Consider that, relatively speaking, Apple’s stock has been down in the dumps of late. A lot of that isn’t due to any particularly bad news, just the illusion that bad news is on its way.

Take the iPhone. Now, although this continues to be misquoted and misrepresented over and over again, Apple has said that it hopes to reach the 10 million unit sales milestone by the end of 2008. That’s not saying there will be 10 million sales this year; that’s the total sales since the product was first introduced in the summer of 2007. I just want to get that distinction out of the way before the wrong version is repeated all over again.

Well, Apple’s chief operating officer, Tim Cook, took the bull by the horns at the Goldman Sachs Investment Symposium this week and reiterated Apple’s promise to reach the 10 million sales goal by the end of this year. Now this is no different from what Cook and other Apple executives have said all along. Unfortunately, Apple, though it usually meets its promises or comes pretty close these days, is still regarded with supreme suspicion, while Microsoft’s fanciful claims about products that are late, crippled or never reach the light of day, are usually accepted as gospel.

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There are some people who have Mac hardware collections that almost remind you of mini museums. I recall visiting a client some years back, a plumbing contractor, who was utterly immersed in vintage Macs. When I checked out his storage garage, it’s perfectly true that most of the storage shelves contained the expected pipes, washers and other accouterments of that business.

However, one wide storage cabinet, several rows deep, contained nothing but Macs, all carefully preserved in a clear plastic wrap. As I traversed the collection, I saw a selection of early models, the compact versions that included the original Macintosh 128K that debuted in 1984.

More to the point, their owner said each had been delicately cleaned and restored to full operation, almost as if they were essentially brand new. Certainly getting spare parts was no great chore, as you can generally acquire them online fairly easily and inexpensively, but it’s not as if I felt the need to put those claims to the test. I was willing to take him at his word.

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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.

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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.

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