So the cultural meme has it that Apple products are notoriously overpriced, and you can do far better if you go elsewhere. That scene has played itself out for years, and even though Apple remains extremely profitable, the demands for cheaper prices just won’t stop.

At the same time industry analysts state that Apple must make things cheaper, they also demand that there be high profits. This contradiction manifests itself with other companies selling lots of stuff for little profit, but some of them, such as Amazon, remain Wall Street darlings. Amazon continues, year after year, to show a slight profit or a slight loss. Maybe some day profits will be more consistent and higher, but probably not in this century.

Now most of you know that the vast majority of revenue Apple earns comes from selling hardware, not from software. Compare that to Microsoft, which, after losing lots of money on the Xbox gaming console, is making some profits from the product, and is making none from the Surface tablet. Microsoft’s revenue mostly comes from Windows and Office.

For better or worse, Apple’s OS X and the iWork office suite are compared to the Microsoft equivalents. Microsoft desperately wants to get into Apple’s game by selling hardware. So what does Apple do in response? Well, OS X Mavericks was released on Tuesday, and it’s free. After four years, the long-awaited iWork upgrade was released, and it’s free to people buying new Macs or who already have a copy of an older version; well, at least iWork 09, which is what I had before the free upgrade appeared in the App Store.

This move comes at a time when the PC industry remains under serious pressure. Just keeping even with the previous year’s sales is difficult, and many PC makers are seeing reduced sales. Apple isn’t immune from industry trends, and it’s expected that sales for the September quarter will be flat or slightly depressed. The age of the PC is ending as more and more people rely on tablets and smartphones to perform many computing functions.

Microsoft understands the problem, but can’t quite figure out a solution. To them, the Surface tablet, which essentially merges a tablet with a note-book computer, is the correct response. The market doesn’t agree. One Microsoft executive has, predictably dismissed iWork as “watered down,” but it’s clear the company was stung by Apple’s decision.

By making Mavericks, iWork and iLife free, Apple has made it easy for any recent Mac user to get with the program and stay up to date, assuming incompatible apps leave them with an older OS. Within the first 24 hours of release, one published report claims some 7% of the Mac user base upgraded. More and more Mavericks-savvy apps are arriving, so it makes sense.

Meantime Mavericks may look mostly the same as its predecessor, OS X Mountain Lion, but Apple has made some smart moves to make it more efficient. An Ars Technica story reported that battery life had increased up to 30% according to one benchmark. Apple boasts up to a one hour improvement on a 2013 MacBook Air. By using memory compression — reminiscent of RAM Doubler, a 1990’s Mac utility — Apple claims that a 4GB Mac can get 6GB of performance. Memory chip suppliers should take notice.

My close encounters with Mavericks have been mostly trouble free. I have run into some very small issues with a few apps, but they will no doubt be fixed before long. I have not checked whether battery life has improved any on my 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro, but I do notice that system load seems lower on a late 2009 iMac. Performance is as good as it’s ever been.

When you factor in the Finder tabs, improved multiple monitor support, and all the other goodies, Mavericks is a terrific and full-featured upgrade. And it’s free besides, just as I have been predicting in recent months.

I also gave the new iWork a brief run. I use Pages frequently, and I’m pleased to report that much of the sluggishness of the previous version is gone. Launches are near instantaneous, and documents also load quickly. This is a promising upgrade, particularly if it remains decently compatible with Microsoft Office. Microsoft has to be seriously concerned, since the iOS version of Office is still missing in action, as is news of the next version of Office for the Mac. They wait too long, the market may vanish except for the business world.

Now some tech pundits seem to believe that Apple is doing something brand new by making Mavericks free. Not so. Those of you who remember the early years of the Mac know full well that OS upgrades were not only free to download, but were freely and legally copied by anyone with disk media at hand. But it’s a smart move nonetheless. It should have happened a long time ago.

As for Microsoft, it’s not as if Windows or Office can be made free unless, by some miracle, hardware sales suddenly take over. But don’t expect that to happen in our lifetimes. To add insult to injury, Apple also cut the price of the new MacBook Pros with Retina display by $200. Yes, they are still not cheap, but are far more competitive against the competition. May sales soar.

Sometimes the Night Owl makes a prediction and even gets it right. So when I suggested that Apple would make Mavericks free in order to reach as many potential Mac users as possible, and stick it to Microsoft for charging up to $199 for Windows 8 upgrades, I bet some of you didn’t believe me. Well, free also appears to be the watchword when it comes to Apple’s newest apps.

So not only is Mavericks free, but so are the new versions of iWork and iLife, though you have to buy a new Mac or a new iPhone or iPad to get them without paying $19.99 for each app. More important, by bundling a free office suite with a new Mac or Apple mobile gadget, Apple provides a nearly complete solution for most new Mac users, who may not have to buy very much software to be productive.

This maneuver also strikes at the heart of Microsoft, which wants to change you for most anything you get from them, although it’s true that Office does come with a Surface tablet. Not that many people care.

Predictably, there were refreshed versions of the MacBook Pro with Retina display. The 13-inch model becomes thinner and lighter, weighing in at 3.46 pounds. The other changes are mostly predictable. Apple adds the Intel Haswell chip, Iris integrated graphics, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and a pair of Thunderbolt 2 ports. Battery life is said to be up to nine hours.

But one of the best reasons to buy the new 13-inch model is that the price is reduced by $200 to $1,299. That’s just $100 more than the remaining legacy 13-inch MacBook Pro with a fixed hard drive, optical drive, and standard display. The 15-inch standard MacBook is gone except for the closeout bins.

The 15-inch Retina display model gets a similar treatment as far as new parts are concerned, but retains the existing form factor. The starting price is also reduced by $200, at $1,999. Both models are shipping today.

But if you were waiting for the new generation Mac Pro, prepare to wait till December. Also be prepared to pay a lot more for this tubular workstation. The very basic model is $500 more than previously, listing for $2,999 with 12GB of RAM, Dual AMD FirePro D300 graphics with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM each, and a 3.7GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon E5 processor. For another $1,000 you get a 3.5GHz 6-core version of the chip with 16GB of RAM, and the FirePro D500 chips with 3GB VRAM each. Both are limited to 256GB PCie-based flash storage, but you can get up to 1TB if you’re willing to pay a bundle. I expect a fully equipped Mac Pro will go out the door for somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000 with 64GB of expensive 1866MHz DDR3 EEC memory, and the top-of-the-line processors.

I don’t expect a Mac Pro to be a best seller, but it ought to have appeal to the professional users who cherish such a beast, and need to perform such chores as 3D rendering and video editing.

So far, so good, and nothing terribly surprising other than the more aggressive MacBook Pro with Retina display pricing. But everyone was waiting for new iPads, and Apple pretty much met expectations. I say pretty much, as you’ll see in a moment.

So the thinner, lighter 9.7-inch iPad, dubbed iPad Air, becomes a larger twin brother to the iPad mini. The side bezel is 40% thinner and total volume of the tablet is 25% less than its predecessor. It weighs just one pound, as opposed to 1.4 pounds for the previous model. Apple claims the iPad Air is the lightest full-sized tablet ever produced.

As with the iPhone 5s, the iPad Air sports a 64-bit A7 processor with M7 motion coprocessor, but no Touch ID fingerprint sensor. The other spec improvements are relatively minor. It’s all about size and performance, and pricing is the same, starting at $499. As with all other iOS gear, memory upgrades remain overpriced, at $100 increments for each jump in storage capacity.

And, as predicted, the iPad mini will have a Retina display, but it won’t come cheap. Compared to $329 for the original, the new model is $399, a $70 increase, and that might be off-putting for some customers who will cite the far cheaper Android tablets in comparison. As with its big brother, the iPad mini gets the A7 and M7 chips and modest spec improvements otherwise.

If the new price is a bit out of line for you, Apple is offering the original iPad mini for $299. The aging iPad 2 also remains in the lineup at $399. The new models go on sale in November, and it appears the iPac mini with Retina display will be constrained at launch, since it won’t be available until later in the month.

Predictably, Wall Street wasn’t overly impressed, with the stock price dropping somewhat during the day. All in all, the media presentation was slick, and filled with information, demos and videos advertising the new gear. I watched the event carefully, but it didn’t seem to have the same level of excitement as previous Apple events.

Nothing was said about a new Apple TV, or any other product. But it may well be that, if the Apple TV is refreshed, it’ll be a minor upgrade in the scheme of things and will be launched with nothing more than a press release. The 2012 Mac mini also remains in the lineup, though I suppose it might also get a Haswell implant before long.

However, Apple does look good for the holiday season, even though nothing spectacular occurred during the media event.

So I was listening to Sirius XM’s broadcast of CNN the other day while driving in my car, when I heard yet another report on the troubled HealthCare.gov site, which is used for people to sign up under the U.S.A.’s Affordable Care Act. That’s what the political pundits call Obamacare.

Without getting into the political by-play over this massive revision of the health care system in this country, let’s limit the discussion to a site that simply doesn’t work. No ifs, ands, or buts, and President Obama has admitted as much, while promising fixes. Whether those fixes come soon enough, and are done correctly, is another issue beyond the scope of this column.

What really concerned me was the almost mindless fashion in which CNN’s reporters attempted to deal with how Silicon Valley might fix the site. So with all the highly sophisticated portals out there, such as Google, Face-book, or even Apple’s iCloud, where did they go? Why to Matt Mullenweg’s Automattic.

Did I say Automattic?

Well, in case you don’t know, Matt Mullenweg is the inventor of WordPress, the world’s largest blogging platform, and Automattic is the company established to manage that property, plus a number of other services, such as Akismet, which handles comment spam, and Gravatar, a site that manages your online avatars.

If you’ve ever tried WordPress, you know that it’s open source and free. Yes, you may pay to set up a site hosting WordPress, but millions simply use the free blogging portal at wordpress.com. Indeed, one in five sites are built with WordPress, so maybe CNN assumed that would be an ideal source for advice on how to fix the health care site. They also compared the $30 million in venture capital received by Automattic over the years to the hundreds of millions of dollars it took to build the failed health care site.

Now someone who doesn’t really understand technology might find this an apt comparison, a prime example of government waste. But it’s not. For one thing, WordPress is, at its heart, a lightweight blogging platform. There are plugins that add limited commerce and content management features, but they are still relatively easy to set up and use.

The health care site is a highly complex commerce site that is designed, at its core, to help you buy a health insurance policy. That may seem simple enough, but the site also has to interact with other sites, government and private, to make the process work. So there must be an active connection with the IRS and Social Security sites, for example, and the individual health marketplaces or exchanges in the some three dozen states that didn’t build their own. That’s hard enough, but once you actually submit an application, the data has to be sent to your chosen insurance carrier, with whom you complete the transaction.

Each of these services has their own organization and setup, and the sites are coded differently. Just communicating successfully would probably be as close to a miracle as you can get. Add to that the process of setting up, verifying and managing an account, and you can see where problems can easily arise even if everyone got involved with good intentions and did their jobs properly. After all, the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which manages the Obamacare site, cannot change the programming of all the other sites with which they communicate and exchange data. They have to cope.

So the comparison between Automattic and HealthCare.gov is not just inappropriate. It’s totally wrong. They are designed to handle totally different functions. More to the point, government-run sites are often designed by large firms that get the contracts by submitting the lowest bid. Having the best idea may not win out, if the company who presents the proposal charges a lot more money. It’s not the same thing as choosing an iPhone over a cheap smartphone from another company.

What they ended up with was a monstrosity that wouldn’t have survived a load test, or even a traditional beta test to evaluate how well it worked. The design is also backwards if you apply even basic logic to the setup.When the site first debuted, you couldn’t simply check out insurance plans and rates in your locality until you actually applied for coverage. Talk about walking backwards. However, the site was revised just this week to allow you to actually browse the offerings before signing up.

I would like to think that the performance problems with the Obamacare site will be fixed in a few weeks. I also understand that applications can be taken by phone or in person for those who just don’t want to confront a badly designed site. I would also hope that the people in charge of the department that created this godawful site will be given their walking papers once the fixes are in place, but don’t bet on it. And as I said, a poorly designed site has little to do with whether the underlying service has any value.

It’s also true that, even the properly coded sites have problems. I’m writing this just hours after a major Face-book failure, and there have been notable failures at sites run by Amazon, Microsoft and, of course, Apple. Yes, the health care site had more visitors than the developers anticipated, but that’s no excuse for poor design.

As for CNN, their inability to pick the right Silicon Valley company for advice is all-too-typical of mainstream journalists. They really ought to have people on staff who do understand how to cover such a story. The eternal quest for ratings, however, means that anchors and reporters are hired because of their appearance, performing ability, and the ability to get ratings, rather than their actual knowledge on how to do their jobs.

I suppose I could make correcting false or particularly ignorant stories about Apple a full-time job, and I’d still have to work overtime. So I just do it when I think it’s most appropriate. Between Daniel Eran Dilger at AppleInsider, and Macworld’s Macalope, the job is already getting done quite nicely thank you. But that doesn’t keep me from jumping in the fray when the need arises.

So I read a particularly dumb post the other day, published on a site run by a major IT publication. You’d think they’d know better, or maybe it was all meant as hit bait. In any case, the writer in question explained why he decided to return his iPhone 5s, and the reasons, if stated accurately, reveal more about the blogger than any problems with Apple’s latest iPhone.

So why did the blogger in question return a spanking new iPhone 5s? Well, it seems he was disappointed because it wasn’t sufficiently different from the iPhone 5. Now the degree of real differences are certainly subject to interpretation. What isn’t subject to interpretation is that someone who writes for a prominent tech publication should know full well the actual specs of such a product. It should not come out of left field as a surprise.

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