In 1998, Apple killed the floppy drive. It took a few years for the rest of the industry to catch up, but the handwriting was clearly on the wall. Of course, anyone who actually lost data on a worn or defective floppy would only cheer the end of that flawed storage scheme.

Segue to 2007. Apple introduces the iPhone without support for Flash. People complain, but iPhones sell at ever-increasing rates. Today, with some 40 million of them around the world, and the iPad on the immediate horizon, Steve Jobs has made it quite clear that Flash is the floppy drive of the 21st century. It’s time for it to go.

Now there have been lots of complaints from the tech media, but you have to wonder whether some of those stories were actually fed by Adobe’s spin machine. Sure, the players are given away free, but you have to pay for the developer tools, and that’s where Adobe earns lots of money. Indeed they bought Macromedia to get Flash and — of course — kill Illustrator’s main competitor, FreeHand.

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There are some reasonable certainties in the Apple universe, and one is that there will be an iPhone OS 4.0 release some time later this year, probably in July. That is, if the expected timeframe for Apple’s WWDC remains in late June.

For now, I’ll stay away from other possible product revelations, such as the prospects for an early demonstration of Snow Leopard’s successor. Instead, let’s look at the hardware Apple is using for its mobile devices and how that might impact what comes next.

In the scheme of things, today’s iPhone and the iPad might be compared in terms of processor speed and other specs to a typical 2002 Mac. That’s not a bad thing, as those computers, still tethered to the PowerPC, were actually regarded as pretty powerful for their time. On the other hand, Apple is seriously constrained in building tiny handheld personal computers. You can’t, for example, just add RAM or replace the hard drive as your needs expand. I suppose it’s possible to swap out the Flash memory if more storage is needed, but the process would not be pleasant nor make sense from a cash standpoint even if you could find someone capable of performing such a component swap.

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Some of you may have read a report the other day that Apple was behind the curve because there were no recent updates to the MacBook Pro lineup. This despite the fact that Intel had recently upgraded its mobile processors. So what’s wrong with Apple? Don’t they want their customers to have the latest and greatest and fastest notebooks?

Of course, the real world doesn’t always work that way. Yes the chips may be available, but there are also complications in the way Apple has configured its recent hardware, using the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M chipset. Now this integrated graphics processor is way faster than anything offered by Intel, but both Intel and NVIDIA are embroiled in a dispute over the latter’s right to produce chipsets that support the new Core i5 and Core i7 mobile processors. Until that’s resolved, Apple can’t use those parts, so they’d have to devise a different solution.

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Recent Apple product releases have received an almost unanimous “ho hum” reaction from many members of the tech media, not to mention Mac users. Despite a tremendous amount of anticipation about the iPhone in 2007, for example, the critics maintained that it lacked key features, not to mention being a little too different from existing players in the market. And don’t forget that the first iPod wasn’t so spectacular either, but the marketplace reached a different decision.

You hear all that again with the iPad. After the constant rumors and speculation, it turned out to be, from surface appearances of course, essentially a grown up iPod touch. Not that this is a bad thing, but it appeared to disappoint far too many people.

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