Perhaps one of the most important issues for Mac users during the year ahead will be the outcome of Apple's case against Psystar.

If the court holds that Apple can't restrict the use of Mac OS X to its own hardware, that'll certainly put the cat among the pigeons. In that case, I'd suggest that we would see a substantial increase in the price of retail copies of the operating system.

And Apple might not be the only company affected. Such a decision could mean that Microsoft would no longer be able to enforce the licence condition that OEM copies of Windows can't be transferred to a new computer.

If Apple was forced to allow other hardware builders to sell computers with Mac OS X preinstalled - or even merely advertise that it could be readily installed - then it could cream off some of Apple's business.

Apple's past experiment with licensing was to its detriment, and I can't see why things would be any better in 2009 except for one thing.

Notebooks now account for a much bigger share of Apple's unit shipments than they used to, and even Windows-focussed publications have good things to say about the MacBook family.

Running Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware would be of interest to three main groups, I'd suggest.

The first is the tinkerers. They are already doing it, they wouldn't buy a Mac, and they are sufficiently few in number that Apple can afford to turn a blind eye. There's no substitution involved.

Secondly there are the buyers who want the maximum bang for the buck, and are prepared to save money on commodity hardware even if that means risking reliability. If you can buy say 30 percent more computers on the same budget, it might not matter if 10 percent were out of action at any one time. I suspect that many of these people have already migrated from (eg) Photoshop and QuarkXPress on the Mac to Photoshop and InDesign on Windows for the perceived hardware savings.

My final category is those who buy to a price. If they can buy a Dell Studio Hybrid for $US449, they won't spend $US599 on a Mac mini - and maybe they're more likely to go for a $US299 Inspiron anyway.

But if Apple pushed up the stand-alone price of Mac OS X up from $US129 to oh, $US259 (the same as Vista Home Premium), then the Dell Studio Hybrid plus Mac OS X is more expensive than the Mac mini.

If you're that price sensitive, you'll probably make do with whatever OS the hardware manufacturer bundles.

While I'm not yet convinced by assertions that Psystar's case is being bankrolled by a major PC company, we do know that Dell has previously expressed interest in selling computers running Mac OS X.

But then, Michael Dell once suggested that Apple should shut up shop and return its funds to shareholders. If you look at the companies' share prices over the 11 years since then, Dell is slightly down and Apple is up by 1500 percent. Admittedly, Apple only started to pull ahead from Dell in the second half of 2004.

Enough of all this... what else do I expect to see during 2009?

I'm with Anthony "Carry" Caruana in predicting a subnotebook or netbook from Apple, though I still have a sneaking feeling that it might turn out to be an beefed-up iPod touch rather than a slimmed-down MacBook.

(But then I predicted the Mac mini would either get a serious upgrade during 2008 or be consigned to history, and neither materialised.)

And will iWork.com take off? I have mixed feelings about this. It looks OK as far as it goes. The question is whether people just need to get feedback from others about documents, or if they need to collaboratively work on them (which calls for something more like Google Docs).

In my experience, it's mainly the latter - but then I realised a long time ago that my patterns of use are far from typical!

Happy New Year.