireless carrier? Well, this is a technique I’ve considered, should I buy an iPhone of course. You see, I have about 18 months left on my present Verizon Wireless contract. Understand that, as mediocrity goes, Verizon is probably the best of the bunch, which isn’t saying a whole lot, but that’s how this business is, unfortunately.

Now I happen to have four phones on my Verizon family plan and if I decided to take the chance on an iPhone, despite my qualms about AT&T, I would simply revert to three phones and transfer one of my phone numbers over partly as an experiment.

In other words, this would be a gradual phase-out on my part, rather than an abrupt departure. But it’s also fair to say that AT&T is between a rock and a hard place here. It can’t be lost on them that they’ve had network and customer service problems, particularly in integrating their newly merged networks. When Consumer Reports runs surveys on the quality of wireless phone service, AT&T is traditionally at the bottom or near the bottom of the list. This despite claims of having fewer dropped calls.

So it’s clear to me that they have their work cut out for them, particularly with a demanding partner such as Apple. I would hope they are working hard to overcome their problems to keep the customers they’ve attracted happy.

As I said, I remain skeptical.

Of course there is one other way to get out of your wireless phone contract in case the gradual migration or obnoxious customer schemes don’t succeed, and that’s to hand off your wireless contract to a relative or a third party. There are sites that promise to offer this service, but I won’t link to any because I honestly can’t recommend a specific company. If you’ve succeeded in pawning off your wireless deal in this fashion, please leave a comment and let us all know.

Indeed, putting down your money on a new iPhone may not seem such a hard task, and the activation process ought to be fairly straightforward. But for many of you, your work has just begun, and it may not be a terribly pleasant process. But the ends, in this case, may indeed justify the means.

You know, with so many resources for news about Apple Inc. these days, you’d think it would be awfully difficult to just make up stories or come up with a wrong-headed interpretation of events. After all, a single foolish story ought to be short-circuited by the plain, unvarnished truth.

Unfortunately, things don’t quite work out that way. You see, the rumor or falsified information is all too often simply repeated without critical comment. This doesn’t necessarily mean that tech writers aren’t competent to separate fact from fiction. There’s just so much data to process, it’s awfully difficult to give a specific story the attention it deserves.

Of course, that doesn’t lessen their obligation to be accurate.

As we await news of the latest Mac products from Apple this coming week, there’s the usual rush to speculate what’s going to emerge during that briefing for journalists. Some of it is pretty obvious. The iMac hasn’t had an update in a while, so the only question is whether it’ll just get those new Santa Rosa chips from Intel, or whether there will be more far-reaching changes.

And that’s where the fun begins.

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

What’s a secret? The conventional definition is “something kept hidden or unexplained.” Indeed, the word “secret” has found its way into lots and lots of Mac books and articles over the years, but many of them were not about what products Apple might be planning to deliver, even though they are the real secrets.

Instead, they refer to features of the Mac operating system that you supposedly don’t know anything about. Of course, nobody knows everything, and I dare say you couldn’t find a single developer at Apple who could recite all Mac hardware and software features off the top of his or her head.

But what do we mean by a Mac secret anyway? If it’s a real feature, why would it be hidden, kept from your eyes? Clearly everything that the Mac does was incorporated as part of years of development. Apple loves to tout the number of new features present in each Mac OS revision. It’s a powerful sales tool, and the higher the number, the better.

So why would those features be kept secret? Well, I guess the first thing to determine if they are secret.

Now I suppose the conventional wisdom of a Mac secret is something that Apple allegedly didn’t want you to know about for some strange reason, so they were shielded behind a special combination of keystrokes, or provided with no information whatever in the Help menus or online documents about how to make them work.

Now over the years, I’ve written books and articles that had content labeled as “secrets,” even though that claim was probably an exaggeration. Every one of those features, in fact, were readily accessible via the menu bar, the Option key or another alternate keystroke combo, context menus or the Help menus.

Now maybe they aren’t used terribly often, which would surely lead one to believe they were, in fact, seldom-used features. But you can’t sell magazines and books using the words “Seldom-Used” in the title. “Secrets” sounds better, and it does indeed invoke the feeling that Apple engaged in surreptitious practices to make sure that many of the capabilities of its operating systems are designed so you can’t access them unless you use some special technique or a private handshake.

Now in the days of so-called Easter Eggs, this was probably true to some extent. You don’t seem them anymore all that much, but experienced Mac users once delighted in being able to find hidden menus listing the members of a programming team, or providing a neat visual effect. That was really nice, and it did demonstrate a certain level of independence on the part of Apple’s developers.

However, these days, Apple keeps its employees under a very tight leash. They can’t just leave components in the operating system unless they are fully documented and approved by the appropriate managers, although some of those things are occasionally left in the system anyway.

At the same time, since Apple has switched to tried and true Unix-based capabilities, you can bet there are a load of command line functions that aren’t readily apparent to the average Mac user. Indeed, you can do an incredible number of things in the Terminal, as Unix mavens will tell you, but the rest of us don’t need to know any of that stuff. For example, it’s possible to delete thousands and thousands of files by a simple set of commands, and there will be no “Are you sure?” prompts to remind you of the potential of disaster before you press the Return key to commence a catastrophic maneuver.

I suppose in the general sense, Mac OS capabilities that are not readily available or accessible via the standard set of graphical tools are indeed secret, and for good reason. They represent the NeXT-based Unix heritage of Mac OS X, and power users will treasure those capabilities and, in fact, harness them as necessary.

But they are otherwise left well enough alone without the proper set of directions at hand. Indeed, unlike the original Mac secrets of old, today’s Mac is a highly sophisticated personal computer with all sorts of capabilities buried down deep that help deliver the incredibly stable environment we’re all accustomed to.

Under limited circumstances, you may have to harness one of those powerful tools to get you out of trouble. Fortunately, there are a number of maintenance utilities that put a pretty face in front of those features, to make it easier for you to solve problems.

In fact, even Apple’s Disk Utility is basically a graphical front-end for some of those command-line functions.

Sure, a Mac secret can be entertaining from time to time, but too much power in the wrong hands is not a good thing.