I have heard - though not confirmed - that another three Apple resellers in Melbourne have either closed or are about to close.

As more Apple Stores open around the country, that trend is likely to continue. And whether or not Apple has a physical presence in a particular area, people seem to be getting increasingly comfortable with the idea of buying even relatively expensive products online.

The writing has been on the wall for Apple resellers for some time. I've personally known just one owner of such a business, and he quit several years ago in the face of extremely thin margins and Apple's move into retail.

It seems to me that part of the problem is that the 'high touch' approach used in Apple Stores - lots of machines on display for people to try, and staffing levels that appear to be unmatched by any other retailer - is great for shoppers but very expensive for anyone else to duplicate.

But it does work. I walked past a couple of Apple Stores while travelling recently, and the customer density was several times that of any other stores in the same shopping centres. It's not surprising that Apple has the highest revenue per square foot in the US (and possibly the world).

[Apologies for the intermittent appearance of Hydrapinion:Mac recently, which was due to the travel mentioned above.]

Apple likes to keep its cards close to its chest, but information about new products very often leaks out sooner than the company would like.

With the announcement of OS X 10.9 expected at WWDC next month, it's not surprising that there has been a round of rumours about what we can look forward to in the next iteration of the Mac's operating system.

All of the rumours I've seen match those published recently by 9to5Mac. So maybe everyone's relying on that report whether or not they chose to give credit where it is due, one set of sources (and 9to5Mac did claim "sources" rather than "source") has been shopping the same information to multiple outlets, or multiple informants have been spilling the beans to different outlets. Call me cynical, but my money's on the former.

So what's the goss?

• Changes to the Finder, bringing features such as browser-style tabbed windows and more easily used tagging (as seen in TotalFinder and Path Finder). According to some commentators, there are bugs that have been lurking in the Finder for years that should be given higher priority than new features, but we'll see what emerges.

• Speed improvements for Safari. Can't argue with that.

• Better multi-monitor support, especially regarding full-screen apps and Spaces. Some users (everyone that uses more than one screen?) have been crying out for improvements in this area, so I see it as a hygiene factor rather than an improvement. That is, it should stop people complaining rather than actually making them happy.

• The possible addition iOS-style multitasking features including 'fast app switching' and pausing of background apps. I suppose there are some situations - such as Macs with what is now considered to be a minimal amount of RAM - where it might be useful to automatically quit apps that are sitting idle. Many of us have become used to the idea of an application automatically re-opening its windows after a quit and reopen, so the foundations are already there. (If you're using Lion or Mountain Lion, have you ever noticed applications quitting when they have no open documents and you bring a different application to the front?) It might be beneficial in situations where someone uses fast user switching and the original user has left several applications open - this seems a recipe for very slow operation. And app pausing sounds a lot like App Tamer, about which I've heard good things.

• Siri may or may not put in an appearance. I'm still not really convinced that I want to talk to my computer, even though I've been using voice recognition products on and off (more off than on!) since the early 80s (third abstract on the page). I generally prefer a quiet working environment...

My iMac's hard drive failed the other day. I rarely shut down the computer, but some electrical work was about to be carried out on the premises so I turned all the equipment off. When power was restored, everything worked except my iMac, which showed the folder-with-a-question-mark icon.

Once I'd determined the drive was at fault - I started up from an external drive, ran Disk Utility and found the internal drive wasn't visible - I took it along to a local repairer.

The bad news was that they didn't keep spare drives in stock, so there was no chance of a 'while you wait' repair. But less than 24 hours later I got a call to say the iMac was ready for collection.

Restoring from my Time Machine backup was quicker than expected, and I was soon back at work. The only problem was that Microsoft Office noticed that something out of the ordinary had occurred, and insisted that I re-entered the licence key.

Note to self (and anyone else that's listening!): collect all licence keys into one place, store a copy on each computer, and print the list for good measure.

My main beef is that if this failure had occurred with any of my previous Macs or any of the Windows PCs I've owned, I would have replaced the drive myself - and have done so on more than one occasion. Call me chicken if you must, but the risk of damage when pulling off the iMac's glass front seemed too great, and I doubted my ability to keep the display and glass dust and lint-free during reassembly. The current iMacs are even harder to open and reassemble as the glass is attached to to the case with foam adhesive.

The cost of installation was the same as the price of the 2TB drive (a significant upgrade to the original 500GB unit for a fairly small premium), but at least I don't have to look at a hair or a fingerprint trapped between the glass and the LCD panel.

It's a far cry from the days when Apple trumpeted ease of internal access with the 'outrigger' case as used by my old 7500, and a return to the situation with the earliest Macs, which required unusual tools to open the case.

I try not to rant too often, but something that gets up my goat (was that Kath, Kim or both?) are blog posts with headlines that deliberately obscure the subject of the article. (If you don't care about that, skip down to the end of the post where I deal with a Safari-related matter.)

If I'm writing about the iMac, I'll use the word 'iMac' in the headline. When Alex writes about BlackBerry, he puts 'BlackBerry' in the headline. And so on.

But there is a cluster of Mac blogs where the writers have for some reason adopted the practice of running headlines of unusual length without actually telling the potential reader what they're talking about.

Maybe it's just me - it often is! - but techniques like this have the flavour of an attempt to trick readers into visiting pages they otherwise wouldn't. And I suspect it doesn't really help bring in traffic, as these articles don't seem to fare very well in Google search results.

My other objection is that they also Use A Capital Letter At The Start Of Every Word In The Headline. It is a legitimate style, but coupled with the unusual length of the headlines it just looks wrong to me. And I simply prefer headlines in sentence case.

Rant over.

On a separate matter, I'll be interested to see how the WebKit fork ("Does WebKit face a troubled future now that Google is gone?") plays out. So far, the commonality between Safari and Chrome is, I'd imagine, one of the reasons why we see far fewer web pages that are incompatible with Safari than we used to.

But unless web developers work hard to accommodate any differences that start to creep in between the two implementations we could see a return to the bad old days. Well, it probably won't be as bad as it was when many developers coded for Internet Explorer and could justify ignoring every other browser because of their minute market share, but I do see clouds on the horizon.

Just as we were settling in with OS X 10.8.3, the first beta release of 10.8.4 has been released to developers.

There's no sign of anything exciting: testers have been asked to focus on the graphics drivers, Safari and Wi-Fi.

Mind you, it's only not exciting to me because I haven't encountered any Wi-Fi problems with 10.8.3. Those who have - and there are reports that on some Macs Wi-Fi has been decidedly iffy since the installation of 10.8.0, with no improvement seen with any of the subsequent updates - are probably hoping that this will be The One.