So Apple’s cards have been on the table for a long time now. Mobile gear and traditional personal computers are two different breeds, and they are not meant to become one. At least not now. This is very different from what Microsoft is trying to do with tablets, witness the Surface, which has, so far, been a pitiful failure. With the Surface, you have two near-identical form factors, the RT version and the Pro version. The former uses the same ARM processors found in tablets, whereas the Pro version sticks with Intel Inside.

The problem arises when you try to use traditional Windows software on the RT brand. You can’t, and that’s been a source of endless confusion for customers who see two operating systems meant to look the same, but which are utterly incompatible. Microsoft’s focus has been on making PC note-books into convertibles. They have touchscreens that you use your fingers or a stylus to manipulate, along with the traditional keyboard and trackpad. Microsoft doesn’t consider that a normal note-book orientation can be a fatiguing exercise if you choose to use the touchscreen.

Certainly, many ads for the Surface tablets reveal a traditional note-book motif, as a result of the physical keyboard cover and the kickstand.

Apple’s approach focuses on two different form factors that aren’t meant to become hybrids, that you can’t mix a toaster oven with a refrigerator, and thus the operating systems must be different. Although iOS-inspired apps and a handful of interface conventions have shown up in recent versions of OS X, it’s still a Mac through and through. This is Apple’s game plan, although the day may come when the traditional personal computer is no longer needed by most people.

But what about the processor?

Apple has already successfully navigated through two major processor transitions without causing a whole lot of pain for customers and developers. The mid-1990s switchover from 68K to PowerPC did mean that developers had to rebuild apps, but Apple delivered an emulation layer to keep most of your older apps running, although performance was a little tepid till PowerPC gear became fast enough. The 2006 switchover to Intel also required emulation, via an app known as Rosetta. Once again, developers had to rebuild their stuff to be compatible with Intel, and some apps never made the transition. When Rosetta was vanquished beginning with OS X Lion, Mac users either had to stick with its predecessor, Snow Leopard, or get their apps updated.

So far, Intel has worked great on Macs, but Apple is into building custom chips for iPhones and iPads, based on ARM reference designs. Beginning with the A7, featured on the iPhone 5s, iPad Air, and the forthcoming second generation iPad mini, Apple boasted a 64-bit desktop class processor. But how close does it come to a traditional Intel Haswell chip? It has been suggested that the A7 is equivalent to a Mac of several years ago. Not bad, but putting one inside, say, a MacBook Air, would not yield a very snappy user experience, but it would surely boast great battery life.

But that’s today. The A7 is roughly twice as fast as the A6, and it all happened in a single year. Compare that to the current Intel chips, which are only a tad faster than their 2012 predecessors. The real improvements come in battery life and graphics. Intel has finally delivered an integrated graphics solution that comes close to that of some midrange discrete chips.

However, with the larger emphasis on power efficiency, without major performance improvements on the latest Intel processor refreshes, is it possible for Apple to build an ARM-derived chip that would match a traditional midrange Intel mobile chip? I don’t want to call this a cop-out, but I’m not going to go that far, except to suggest that it could possibly happen in the next few years. At what point does Apple consider an ARM switch, so the same processor family can be used across the board? Such a move would give Apple even greater control over the Mac’s destiny with custom-built chips.

Unfortunately, the tech pundits arguing in favor of such a move seem to forget the developer dilemma. Many Mac apps aren’t fully compliant with Lion, particularly the full-screen and auto save features. Now imagine having to go one step further, rebuild an app to talk to ARM. It may not be so hard if Apple makes the conversion tasks easy in Xcode. But just clicking a button is a fraction of the job. There are all sorts of code optimizations that will be required, and what about “fat” apps that work on both ARM and Intel?

And what about apps that are still Intel savvy? Does Apple build a new Rosetta-style translation utility, or do they embed some sort of chip-based conversation feature, to reduce the performance loss as much as possible? Now that Apple has control of chip development, I suppose most anything is possible.

So do I think it’ll happen? Well, even if Apple went all or mostly ARM on Macs, it wouldn’t necessarily result in lost business for Intel. According to published reports, Intel is going to start building ARM chips, so they could still keep Apple’s business if the need arises. Apple clearly wants to ditch Samsung as much as possible, so another assembly partner would be a good thing.

Or maybe not. But if you can believe a certain article in a large national newspaper, the iOS 7 upgrade has been an unmitigated disaster. Bugs and more bugs, and one survey concluded it was even worse than Windows Vista. On the other hand, isn’t Windows 8 worse than Vista? After all, customers are avoiding it like the plague.

Now I haven’t read a retraction from the paper in question, although there ought to be. You see, that alleged survey was released by a consulting company that worked for the likes of Google and Samsung, but not Apple. The propriety of depending on such a biased source for a key story eludes me, but the identity of the source was, at the very least, disclosed in the article, so it’s faults were front and center, and you quickly realized what was really going on if you did some checking.

On the other hand, the mainstream media isn’t very tech savvy. For how else would the likes of Rob Enderle, a notorious alleged industry analyst whose credentials list him as being paid by Apple’s rivals, be allowed to comment on our favorite fruit company? At least mention the reasons why he’d be biased.

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Let me put my cards on the table, without saying too much beyond the obvious. When Gmail began in 2004 as a public beta, where you had to be invited to sign up, I decided to give it a try. Now the same was true with Hotmail, AOL and other services over the years. I always wanted to get in early and grab the best names, and I was mostly successful.

However, my uses for Gmail were pretty basic. I simply wanted to send and receive email without any red tape. When Google added IMAP support, it made it possible to use a regular email client, such as Apple Mail, without having to contend with the busy online interface and the targeted ads. Indeed, I seldom run any Webmail, unless I’m using someone else’s computer.

Even when Gmail exited the beta stage, there were loads of organizational and feature options, some beta, some release, which made it endlessly confusing. While power users may have cherished the features, most people didn’t need them.

One particularly irksome programming decision was to organize mail in a single category, All Mail, and use flags to separate messages that you wanted to put in other categories. In normal email systems, you’d deposit messages in a special folder. With Gmail, applying a flag or label simulates a folder, which means you can take a message and have it spill into multiple categories. You may compare this to the OS X Mavericks Finder, where you can use the new tagging feature to organize your stuff when a simple folder isn’t sufficient.

Now when Gmail began to support IMAP, which is when I began to use it more extensively, they had to force their unique interface to match the tried and true. So folders would be used to separate flagged messages, to make everything appear the same as other email systems.

I don’t want to confuse you any further. Let me just tell you that Gmail worked all right for the most part in Mail, except for being unable to undo a mistakenly deleted message, as you can with most other email systems. Instead, you go to the Trash, although, technically, Gmail doesn’t normally delete messages unless you specify that option.

In any case, there have been complaints that Mavericks Mail is not as Gmail friendly as earlier OS X versions. In recent days, I’ve read some articles from Gmail users who have opted to take their business elsewhere. I even saw one on how to switch from Gmail to Outlook. No, not the Outlook email client from Microsoft, but the Outlook.com free mail service that replaces Hotmail.

Now I never paid much attention to Hotmail/Outlook.com until Microsoft added IMAP and ActiveSync support. That’s when things changed. The new online interface is predictably minimalist, echoing the Metro or Modern UI look and feel that has polluted Windows 8. But it’s not so bad online. Targeted ads are presented on the right pane, although a $20 annual payment will dispatch them for good.

I oped to add my Outlook.com account to Mail. Apple has clearly worked with Microsoft, as the setup was nearly automatic.  On iOS7, you merely have to give your username and password, and it’ll be set up as an Exchange-style account, complete with genuine push email. That means that, when a message arrives, it’s dispatched to your iPhone or iPad likety split.

Typical of Microsoft’s minimalist approach to consumer services, there are no tricks about Outlook.com email. You have a straightforward online interface, so configuring it for your Mac, PC, iOS or Android device is a snap relatively speaking. Moving from Gmail is fairly simple. First set a forward from your Gmail account to your Outlook.com account, and you can also manually copy your messages from Gmail’s IMAP folders to the corresponding folders in your Outlook.com account; that is, if you want everything in the same place. Outlook.com even has a send-only feature, where you can actually send your messages through your Gmail account, simply by entering your username and password. Gmail’s two-factor authentication feature has to be switched off, though.

In terms of features, you can set up a multi-gigabyte account at Outlook.com, although Microsoft is a bit vague as to total capacity. I’ve heard 5GB and 10GB, and another version where your mailbox expands as needed, until it stops, after which you have to clean out older messages. Go figure.

Update: Although not widely advertised, it appears that Yahoo! Mail does have IMAP support, apparently in the business version. However, the documentation I’ve seen seems to confuse IMAP with ActiveSync. But since I only check my Yahoo! account on a rare occasion, it really doesn’t matter.

In any case, after nine years with Gmail, I’ve moved over, partly as a test, strictly for my second-level email. The rest still comes through my domains, as before. You also have to wonder whether you can depend on a free email service, and whether Microsoft will just up and give it up some day, or decide to charge you extra for IMAP support and other features. When you use an email client, you’re not seeing the ads, but maybe Microsoft wants you to feel warm and fuzzy about the products, and I can see where that’s a plus.

But I’m especially intrigued by the ability to send out email through another service from Microsoft’s interface. Imagine doing that with Gmail. Ah, the unkindest cut of all!

So OS X Mavericks has been out for one week, so you must expect that the sky must be falling. After all, every time a new version of OS X appears, there are early-release bugs that potentially cause havoc. Or at least that’s what some might believe, although only a few releases came with show stoppers.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t scattered complaints about Mavericks. They don’t seem consistent, so I hear of issues with scanners and, closer to home, Mail. Now one of the key issues appears to involve the faulty handling of Gmail accounts, which isn’t something that bothers me very much. As I’ve said before, I use Gmail as a backup account and to receive messages from or about our Web server. Nothing that Mail does hurts that process.

On the other hand, Mail is broken in one key way, the same way it has always been broken, and that’s the lack of intelligent management of the basic IMAP email folders. Now without going into the ins and outs, I use IMAP because it stores my messages on the server, and thus can be shared and synced across all platforms. Whether I have an Android or iOS smartphone, a Mac, a PC — you get the picture — I don’t have to worry about keeping tabs on all of incoming and outgoing messages, plus all the folders I’ve created in which to store messages for various needs.

Well, in order for the sync process to work, your email client needs to map the core four folders with the ones on the mail server. You obviously want your Sent messages to be stored, and possibly Drafts. But not so much Junk. But if you dispatch a message to Trash, you’d like to know that message has been marked for deletion on all your computing devices, right?

Unfortunately, Mail is brain-dead about handling such matters. Yes, an Inbox is an Inbox, but, aside from iCloud, you would probably have to manually assign the rest of these folders. To do that, you select the folder (say Sent), choose Use This Mailbox For… from the Mailbox menu, and choose Sent. Unfortunately, junk mail isn’t constantly labeled. It may be called Bulk, Junk, or Spam. Our email provider has a subfolder called Hard Spam for the really nasty stuff.

Sent? Well maybe it’s Sent Messages.

Regardless, you’d think that Mail would be smart enough to sort through this and automatically map the correct folders, perhaps with the option of allowing you to select a different folder if the wrong folder is sleected. By forcing you to perform this critical organizational step manually, many Mac users end up not syncing their messages across platforms. Each gadget may have a different Sent folder, for example, depending on what you wrote and where you wrote it, meaning that you might need to check a message you sent to someone, only it’s not on your iPhone, because it was left on your Mac.

And, yes, the same situation more or less exists with Mail for iOS, though it’s tends to get it right on occasion.

Now, Microsoft Outlook for the Mac, which is otherwise often unusable, does have a better chance of mapping IMAP folders correctly. Certainly Apple wants things to just work, so I wonder why this glitch has never been fixed, or am I the only one who cares?

There is one other issue with Mail for Mavericks that bothers me, beyond occasionally sluggish performance, and that’s the inability to correctly flag the number of unread messages. The numbers may be correct sometimes, but I’ve often seen an undercount, or no count at all from an account in which there are unread messages. That’s the sort of bug that probably wouldn’t get high priority in the rush to complete an OS release, but I would hope that there will be a 10.9.1 update soon that will fix the issue.

One thing about Mavericks, and that is that its ability to improve performance and battery life appears to be adaptive. As you continue to use your apps, things will get better. That may explain why some people report little or no impact to battery life, whereas others claim up to a 50% improvement. This is the sort of thing Apple might have explained in a support document, but a few days can make a difference.

Now as to that “troubled” iOS 7 release, the recent 7.0.3 update did take care of the so-called nausea or motion sickness issue caused by its penchant for special effects. The Reduce Motion option under Accessibility now not only shuts down the parallax effect, but seriously reduces zooming throughout the OS. So you won’t need any more Dramamine.

Unfortunately, I’ve not had a good experience with the newly-supported iCloud Keychain on my iPhone 5s. When I have a service that has several logins for different accounts, such as a Webmail system, it often puts in the wrong username and password, and when I simply try to delete the incorrect entry, text response is absolutely glacial, with long seconds passing between the appearance of each letter. So I’ve turned it off for now. But iCloud Keychain continues to work just fine on my Mac. So maybe we need a 7.0.4 fixer-upper to set things right.