In recent days, Apple has paid some $700,000 in legal fees to the defendants in its failed action to locate the source behind revelations about an alleged product under development bearing the code-name Asteroid.

Although the product got lots of attention as a result of the lawsuits, it never saw the light of day. Supposedly an audio breakout box of some sort, there is no hint that such a gadget ever came close to release, or even that it ever went beyond a few sketches.

But what about the documents in the lawsuit, mentioning published reports about documents that were supposedly part of a presentation on Asteroid? Just what is going on here?

Well, it’s quite true that Apple, typical of technology companies in general, may have lots of products in various stages of development that never see the light of day. There are many reasons for this. In some cases, the goals for that project aren’t realized, or a marketing department decides that it just can’t succeed.

I would rather consider another possibility. It’s clear that Apple would prefer the rumor sites would just go away, although, frankly, the company benefits from all the speculation, whether accurate or otherwise. Sure, Steve Jobs will make some lame jokes about the rumor sites during a keynote, but you just know he’s seething inside about what they do.

He’s even more incensed about the people inside Apple who apparently feed critical information about new products to the press. This is not just a matter of hating the press. Any technology company has the perfect right to protect its trade secrets, and Apple employees, contractors, suppliers and developers all sign extensive nondisclosure agreements ageeing not to disclose confidential information.

So imagine if Jobs or perhaps one of Apple’s attorneys came up with the bright idea of creating a Trojan Horse product to smoke out the leakers. Thus begat Asteroid.

So when the news first appeared, it wasn’t just a matter of lawyers sending cease and desist orders to the offending sites, but a larger strategy played out, that of filing lawsuits to unearth the identities of the “John Does” who provided the information. I don’t know what Apple’s real expectations might have been, but they depended upon the courts siding with them, that the people who run those sites weren’t really journalists, but just “bloggers,” as if a distinction of that sort truly exists. Thus, they must reveal their sources, or so they thought.

I suppose Apple had to be optimistic when it won its first skirmish, but when an appeals court turned them down, I suppose they realized it wasn’t worth the expense and threw in the towel.

In the end, all Apple did was fuel the hit counts on the rumor sites that were “lucky” enough to be targeted for these legal actions. Nick Ciarelli, the Harvard undergraduate who runs Think Secret, for example, briefly became a national celebrity with interviews appearing in the mainstream press.

This doesn’t mean that Apple has given up trying to stop leakers, and to kill the rumor sites. But they have to feel chastened over the turn of events.

In a sense they’re lucky. I mean, how many rumor sites have arisen over what new products Dell is producing? Of course, you can predict the next Dell upgrade from the Intel and AMD processor roadmaps. As for Microsoft, well, it’s also apparent that the company might actually fund or fuel prerelease coverage of its products, beyond what they already tell you of course.

Indeed, in the days before the last Macworld, few tech pundits could stop talking about the iPhone. Even mainstream writers got in the act, and it quickly became a feeding frenzy. By the time Steve Jobs actually took the wraps off the product, worldwide attention was focused on his Macworld Expo keynote. All that free publicity generated by silence. Apple didn’t have to drop a single hint. You can’t buy coverage like that.

Indeed, Apple needs the rumor sites as much as they need Apple.

As to Asteroid, does anyone really care if it never sees the light of day?

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Listen, despite the fact that my personal needs don’t really include an iPhone, I can well understand that it’s going to be a freaking awesome product for many of you. Whether you want a so-called “smartphone,” or just a cool gadget to show your friends, it comes across as a compelling package.

At the same time, it won’t be out till June, although some rumor sites are suggesting it might arrive earlier. After all, doesn’t Apple beat its deadlines more often than it meets them? Well, that depends, I suppose, on whether the public deadline and the private deadline are one and the same, and I’m not so sure about that.

Besides, if you promise to deliver something within a given time-frame, but know you can do it twice as fast, you end up gaining a lot of goodwill.

For now, though, let’s put this cool appliance aside and not concern ourselves about the fine details or lack thereof and get back to something more compelling. You see, although it’s forgotten from time to time, Apple builds personal computers too. Sure, maybe they don’t sell near as many Macs as iPods, but they make a lot more profit on the former, so it’s not something they’re going to abandon anytime soon.

So what can I say about Macs that you haven’t read about before? Well, the design. Back when Apple first announced its plans to switch to Intel processors, I’m sure a lot of you expected brand new form factors to accompany that transition. Instead, you got Macs that looked pretty much like the models they replaced, at least from the outside. And only power users worry about what’s inside, unless it’s time to upgrade or fix something.

Indeed, some tech writers felt the same, and when Apple didn’t go there, they might have felt cheated. Or perhaps they believed that Apple really had new cases under development, but wanted to get the nuts and bolts of the Intel migration out of the way first. In addition, having a Mac look the same has the psychological advantage of demonstrating that it’s still a Mac even though there are new processors inside. It also saves a few dollars on development costs.

So now that the work is done, isn’t it time to toss out the aging designs and start anew? The question is: Where will Apple go, if anywhere? Consider the iPod. Although the iPod shuffle is daringly different from the original, the present iPod nano harkens back to the iPod mini that the first nano replaced. The full-size iPod doesn’t look altogether different from the one that debuted five years ago.

So where’s the incentive to change anything? Besides, does it really make that much of a difference? For a desktop computer, you’re looking at the screen anyway and not the Mac, unless it’s an iMac of course.

Besides, having a signature look and feel makes Apple’s products distinctive. You don’t find much of that in the PC industry as a whole. For example, an insurance salesperson dropped by my office the other day suggesting that I really needed lots and lots of life insurance. Does he know something I don’t? But I don’t want to seem morbid about such things.

In any case, to prepare his quote, he unstrapped his case, and pulled out an anonymous-looking PC laptop. I don’t recall if it was a Dell or an HP. It was one or the other, but, aside from the logo, the drab dark gray case was devoid of any distinguishing features. After all, the typical PC is a commodity product, by and large, and it doesn’t really matter who makes it. They all get their parts from the same parts bin, and everything appears to be interchangeable. Obviously, an AlienWare, a power user’s and gaming machine builder now under the auspices of Dell, has a unique look. But not too many other PC boxes qualify in that regard.

Side by side, you don’t have to look at the screen to separate the Mac from the PC, so where’s the incentive for Apple to change? Oh yes, didn’t Dell hire some more designers to spruce up the looks of their products? Well, maybe, but there’s no evidence that their PC boxes and notebooks will be that much more exciting than prior generations.

This isn’t to say that Apple has the ultimate form factors and that things can’t be changed. Consider the keyboard on the 17-inch MacBook Pro, which seems a small rowboat adrift in a large river. You wonder if there couldn’t be something to fill the open spaces, maybe some multimedia buttons, although that works against Apple’s veneer of simple elegance. Maybe a numeric keypad? Or maybe just leave well enough alone.

In fact, the prospects for major change don’t seem terribly high. The Apple TV and new AirPort Extreme base station resemble half-height Mac minis. In other words, Apple is simply adapting its new products to fit into existing design motifs.

The Mac Pro was only updated last summer, so it doesn’t seem to make sense that it would change an awful lot, and updates to the Mac notebooks and the Mac mini came more recently.

Now I suppose it’s possible that those incredibly powerful new Intel chips, due out in the second half of the year, could be installed in Macs with revolutionary designs. That might be fitting.

Or maybe not.

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A year ago, our daily bucket of junk mail had gotten way, way out of control. Hundreds of those messages polluted our various mailboxes every single day. It got so bad that it was near-impossible to check the spam captured by our Web hosts and email software for mistakes. In fact, I missed out on a small business opportunity because a message was mistakenly flagged as junk and it got lost in the shuffle. I called the client back too late to repair the damage.

No doubt you’ve had similar problems. You’re inundated with the stuff, and there’s just no time to find out where your ISP or email application goofed, but it does happen. In fact, even the best spam filters talk of 98% to 99% accuracy. That seems a pretty high average, but you have to check the spam folders anyway just to examine the mistakes and, you hope, retrain the spam filter.

Well, I got sick of it, perhaps in the way that the late Peter Finch felt battered and bruised over society’s ills in the that classic movie, “Network.” But I didn’t feel the urge to open the window and shout my frustrations to strangers. These days, they have rooms with soft white walls to handle people who behave in that fashion.

At the time, our sites and email were handled by Yahoo, but not the free version. This was the allegedly more sophisticated business email package, which promises more robust spam and virus protection. Yes, sure it does!

The first step I took was to eliminate what’s known as the “catch-all” email address. That’s the mailbox you can set up with a Web host or email host that accepts everything that’s not addressed to a specific person at your home or office. I was naive about such matters in those days, but I learned that you really don’t want to do that. You see spammers will simply inundated a domain with messages to everyone in creation, figuring a few will stick. Once I restricted the addresses to the real ones — those that had a real purpose — and cut out the catch-all addresses, I gave the spammers fewer targets.

Yes, it got better, but the next solution was to leave Yahoo and go elsewhere. First it was GoDaddy, and rather than repeat the details of my unfortunate experiences with their support people, I’ll just tell you that I joined up with DreamHost around the first of the year. Prior to that, however, I moved the company mail to Webmail.us, which was the best move of all.

The switch to GoDaddy reduced spam by a good 80% if not higher, though a lot of that might be attributed to the elimination of the catch-all addresses. Webmail has even more powerful spam and virus filters, so the situation began to get even better.

One more spam reduction technique was to eliminate all live email links on our sites. You know, the ones that have the common “mailto:&#8221; tag in your site&#8217;s HTML code. There are actually programs out there, which you&#8217;ll find over at <a title="Look for your updates here!" href="http://versiontracker.com/macosx/" target="_blank">VersionTracker, which will encrypt the address. It’s transparent to real people who click a link and open a blank email message window. But to the spammers who crawl into your site to access the code, it’s invisible. They don’t see it, and that helps eliminate spam even further.

On this site, for example, we have a Contact Us link that does all the parsing of the message in our publishing system’s database. Cool.

Indeed, the daily allotment had gotten down to maybe 40 or so messages at this point, although it would climb to nearly double that figure from time to time. Such things are not consistent, but it was a terrific improvement from where we started.

But there was one more thing. You see, up till very recently, the 17 domains we own were listed under my name and the company name, along with a real email address. That made it visible to spammers and those who engage in various types of domain fraud, where they attempt to get you to move your domain at three times the price by sending a fake bill.

We added a “privacy” package, which means that our domains show the registrar, not our address.

After a couple of more weeks, spam dropped yet again, to the point where I am now receiving an average of about 20 per day among all my accounts, give or take a few. That’s something I can live with, as it’s real easy to keep track of the occasional mistakes.

So, for now at least, I’m pleased, that is until the next onslaught, which is probably inevitable. And, no, I’m not being pessimistic.

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