This is a different type of column. It’s not necessarily about Tiger, Leopard, or even the iPhone. Instead, it’s time for me to vent my spleen, and tell you about the things that annoy me to distraction in our odd corner of the universe. As is usual, my comments are arbitrary, and the selections are as well. Feel free to agree, disagree, or just ignore me entirely, which most of you do anyway.

Cables not included on new printers: I understand that you have to cut corners for a $50 ink jet, but when you’ve just paid $300 or so for that spanking new multifunction printer, it’s ridiculous to have to go out and buy a new set of cables too! In the days when these printers had both parallel and USB ports, I could understand the reluctance to provide two cables when just one would suit (and how do you predict which one?), but not today. If anyone has actually purchased a new printer with cables provided in the box, I’d love to hear about it..

Printed manuals not included: Those tiny books that ship with high-priced software, such as the new Adobe Creative Suite, don’t do it for me. These are complicated programs, with fairly tough learning curves. So maybe Adobe wants to save trees, and it’s true there are sometimes PDF versions at hand on the CDs. But when I spend upwards of a grand or two on a new software package, is it too much to ask for a complete, old fashioned printed manual? Yes, there is one that ships with the various versions of Adobe’s CS3 suite, but it is absolutely pathetic if you hope to acquire anything more than a cursory knowledge of how things work.

Ridiculous upgrade policies: You buy an upgrade to a product you already own, but you have to wait for the rebate to get the discount price. You and I both know that rebates are often an illusion, and you have to wait weeks or months to get your money back, and even then it may take a few calls to an anonymous call center, in a land far, far away, to get some action. Talk about giving a company an interest-free loan. As far as Apple is concerned, upgrade policies are almost non-existent, and while they might be moving tons of retail Tiger boxes, and perhaps even more upgrades when Leopard ships, I bet they’d move a lot more product if there was a decent upgrade policy.

We are not unpaid beta testers: I understand that shareware is also a shared experience, and the authors work with users to build better, more stable products. But when you pay hard-earned money for regular, commercial software, you shouldn’t have to wait for a .1 or .2 upgrade for things to settle down. I know the marketing department wants to get the thing out as soon as possible, so the profits roll in. As of now, Apple is promising that Leopard will ship in October, and one hopes it’ll be fully baked and ready to ship by then, and relatively free of serious bugs. But if some last-minute problems appear, I’m sure most of you would forgive Apple for postponing Mac OS 10.5 for a few weeks, because even a mid-November release date won’t be too late for the holidays. There’s never too much testing when it comes to an operating system or mission critical productivity application.

Critic proof benchmarks: It’s a case of damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. In the old days, Apple would compare a Mac against a PC box with roughly similar specs, causing the usual uproar from supporters of the product that got trashed. That’s no longer possible, since they all use the same processor and most of the same support systems these days. So Apple has switched to comparing the new Mac with the old Mac, just to show how much things have improved. But when the tech reviewers run their own test suites, the differences are never quite as vast. Wouldn’t it be nice if editors and manufacturers devised a system that everyone could agree upon, either from existing industry-standard test methods or something altogether new?

Technology journalists are too full of themselves: We think we know better than the manufacturers how to build and market products. We are quick to criticize, although some of us do really try to make helpful suggestions. But let’s not assume that we’d be able to run any of those companies without messing up big time. Do you really want to be Steve Jobs for a day, and do you think Apple would survive the experience? If any of us really knew how to run a multinational company, why do we work for a pittance sitting in front of a computer writing words that most people don’t care about anyway? And that’s the truth.

An even more interesting truth to our regular readers is that I expressed many of these same viewpoints in an article posted four years ago. Indeed, little if anything has changed.

A couple of months back, a friend called and asked me whether it was a good time to buy a new iMac. I thought about it for a moment, and I was ambivalent about an answer. You see it’s not quite as easy as it used to be to guess Apple’s moves.

As you probably know, it wasn’t so long ago that Apple reserved the introduction of new Macs to the Macworld trade show. But that began to change when there were no longer two Macworlds every year. Now, Apple introduces new products throughout the year, sometimes during a special press briefing, but just as often with a simple press release, if the product represents just a minor update, such as a Mac with a faster processor.

Regardless of venue, you could generally predict when a model was due for an upgrade. It would often happen on a six- or nine-month cycle. When Apple switched to Intel processors, on the surface, things seemed more predictable. Intel has a very public processor roadmap. When they come out with a new product line, isn’t a new Mac just around the corner?

That would seem logical, but it hasn’t quite turned out that way.

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

Apple Inc. finds itself in a peculiar situation. They eyes of the world are focused four-square on what they’re doing, but they’ll only release details on a new product when it fits in with their current market plans. That means that if they don’t want to say anything about the product until it ships, they will say nothing. If, however, they want to drum up interest in some gear that may not appear for months — such as Leopard, Apple TV and the iPhone — they’ll be shouting it to the skies.

But whether silence emerges, or a full-blown media campaign, the speculation about what Apple is up to never stops. In the old days, it was confined to a few Mac rumor sites and the late, lamented “Mac The Knife” column in the long-discontinued MacWeek magazine.

Today, the players are far more respectable. From Wall Street analysts to tech publications and daily newspapers, Apple can just sit back and do nothing, and the conversation will only intensify.

However, if you really want to know what they’re up to, the worst place to go is a rumor report. Sometimes those rumors are correct, but more often than not, the guesswork simply doesn’t pan out. While you might remember the stuff that turns out to be true, even those revelations might be the result of simple common sense. It’s been so many months since a product upgrade appeared, Intel has already released a new processor family, so it stands to reason that Apple might use it in a forthcoming product.

Now, without naming names, there are actually some sites that almost always get things wrong, even when there are official announcements from which to draw information.

On the other hand, it may well be true that some of those rumors, particularly when they appear in such respectable publications as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, are quite likely fed by Apple to stoke the fires. They get an official briefing “on background,” which they can report without direct attribution to the Apple executive who presented the information.

Of course, getting information in this fashion is not unusual. It happens all the time in government circles, and other corporate executives have done it for years. But Apple knows how to play the game. They know which tech writers have the most influence, so this worthy handful and a few selected publications will get first digs on a new product review. The rest of the world has to simply get in line.

Yes, even when I was still working with the traditional news media, I learned my place really quick, and it was not even close to the top of the list.

Another method used to divine what Apple is working on is to consult patent filings. You can learn all sorts of things about what’s happening behind the closed doors at One Infinite Loop if you pore over this information. You will surely unearth loads of nifty ideas that could conceivably end up in a future iteration of Mac OS X, a new Mac, or some other gadget.

However, filing a patent certainly doesn’t guarantee the product or innovative feature will ever see the light of day. As with other technology companies, Apple files patent applications as a defensive measure to protect their rights to the new idea before the competition places a similar application in the queue. Indeed, one major reason why Apple made that $100 million settlement with Creative Labs was simply because the latter beat Apple to the patent office.

In the end, it may be months or years before the concept in that patent appears in a new product. It may never happen, simply because the the idea doesn’t translate well to a retail product. I’m willing to suggest that there may be hundreds of new products under development at any time in Apple’s research labs. Only a few will get the green light from Steve Jobs and the rest of the company’s senior management and make it to the production lines.

But that doesn’t stop patent filings from remaining as fodder for the rumor mills. Since Apple isn’t telling them anything, they might as well see if one of those inventions seems interesting enough for a story. At least the filing has a fair amount of credibility, since it does come from Apple, and bears the name of the employees that led the team responsible for the concept.

So is there any way that an enterprising investigative journalist can unearth the facts about a new Apple product? There doesn’t seem to be any legal method that would bear fruit.

And while the occasional bandit Apple employee or contractor might spill the beans to the press, it’s a sure thing Apple’s legal will quickly clamp down on the offenders. Yes, Apple did lose that lawsuit to get rumor sites to reveal their sources, but that was probably a put-up job anyway. The product reported in those rumors known as Asteroid — a breakout box with multimedia inputs — never saw the light of day and probably never will.

I’d hate to be a stock broker. Well, maybe not, because I’d get a commission on every sale, regardless of whether the customer lost money or made money. But trying to figure out the weird morass of financial dealings, and the potential for a company to make a profit or show red ink would give me elevated blood pressure fast. What would I tell the people who called me for advice?

Now on the surface, it would seem to require a lot of careful work to make projections on a company’s prospects, but sometimes I wonder if those so-called Wall Street experts aren’t just reading crystal balls and tea leaves with some of the conclusions they deliver.

Take that rumor about a forthcoming miniature iPhone similar in concept to the iPod nano. I suppose the idea has its attractions, particularly when you ponder whether it makes sense to pay full price for the standard iPhone. Wouldn’t it be nice to get one for less than $300. Of course, that’s just the initial purchase price. You’ll still have to pay the same monthly rate, depending on your particular wireless plan.

Now it turns out that the story about a possible iPhone nano had no substance behind it. Of course, few stories about Apple have any substance at all unless the company confirms it, and they seldom talk about future products, unless it conforms to a specific marketing plan. In the case of the iPhone, it made sense, since there was a six=month frenzied promotional buildup that culminated in an incredible first weekend that blew away all sales estimates.

However, just the thought of another iPhone was sufficient to boost Apple’s stock price, which promptly dipped a tad when the reports were short-circuited.

This isn’t to say that buying Apple stock is a bad idea. I still wish I had done something when it was $13 or so, prior to the stock split. But, as a tech journalist, that would be highly unethical, since I’m not supposed to invest in a company I write about. On the other hand, if I had enough money on hand, and took that ride, maybe I’d make enough profits not to care.

I am troubled, though, when I see stock prices rise and fall on the basis of questionable information, sometimes hardly more than rumors. I’ll never understand the psychology of Wall Street and why slender tidbits that are hardly worth a second glance are sufficient to influence trades involving billions of dollars.

Oh well, maybe some of the cynics who say the stock market consists largely of overeager paper pushers passing paper money around aren’t so far off the beam after all.

Unfortunately, critical corporate decisions are often made based not on what is best for the company, its stockholders, employees and, one hopes, its customers, but on how its stock price might be affected. Worse, since you can’t really predict how Wall Street might react with certainty, that’s just an exercise in futility.

It’s clear to me that Apple isn’t developing its products and sales strategy based on how its stock price will fare from one day to the next. Apple succeeds because millions of people love their products, and continue to buy them. That’s true even when some financial analysts and tech writers predict a dire fate for Apple over and over again. The iPod can’t remain successful, the Apple TV is an abject failure, and how could anyone call the iPhone a smart phone?

This isn’t to say that every story predicting what Apple might do turns out to be wrong. Take the iPhone. People have been talking about such a thing for years, perhaps feeling that if they repeated it often enough, it would truly come to pass. Indeed, it’s clear that the iPhone was definitely under development for several years, so it’s possible some of the early stories had some factual basis. Or just good guesses or lots of positive vibes.

Of course, devoted Mac users have hoped for years that Apple would somehow pull off a miracle and win the operating system wars, but it simply never came to pass, although Mac market share seems to be doing a lot better than most expected.

After the success of the iPod and the iTunes store, the pessimists among us decided that all good things must inevitably come to an end. All right, Microsoft’s Zune didn’t do it, but how could Apple possibly succeed in the deeply-entrenched wireless phone industry?

Well, clearly, the iPhone has done enough in less than two weeks to even cause Congress to begin to look into the practice of tying a mobile phone to a single company, along with long-term contracts. Would they have done that had the iPhone not taken off like wildfire? They never said anything when the Motorola RAZR first came out.

Yes, I’m really glad I’m not a Wall Street analyst, or an industry analyst. I prefer to live in the real world. Of course, I do co-host a radio show on the paranormal, but that’s just another twist of reality, right?