When Steve Jobs said diddley about the Mac at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference some people started writing obits for the widget.

It had the Motley Fool, for instance, speculating about the iPhone's newfangled iOS and the Mac's OS X eventually merging into a new operating system built to run on an Apple proprietary A4 chip or its descendents and designed for highly interactive open web standards like WebKit, JavaScript and HTML 5.

Developers, it said, would be ready to adopt it because "it'll already have played host to hundreds of thousands of software apps."

The financial blog went on the say that if that sounds scary, it should.

"This is a nightmare scenario for Hewlett-Packard and everyone else in the device and PC business, but for Google and Microsoft most of all. Why? A tightly integrated Apple ecosystem would give users the ability to pull from apps to perform any task, on any iDevice, and in any location. No other supplier would be able to match that degree of pervasiveness: HP and Dell have the hardware but not the software; Microsoft and Google have the software but lack the hardware; Research in Motion has some of the hardware but nowhere near the software. Only Nokia has a comparable vision, with smartphone and netbooks powered by its popular Symbian operating system."

Of course that was written before Nokia admitted last week that it was bleeding on the carpet because of Apple and that it won't make as much money off its phones this quarter or any quarter this year, for that matter.

Anyway, Jobs read some of those early obits and e-mailed one of the authors a "just you wait and see" and on Tuesday Apple quietly came out with a redesigned $699-$999 Mac mini with up to twice the graphics performance, a new HDMI port and a new SD card slot in a compact aluminum enclosure.

It'll run Mac OS X, iLife or Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server.

Of course, the mini isn't the "most affordable Mac ever" that it was five years ago. In fact, it's reportedly hardly ever used as a desktop anymore but is popular as a media server to deliver music and video to home entertainment systems.

The latest improvements let users transfer photos and video from digital cameras and connects the dingus easier to an HDTV. It's also more expensive than it's ever been.

On the other hand, a record 600,000 people tried to pre-order Apple's new iPhone Tuesday, many of them near the end of their two-year contract and eligible for a discount. It was way more than enough to crash the rickety AT&T provisioning system and along with it Apple's own system, reveal identities and screw things up in general after the iPad security lapse of a few days before.

The iPhone 4 officially goes on sales June 24; pre-orders are completely sold out; figure the push-back date is sometime in mid-July or beyond.

Morgan Stanley thinks the number of iPhone users could pass 100 million next year.

Apple's market cap is now $247 billion to Microsoft's $231 billion outstripped only by Exxon's $294 billion.

Maybe the Fool's not such a fool.