From almost the day that the iPhone 4s was released, Mac rumor sites, joined by the mainstream media, were busy informing you about a forthcoming “real” iPhone upgrade, the alleged iPhone 5. Just because Apple beefed up the parts, and added the Siri personal assistant, wasn’t sufficient. It looked the same as the previous model, supported essentially the same accessories, but that wasn’t a good thing. It wasn’t different enough.

Not mentioned is the fact that, once placed in the case, some of the perceived differences in form factor may be buried. Besides, whether your iPhone has a glass or aluminum backing isn’t going to materially impact your user experience. Well, at least if you’re not caught up in constantly staring at the thing.

Of course we all know that the iPhone 4s has been an incredible success, despite the endless proliferation of new Android OS models, not to mention the pitiful efforts of Microsoft and its main hardware partner, Nokia, to make Windows Phone relevant. And you need not remind me that Windows Phone is still, in some ways, a year or two behind iOS and Android, particularly when it comes to multitasking.

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Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that more and more sites inflict loud videos on you within seconds after their home page displays. Some bury the unwanted videos in a subsection, such as the Cars area of the Los Angeles Times, which is sponsored by the cars.com automotive site. Worse, the videos aren’t always visible, so turning them off is a non-starter. Even if I wanted to hear that nonsense, I shouldn’t have to go and search for the player so I can click Stop.

I’ve noticed this phenomenon is especially common on a number of financial sites, but at least there’s usually a YouTube-style embedded player window that I can switch off. But inflicting such unwanted noise on visitors to someone’s site is a huge turn-off. Silent animations are one thing, and don’t tell me just to turn down the volume control on my Mac. For me, those noisy interruptions can happen at times when the audio levels are set to record an interview for one of my radio shows. I will often go online to do a little extra research as a guest is speaking, and visiting the “wrong” site can bring unintended consequences.

I also have to wonder what the designers of those sites were thinking. Maybe they hope to suck you in with some sort of promotion from one of their advertisers. They have the right to make a living, but annoying customers isn’t going to make them feel warm and fuzzy about someone’s product or service.

But I’m only getting started. On my iPhone, I’m still hoping for some sadly needed iOS fixes. Maybe I’ll have good news for iOS 6. Meantime, there is the inability to add extra signatures to the email system. Yes, I’ve tried an app that promises to do that, Quick Sig, which, at 99 cents, is certainly a decent value. But it’s also buggy, and has a nasty habit of turning my multiline signatures into a single line entry.

Being able to bounce back to the last-selected bookmark in Safari would be helpful. Yes, that feature soft of works for a short time if you visit a site, and return right away to the bookmarks list to check the next site. But after a while, the display jumps right back to the beginning, so you’re forced to scroll through what might be a long list to locate the entry you wanted, and you shouldn’t have to perform a search. I see this problem on both an iPhone 4s and third generation iPad, so I’ll have to assume it’s Apple’s fault.

Speaking of the iPad, one of the recent wish list items for iOS 6 is the ability to work in more than one app at the same time, and not be saddled with the limited multitasking scheme that Apple devised. Having multiple windows open in a word processing app, such as Pages, is still a good thing.

Remember that the iPad’s 9.7-inch display is not so dissimilar in size compared with the earliest PowerBooks, where you could certainly run as many apps as you want. Sure the iPad is severely constrained when it comes to memory usage, and that might be a large reason why you wouldn’t want too many apps to be fully loaded, as opposed to sitting idle in the background when not selected. But if the iPad is meant to serve, in part, as a consumption device, you’d think Apple would be working on a solution for this dilemma. Or maybe they aren’t taking it seriously yet.

A larger issue on the iOS might be better app interface consistency. You want to know that the swipes and taps deliver consistent results. Some apps do put up an illustration showing how things operate on first launch, but if there’s no help option, those directions may be lost to the dark recesses of your memory.

That takes us to the larger issue of help systems. The one for OS X sucks rocks. When you invoke Help on the desktop or in an app, there’s an annoying delay as information is retrieved. Apple will rely not just on help files stored on your Mac, but online as well. If you have a slow connection, no connection, or a large amount of data has to be retrieved, you just wait.

But the real issue is whether the delivery of instructional information is truly helpful. For the most part, the text comes across as similar to a regular computer instruction book, though not quite at the “Dummies” level. I’m not so much a fan of text that’s dark gray rather than black. That also hurts readability. All right, you can make the text larger when you click on the gearbox at the the top of a Help window, but the “Show” and Hide” links remain small as ever.

The key question, however, is whether the Help menu is really getting the job done. It doesn’t reveal much imagination, or make much of an effort to enhance the ability of, say, a new Mac user to figure out things really fast. After giving up on the infamous Balloon Help in the Mac OS years ago, it’s not as if Apple has really devised anything altogether new. Here the Mac and Windows help systems are both serviceable, but not much more.

And it’s not as if the situation is any better in Mountain Lion, unless Apple is making some big changes that developer’s have yet to discover.

More and more people no longer take Microsoft seriously nowadays, even though Windows maintains a substantial majority of the traditional personal computer operating system market. Indeed, recent surveys show that Windows users are continuing to dump the Internet Explorer browser, even though it has gotten far better in recent years.

This anecdotal tidbit comes to mind. I got a letter the other day from a friend, who sent me a link to a recent survey of browser market share. She wrote, “I can hardly believe this headline! IE the number one browser??? I don’t know a soul that uses it.”

All right, she’s a Mac user, but many of her friends rely on Windows and they aren’t power users. You’d think they’d stick with the browser that came preloaded on their computers. Yes, I know you get a menu with browser choices if you live in Europe.

So a recent survey of Web traffic from StatCounter actually showed Google’s Chrome browser, which is also available on the Mac and Linux platforms, as number one ahead of Internet Explorer. The figures are being disputed, because Chrome’s pre-rendering feature, designed to make sites load faster, allegedly skewed the numbers in Google’s favor. Regardless, it seems clear that Internet Explorer 9 hasn’t been a magic bullet for Microsoft, though it may have stopped the market share freefall.

Certainly, Microsoft is doing their best to boost IE’s popularity, witness those dreadful and misleading TV ads that proclaim a browser as somehow providing a prettier Internet. Well, I suppose if you’re still using Internet Explorer 6, with its awful rendering and questionable adherence to Web standards, maybe. But a site should look much the same with any standards-compliant browser, so I wonder where Microsoft’s ad agency came up with those silly claims. Maybe they just didn’t know better, but the same can be said for the Microsoft executives who approved the campaign.

But it’s not as if the FTC will go after Microsoft because IE doesn’t make sites more beautiful. Such tall tales won’t impact your bottom line or health and welfare. Browsers are free, and you can install as many as you want and use the ones you like.

What is most intriguing is that tens of millions of Windows users have made the choice to avoid IE, even though that requires downloading and installing something else. Instead of running meaningless ads, maybe Microsoft needs to start considering the consequences, which is that more and more PC users don’t feel wedded to Microsoft, or even take them seriously. Having the Microsoft brand on a product these days doesn’t guarantee success, except for the Xbox, and that gadget is getting real old.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has bet the farm on Windows 8. They are even, according to recent reports, removing the Aero interface that debuted with Windows Vista, and continued with Windows 7. Aero is Microsoft’s answer to the fancy shaded and realistic graphics that first appeared on the Mac with OS X beginning in 2001.

This all-or-nothing approach may force Windows users to get with the program, but if they don’t take to Windows 8 and Metro, what then? Where’s Microsoft’s Plan B? If it was easy to quit Metro and return to the previous Windows look and feel, at least skeptical customers would realize they had an alternative.

In one area, though, having a choice may not be a good thing. There will be both Windows 8 tablets running on Intel processors and Windows 8 RT tablets running on ARM. The major PC makers will no doubt want to sell both, hoping one or the other will yield good sales and profits. While the Intel version will be basically just another PC in terms of the hardware layout, and will thus run traditional Windows apps, the same won’t be true for the ARM version. The user interface will be essentially the same, at least on the surface, but apps will have to be modified to work for a different processor, and to run efficiently under severely constrained system resources. Power users will grok this distinction, but regular people who just want a cheap tablet may end up being confused, disappointed, and thoroughly disgusted with what Microsoft has done.

Microsoft would have done better to restrict tablets to the ARM platform. Make it clear through advertising and sales literature that tablets aren’t just small PCs, but altogether different devices using different apps. When it comes to Metro, removing legacy interfaces is also going to confuse and anger customers. But the same can be said for the decision to remove DVD playback support from the Windows Media Center, or whatever Microsoft wants to call it these days.

As far as businesses are concerned, they will continue to buy Microsoft products, though the upgrade path to Windows 8 seems questionable. It’s not that system admins want to be forced to retrain employees to adapt to a new interface. That’s so unnecessary. Some even suggest that Microsoft might have another Windows Vista in the making.

But Vista was basically bloated and buggy, and critical peripheral drivers weren’t ready at the outset. Aero may have looked different, but a Windows user could adapt quickly since the basic functionality was the same or close enough to Windows XP. By throwing out a perfectly serviceable interface in the belief that desktop and mobile platforms must become one and the same, a disaster may be looming.

So it’s no wonder that people are dropping Internet Explorer in droves. Sure Windows will continue to dominate personal computing desktops for years to come, but who cares anymore?

There’s a report this week claiming that the so-called tech “supply chain,” which refers to the manufacturers who assemble all those great gadgets, mostly in Asia, would be shrinking were it not for Apple’s impact. Certainly selling tens of millions of iPhones, iPads and even iPods has had a major impact. Such contract makers as Foxconn can attribute a hefty portion of their revenue to deals with Apple for one product or another.

The analysis comes from Citibank, and I’ll assume it is correct for the sake of argument. However, reports of this sort aren’t always nuanced in reaching a conclusion. They seem to assume that, if Apple didn’t exist, those factories wouldn’t be assembling someone else’s gear instead.

Consider if there was no iPod. Would there still be digital music players selling tens of millions of units per year? Would the market just be stillborn without Apple around? That’s a difficult question to answer, but you can’t assume it would be zero.

This is particularly true for smartphones. Before the iPhone, BlackBerry was the standard. While the industry chased the iPhone and its marvelous touchscreen after it came out, wouldn’t it be safe to assume that the market would have otherwise gone in a different direction? Remember that Google bought Android in 2005 to compete with Microsoft and Windows Mobile. The success of the iPhone, or even its existence, was an unknown back in 2005. If Apple never entered the smartphone market, the Android look and feel, and the prospects for success for that matter, would have been very different.

At the same time, I wouldn’t try to predict how many of you would have bought smartphones without an iPhone in the mix. I know that I never considered a BlackBerry, and relied on a standard feature phone over the years. The iPhone has totally changed my workflow. When I’m not using my desktop Mac, I rely on my iPhone 4s to keep tabs on email and updates from a number of news-related sites. The entertainment value is hit or miss for me, since I’m not a gamer.

On the other hand, the iPad succeeded in a market where all previous entrants had pretty much failed to capture consumers, let alone that many business customers. Today I read reports that they used 100 iPads to handle the financial details of Greece’s recent debt restructuring. Can you imagine that being done on one of those heavy, clunky Windows tablets?

Yes, the supply chains are working overtime to keep up with demand for the new iPad. But if no such product came to be, what would they be building instead? To how many customers does the iPad represent a replacement for something else, such as a personal computer? How many people buy the iPad as an extra device, to work in concert with their regular computers?

It’s fair to say that a decent portion of the people who bought iPads might have purchased a Mac or PC note-book instead. The supply chains would simply be churning out different products. Many of those personal computers are more expensive than the iPad, and thus worth more to the contract manufacturer on a per unit basis. The production lines wouldn’t just be idled.

At the same time, the Citibank report does reveal Apple’s amazing impact on the industry. While some of the products they build would be replaced by other electronics gear if Apple never strayed beyond personal computers in any meaningful way, it’s very possible that the supply lines would be somewhat less busy.

What interests me more is whether Apple can keep the gravy train speeding with the next iPhone and iPad, not to mention the expected refresh to the Mac lineup. On the short term, the signs appear to be in Apple’s favor. But there are still potential clouds on the horizon, particularly as Apple moves past products that were likely green lit by Steve Jobs. While Tim Cook has clearly done impressive work as CEO, he certainly doesn’t appear to possess Jobs’ talent for selecting the best product ideas and features. But since a lot of what went on at Apple occurred behind closed doors, we only have an inkling of the truth. We do not know, for example, how other Apple executives might assumed this all-too-critical role. Will several executives be able to replace the brilliance of the one?

The other question is what comes next? The media seems convinced that an Apple smart TV is a given, an essential component to Apple’s drive to conquer the living room. Maybe. Or maybe there will be a souped up Apple TV set top box that will simply deliver the Apple experience in a more comprehensive way to any TV viewer with a recent set.

Meantime, if the factories that churn out tech gear are busier because of Apple, that’s a good thing. But it would even be better for people in the U.S. if we learned how to build automated factories that could assemble the same products here at affordable rates, and give more Americans employment. But that can also be said many other countries that I am sure would love to get more business from Apple.