Just today, my copy of the August 2008 issue of Macworld arrived, with a fascinating headline situated above the title: “Mac CLones: Are They Coming Back?”

This would seem a silly proposition, since Steve Jobs ejected the last round of cloners, because their actions were threatening Apple. While the company’s erstwhile executives felt that ceding to the constant demands to open the platform would expand the Mac platform, they encountered the reverse. Aggressive startups, such as Power Computing, went with a vengeance after Apple’s core market with cheaper and faster products.

Indeed, Apple was hemorrhaging lots of red ink when Jobs took over as “interim” CEO in those days, and a lot of the members of the tech press and even Wall Street even felt Apple had gone down for the last count.

However, so many things have changed since then, the most important of which is the fact that Apple’s sales are higher than ever, and Mac market share is increasing at long last, after moving in the opposite direction for so many years.

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One common objection to Macs might be called the “McDonalds argument,” which posits that, since Windows occupies more than 90% of the world’s personal computers, they have to be the best. The public says so.

While I won’t say McDonalds is necessarily bad as fast food establishments go, the food is a far cry from gourmet level. But Microsoft didn’t necessarily get to the head of the pack by delivering better products. As Bill Gates leaves his full-time job at Microsoft, history shows that he used bait and switch, misleading claims, false promises and other questionable tactics to own the operating system market.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t threats on the horizon that Microsoft’s new leadership will have to confront. In fact, that threat will come, in large part, from Apple.

For years, it was claimed that Macs were not intended to be business computers. They were for home users, perhaps small business, and certainly those ever-eccentric content creators. But no large business would be caught dead buying them in quantity.

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All right, we know that Snow Leopard will be, for all practical purposes, a wholesale cleanup of Leopard. Most of the surface features, save for Microsoft Exchange support, will be essentially identical to 10.5, although I suppose there might be some refinements here and there.

But the real stuff will happen out of sight, in the guts of the system where the plumbing will be cleaned up, the operating system’s footprint will be reduced, and key performance enhancements will be added. It’ll also support up to 16TB of RAM, which may not mean much to you now, but it might a few years hence.

Indeed, Snow Leopard is laying a foundation that will pave the way for 10.7, 10.8 and beyond, and that is a good thing.

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As the world wonders whether or not you’ll be able to buy the iPhone 3G in the morning or the early evening come July 11, the real question is whether the new software has all or most of the critical features missing from the original version.

Yes, there’s some great stuff in iPhone 2.0, based on what Apple has revealed so far. Forgetting the faster Internet and GPS features of the new hardware, you’ll have push email, contact list searching, improved security, full Microsoft Exchange support, the ability to read more formats and other stuff. Then there’s the incredible promise of the App Store and all the marvelous third-party stuff that’s expected.

But Apple hasn’t come close to filling the wish lists of a lot of iPhone users.

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