All right, Apple Inc. really isn’t celebrating my birthday. Besides, that was so long ago, even I’ve forgotten how old I am. But, seriously, being so close to the main event makes the results ripe for speculation.

Apple enjoys giving the press broad hints as to what their events are all about. This one, set for September 9th at 10 AM Pacific Time in San Francisco, simply says, ”Let’s Rock.”

Those two words are pregnant with meaning, and it easy to cover a reasonable set of possibilities. At its core, though, it’s clearly iPod-related, witness the telltale artwork that typifies the standard iPod promotional motif. It doesn’t take a huge stretch to consider the fact that September is the time for those annual updates to Apple’s best-selling digital music player.

Already, there have been mock-ups of possible revisions to the iPod nano, but it’s not at all clear if they are based on actual design graphics leaking from Apple or a little wishful thinking. I’m inclined to consider the latter. But the betting is that any changes to the iPod lineup will be relatively minor, since Apple has no real competition, and there’s only so far you can expand the traditional iPod before it morphs into something else entirely.

That takes us to the iPod touch, which is a genuinely fascinating product. At this point, though, other than perhaps making the case design a bit closer to the iPhone 3G, dropping the price somewhat and having a model with more Flash RAM, what sort of changes might Apple make?

Besides, there are still those tantalizing tidbits that emerged from the last quarterly session with financial analysts, where Apple’s executives talked of some major product transition and reduced profits that, in part, would be the result of aggressive pricing.

So would all that be the result of cheaper iPods? I think not. There are other possibilities that I’ll explore.

One of the more intriguing bits of speculation emerges from the fertile imagination of Daniel Eran Dilger of Roughly Drafted Magazine. In a fascinating recent column, he posited a tiny touchscreen in place of the existing trackpad on a new line of Apple notebooks. Extending the MultiTouch capabilities you now see on the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro lines, such a display would serve as a proxy for the main display, where your actual finger movements would be recognized in the same fashion as an iPhone.

You might ask why Apple doesn’t just make the entire display touch-enabled, but that would surely increase prices higher than most customers would like, even if some of those increased costs were absorbed by the company. It’s also an awkward reach from the keyboard.

But a tiny touch screen, which Daniel suggests would cost about $56 in raw materials, would cut profit margins all right, but not enough to prevent Apple from sticking with their current pricing.

In addition to the terrific press such a feature would generate, it would also separate Apple’s notebooks from the pack in a huge way. Yes, some notebooks have external LCDs, but they are designed to be similar to the second display on a typical clamshell mobile phone, where you see a miniature rendering of time, signal strength and the Caller ID when you get a phone call. It’s not the same thing.

Now I can’t tell you that Daniel nailed it. Yes, he’s got some good sources inside Apple, but I suspect this particular idea is nothing more than a great turn at common sense. It’s a logical extension of MultiTouch, and it avoids the clumsiness of a large touch screen.

And, yes, if it happens it will indeed rock!

Beyond these two product line upgrades, are there any other things Apple might reveal during this session?

My feeling is that iPhone 2.1, the one that will supposedly provide push notification and loads of bug fixes, may also make its debut. But that doesn’t have to happen. Apple could simply announce it, and say it’ll be released in a week or two.

For that matter, why assume that this is the only press presentation from Apple this month? Is it possible they might simply reserve the notebook revisions, and perhaps a reinvigorated iMac and Mac mini, for a later session, the better to focus attention on a small number of product introductions at a time?

Indeed, what’s going to happen to the Mac mini and is it a goner? I hope not, because I still think those tiny computers are great upgrades for folks who are ditching the PowerPC. Even though the most recent mini is actually less powerful than a MacBook, anyone with a G4-based Mac, except for those with tricked out dual-processor models and voluminous, speedy drives, would see a significant performance boost.

What’s more, it wouldn’t cost Apple a whole lot of money simply to upgrade the mini with the latest Intel parts. At the same time, with perhaps a speedier hard drive and the very same price, it would be a far more compelling alternative for those who want to acquire a new Mac, but find even the iMac too expensive. That’s particularly true if they already have a decent mouse, keyboard and display.

Yes, there’s still that concept of the headless iMac, the desktop that would be situated between the mini and the Mac Pro. I still believe it’s a viable product that would definitely find a substantial audience. But, as I’ve said many times already, when was the last time Apple listened to me? Or the first time for that matter?

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Most of you know that Microsoft’s Mac Office apps all originated on the Mac in the 1980s, before they were duplicated on the then-fledgling Windows platform. Now before you remind me about that old political gaffe about being in favor of something before you were against it, that should, in theory, indicate that the world’s largest software developer ought to be able to build the best Mac products on the planet.

But that is not necessarily true.

Sure, Office for the Mac has a huge market share. That may be due, in large part, to the fact that people who switched from Windows want to work with what, to them at least, is the tried and the true, and not have to seek out a new set of productivity applications. In multi-platform environments, the system admins prefer to have equivalent software for their Mac and PC users. It sure lessens the learning curve, and enhances compatibility.

After occasional stumbles, it’s also true that Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit has tried hard to infuse the appropriate Mac-like interface elements into their software. If anything, Office for the Mac is probably superior to the Windows version, even thought the latter sports extra stuff.

Unfortunately, perhaps in the drive to provide comparable products, Office for the Mac suffers from the same useless complexities of the typical Windows product. We all know, for example, about the deep-seated menus in Word that offer functions few ever heard of or perhaps will ever need. One of the big selling points of Office 2001, the last Classic version, and Office 2008, the first Universal version, was discoverability. That means making the hidden features more accessible, so you can take advantage of the sheer power of these applications.

However, you sometimes wonder when enough is enough. Apple, in contrast, is perennially spare with its features, and only adds them over time, in a gradual fashion. In fact there are still some Classic Mac OS capabilities that have yet to find their way into Mac OS X. It may well be that they’ll never appear, or that Apple will simply find a different — hopefully better — way of doing things.

Unlike Microsoft, with its committee-based approach, Apple doesn’t appear to build software based on bullet points of features.

One blatant example of Microsoft’s overkill is Entourage 2008, which may be the least changed component of Office 2008. Now I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the program over the years. I like its auto-correct feature when writing email, but I then encounter one of its quirks, and, as the frustration grows, I return to Apple Mail.

In large part, Entourage is descended from Microsoft’s original Mac email application, Outlook Express. That, in turn, contained some of the concepts that originally appeared in Claris Emailer before that application was folded. Indeed, many of the members of the original Emailer programming team went to Microsoft to work on Outlook Express.

To be sure, if you take Outlook Express for the Mac and learn it fully, you’ll understand much of the layout of Entourage. Of course, you have to fold in the calendar and task management feature.

I returned to Entourage a few days ago, when I encountered some difficulties with IMAP email handling in Mail. I contacted the support team at HostGator to find out why I was getting such weird prompts as “You exceeded mail quota” when Mail tried to parse junk mail or when I attempted to move a message from one IMAP folder to another.

Before you ask, my actual email storage quota, which I can configure myself since we lease the entire Web server, is twice what we actually use. The problem that confounded HostGator’s admins was that the message was random, and not always repeated. They responded that they felt Entourage had superior IMAP handling, so I gave it a try. Alas, the error messages still appeared, but they were more obscure, such as “Unable to add message to IMAP mailbox.” Yes, that’s Microsoft for you.

As I navigated through Entourage’s IMAP account settings, I found several times as many as Apple offers, with little, if any, explanation as to what they did and why I’d use them. Indeed, when HostGator’s admins suggested some specific settings, I found that they were not necessarily the defaults, as opposed to Mail, where the proper settings are usually configured automatically if you use the Setup Assistant. Go figure.

Finally, the source of the email setting was traced to a problematic default quota configuration on the server, which was fixed using a function in the Web Host Manager configuration panel. I decided to stick with Entourage for a while to see if really represented a superior solution. Alas, I encountered another long-term problem with the application, the failure to update email messages despite the correct scheduling. In theory, it should check for new messages at the repeating interval you select. In practice, sometimes you have to click on the Inbox of an account for it to update. No amount of rejiggering preferences seems to eliminate the problem, which is random.

Since this Entourage quirk is something I have encountered with every single version, with different email servers, I decided to choose simplicity over needless complexity and unreliability. I’m back to Mail again, and I’m so glad I don’t need to access a MIcrosoft Exchange server, where I would not be able to consider such a move.

And, don’t get me started about the weird errors Keychain Access reports when you run Keychain First Aid after setting up Entourage.

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