As speculation about the possibilities of the next Mac notebook revision heat up, some are wondering whether the MacBook Pro will become just another MacBook Air? Maybe it will be lighter, thinner, and perhaps contain a longer-lasting battery. At the same time, with the arrival of Intel's Ivy Bridge chips, it'll run faster too.

It sounds good so far. But I won't speculate as to when you'll see them in the stores.

There will also likely be a wider selection of solid state drives, and maybe prices will begin to come down to the point where you don't go broke having a larger storage capacity. An SSD means much faster start times, quicker app launching, faster file copying and so on and so forth.

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As you might imagine, the last few weeks have been filled with speculation as to what Apple, with Tim Cook at the helm, will do in 2012 to upend the tech industry. But the real question is whether Apple needs to make any deep changes in order to remain hugely successful.

By changes, it's not just product initiatives but corporate policy. Since Cook has been prospering under Apple's policy of extreme corporate secrecy, it's hard to imagine he'd change anything except to a very minor degree. The present corporate posture made Apple amazingly prosperous, and it made Cook very, very rich. So there'd be no incentive to alter any policies.

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I started using Macs in the 1980s not for recreation, but to get work done. I was involved in writing and desktop publishing. The latter had just debuted on the Mac; I was using them at the office, and needed to bring work home from time to time; I traveled with a regular supply of floppies and other material in a briefcase. It wasn't long before I stayed home and did everything from a room that I converted into an office. Only later did I find reason to perform more relaxing functions on that Mac, particularly when I got a notebook to bring into the bedroom each evening.

These days, an iPhone sits on my night table, and I use it to surf and keep track of my heavy email load, answering messages that can't wait till my regular workday begins.

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The very first Mac arrived in 1984 without the ability to upgrade anything. Even opening the case was a chore best left to service technicians when troubles arose. Although the Macs that arrived in the years after Steve Jobs left Appleoften sported relatively easy upgrading, it wasn't always a cake walk.

I remember, for example, the Quadra 800, a precursor to the similarly designed Power Mac 8100. If you wanted to add or replace RAM, you had to separate the chassis from the case, which involved removing lots of screws and separating cable assemblies. The process, while theoretically not difficult, presented the potential hazard of damaging delicate cables and wreaking havoc. Understand that this model, and some of its successors, were minitowers designed for professional content creators who required smooth internal expansion, and Apple fell down on the job big time.

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