So the headlines loom large and threatening in the U.S.’s newspaper of record, The New York Times. Workers at Apple’s contract factories, particularly those owned by Foxconn Technology of China, are little more than slaves existing in unsafe conditions. They may suffer injuries and possibly commit suicide because the are forced to work hard day in and day out with little rest or relaxation. Indeed, they have to live in dormitories, not apartments or regular homes.

Now America’s image of the factory worker is cemented in the 1950s. People who worked in steel mills and auto plants were relatively comfortable citizens of the middle class. They were able to earn enough money to buy a modest home and, perhaps, even save a little to help send their kids of to college. That way, the next generation could use their minds instead of their hands to earn a paycheck. What’s more, two-income families weren’t always necessary to help cover the mortgage and pay for food. Extra income from a second job would help cover family vacations and luxuries, perhaps even a new car or TV set.

That way of life is long ago and far away. The proverbial 40-hour work week is a forgotten dream in many countries, and it’s far worse for a the citizen of a third-world country. Getting a regular gig at a factory such as the ones run by Foxconn can help develop new skills, and ensure that workers and their families might have enough money to begin to improve their humble standards of living.

Sure, we wouldn’t tolerate such sweat shop working conditions in the industrialized world, but China is moving fast and furious to raise everyone’s standard of living from near-squalor. At the same time companies are taking advantage of cheap labor to save production costs.

Nowadays, these contract factories assemble most of the world’s supply of personal computers, tablets, smartphones, and loads of other products. Yes, every Apple product is designed in Cupertino, CA, but most are assembled in Asia for a whole lot less money. As a result, you pay less too, but it also means that the manufacturing base in many countries with more expensive labor is dying.

However, Apple has a perfect right to assemble their gear wherever they get can the best prices and high production efficiency. But you have to be concerned when you read reports of worker mistreatment, and you wonder about the charges that Apple is turning a blind eye to such abuses.

Well, in response to story in The New York Times detailing this sad state of affairs, Apple CEO Tim Cook responded quickly, claiming the company is very focused on worker safety, and will continue to do what’s necessary to improve the treatment of employees of Foxconn and other factories. In passing, I wonder if Steve Jobs would have responded near as quickly and forthrightly, though he also professed similar concerns.

At the same time, the people who focus on Apple’s production worker situation shouldn’t forget that other companies assemble their gear at Foxconn, including HP. Sure, Apple may be Foxconn’s largest customer, but HP is a healthy number two. And just where do Dell and other companies go when they need to assemble such products as personal computers or printers?

Now I don’t pretend to know the inner details of the worker situation at these plants. Even if they feel they are comfortable and relatively well off, at least compared to their former standard of living, nobody has the right to abuse them or overwork them. If that’s still happening, certainly Apple and other customers of these firms need to continue to properly deal with such abuses. Maybe it would serve the entire consumer electronics industry to set aside their competitive differences and agree not to deal with any factory that mistreats its employees. That will fix the problem but good.

Of course, you wonder why the governments of China and other countries that allowed these factories to be built are tolerating such a tragic situation. Or maybe they are happy that their citizens are putting food on the table and paying taxes. I suppose one could suggest that the right officials in the right departments might be enriched from time to time with money from factory executives to look the other way. That wouldn’t be out of the realm of possibility, though I am maybe paying too much attention to movies about how officials behave in third-world countries, although payoffs are common all over the world.

You could also suggest that maybe Apple should just call up Foxconn and say, “you’re fired,” but it’s not that easy. Apple has assembled a very sophisticated supply chain, using expensive custom tools with which to fabricate unibodies on MacBooks and the glass externals of iPhones. Switching production facilities under these circumstances wouldn’t be easy, and it would have to be done slowly and deliberately to avoid any production interruptions.

At the same time, I hope that Cook is right that Apple won’t tolerate unsavory working conditions. Everyone who labors long days and nights to build your favorite electronic gadgets deserves to be treated with courtesy and respect and, of course, paid a decent wage.

Industry analysts are without doubt engulfed in dizziness after looking at Apple’s stellar financials this past week. How can that company possibly maintain such a level of growth year after year after year? When will everyone who is interested own an Apple product, and only look to replace the ones they have?

Consider the iPhone. According to AT&T, some 80% of their smartphone activations this past quarter consisted of one of the three iPhone models they offer. Verizon Wireless managed more than 50%, but AT&T’s big advantage in this game is the fact that they still offer the iPhone 3GS free with a two-year contract? How do you beat free?

Sure, that aging iPhone will probably not survive in the lineup when the next iOS release is out, and the free phone will probably be 2010’s iPhone 4, but that’s nothing to apologize for. It’s still a terrific product, even if you are concerned over the long-forgotten remnants of Antennagate. Or does anyone even remember what that was?

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The other day, when I forgot to Fast Forward through some TV ads, I caught one for Microsoft that struck me as one huge embarrassment. It seemed that father and son were seated next to each other working on anonymous note-books. The father completed a spreadsheet, no doubt Excel, and the son took over, adding a few flourishes that delivered results frightening close to a badly done 1990’s Flash animation. It came complete with what came across on my TV as ragged lettering.

The message: If you want to create that junk on your PC, get Windows 7.

I had to wonder how Microsoft’s executives and ad agency came to believe such a message would drive the supposed excellence of their product home. Sure, it’s great for family values to see parents and children getting along. That’s a good thing. But if they hoped to demonstrate that Windows 7 was somehow empowering someone’s creativity, they failed, utterly. But that’s nothing new.

In recent years, Microsoft has made some awfully lame efforts to get the word out about a current version of Windows. I remember when they squandered a reported $10 million to hire comic Jerry Seinfeld to appear in a series of TV ads accompanied by Bill Gates. Sure, Gates was the good sport and all, but these were ads about absolutely nothing, and were pulled after a few showings.

Of course, Seinfeld became famous in the 1990s as star of a TV sitcom “about nothing,” but you have to wonder if Microsoft’s marketing team had been caught in a time warp, to believe that the unlikely pairing of Seinfeld and Gates would somehow attract an audience. This came at a time when Apple’s Mac Versus PC ads were gaining lots of attention.

On another occasion, Microsoft tried to demonstrate the low pricing and sheer variety of Windows PCs by filming a set of faux reality spots, where people visited a consumer electronics store and ended up choosing a PC for some lame reason. I believe they even passed on a Mac on one occasion because it cost too much. Unfortunately, the logic or lack thereof used by those deliriously happy PC buyers almost always turned it to be wrong. Welcome to the Bizarro world.

Microsoft should feel lucky that they continue to fare best with business customers, except, of course, for the Xbox gaming console The Xbox and its accessories only succeeded, however, after Microsoft wasted billions of dollars trying to make that division profitable. This may be the reason why Microsoft continues to lavish ship loads of money into developing new versions of Windows, Windows Phone, Bing search and other products and services. They believe if you toss enough money at a problem, success is inevitable.

For 2012, Microsoft wants you to anticipate, with bated breath, the arrival of Windows 8. Sporting an interface overlay based on the failed theme used in the Zune digital media player and Windows Phone handsets, Microsoft somehow believes the Metro interface will come into its own on a personal computer or ARM-based tablet.

This doesn’t mean Metro is necessarily bad. Maybe the retro look will appeal to some people, though putting light text against darker backgrounds is a non-starter for me. Fortunately, it’s easy to dispense with Metro and return to the traditional Windows interfere on a PC; that is, assuming what I saw in the public developer release will carry through to the final version.

Microsoft, it seems, feels that innovation is akin to making something look and work differently. That must explain some of the curious interface changes with Windows Vista and Windows 7. Do they believe that confusing customers will somehow make them more productive?

The marketplace, though, has other ideas. Sales of Windows PCs are down. Some of that unexpectedly high increase in iPad sales came from customers who might have otherwise purchased PCs. That’s the sort of cannibalization Apple loves, although some iPad sales came at the expense of Macs. But not enough, it seems, to have made a significant dent in otherwise record sales.

Now there may be any number of explanations why Microsoft still doesn’t get it. Perhaps CEO Steve Ballmer is to blame, as some feel that, if Gates stayed at the helm, things would be different. Some suggest that Microsoft suffers from a problem that used to inflict GM. Management is saddled with committees headed by people who are afraid to make the hard decisions. Products and services are distilled, homogenized, lacking the substance necessary to change things substantially.

Sure, perhaps Microsoft is also the prisoner of OEM partners who insist on maintaining backwards compatibility in Windows. But that’s no way to lead the industry to embrace 21st century changes. These days, it’s all too little and too late with Microsoft, and it doesn’t appear as if the tech media takes them near as seriously as they used to. I mean, do you even recall what Microsoft discussed at their recent CES keynote? It was about Windows 8 and tablets, but it doesn’t seem as if anyone cared.

But there’s one significant problem in developing taste. It’s not necessarily something that can be taught. You either have it or you don’t. Microsoft may do best by throwing out their existing leadership, starting over with executives who actually have a clue. Or maybe it’s just too late.

An interesting sidelight of Apple’s blowout quarter is how quickly the company is soaring past Microsoft. As sales of Windows falter, Apple is firing on all cylinders. Indeed, media analysts hoping for a big fall are clearly going to have to wait a long time for Apple’s momentum to slow.

Meantime, I have to think how things have changed in the tech industry.

When I first started using Macs in the 1980s, they weren’t taken very seriously beyond a small core of content creators, such as musicians, producers, and graphic artists. As recording engineers began to bring Macs into their studios, and traditional typesetting companies went Mac, I was repeatedly informed that I had bet on the wrong horse. Real computers, so to speak, used MS-DOS. Macs were toys, and, besides, there wasn’t much software available for them.

Certainly Apple didn’t help the process when a procession of inept executives nearly sent the company off to pasture, as Microsoft just grew larger and larger. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, the company was weeks away from failure. That frightening fact, however, may not have been obvious to people like me who depended on Macs to earn a paycheck, and only chafed at the unstable OS releases, and the questionable design decisions on new models. And please don’t get me started on the insane memory upgrade scheme that afflicted loads of Mac towers during that era. The process sometimes made fiddling with an original Mac mini with a putty knife seem simple.

Now over the years, a constant meme has played out in some sectors of the tech press, that loyal owners of Apple products have somehow been brainwashed. Apple’s gadgets are overpriced, and do not perform any better than the competition, so why pay more? Of course, they can’t talk seriously about the legendary Steve Jobs “reality distortion field” anymore, since, in his final days, he wasn’t visible all that much as Apple’s leader. Indeed, Apple’s greatest success has come after Tim Cook became the official CEO.

Meantime, Microsoft appears to have been bracing for a fall over a period of several years, although their executives seem oblivious as to how much things have changed. Consider, for example, the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. At the time, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer dismissed Apple’s chances for success, yet what we’ve seen is that, as Apple’s share of the market entered double digits and, in fact, even surpassed Google Android smartphones in the last quarter by a small margin, Microsoft has failed. Utterly. Windows Phone market share lies in the single digits, with little evidence of any real growth.

Worse for Microsoft is the fact that Windows Phone has actually gotten pretty good reviews overall. The Metro interface, although it hasn’t caught on, doesn’t look bad on a smartphone. You see them on TV shows from time to time, although they aren’t mentioned in the shows themselves. Contrast that to Apple, where the iPod, iPhone and iPad — and even Macs — are referred to by name. I recall an episode of the CBS procedural drama, “CSI: NY,” in which iPads actually became important plot devices.

When it comes to PCs, sales are down almost across the board. During Tuesday’s conference call with financial analysts, Cook said that the iPad has continued to cannibalize PC sales. The iPad even took some sales from the Mac, but not a lot, since record sales were tallied regardless.

In fact, when you combine iPad and Mac sales, Apple has already passed HP as the number one personal computer maker on the planet. That ought to serve as one huge embarrassment to HP CEO Meg Whitman, who didn’t expect that to happen until later this year.

The change in the PC business has clearly left Microsoft unprepared to embrace a future in which mobile devices dominate. Sure, Windows 8 will be available for both PCs and tablets. Sure, Windows 8 will sport a user interface derived from Windows Phone, Metro. But regular Windows apps won’t work on mobile gear, which will use the ARM processor family. Besides, when you click beneath the Metro veneer, it’ll still be Windows on a regular PC. Does Microsoft truly believe you won’t notice?

Some months back, I joined other tech commentators in suggesting the PC era for many of you is drawing to a close. More and more people are using iPads as personal computers — notice I don’t use the word “tablets” because it’s an iPad market pure and simple — and PCs have passed their prime. This doesn’t mean that they will disappear for quite a few years, but they will more and more serve the needs of a smaller user base. That’s inevitable. Indeed, Microsoft’s 90%-odd OS market share barely crosses 50% if you regard mobile devices as computers.

Strange how things turned out. In the old days, you were told you couldn’t go wrong betting on Microsoft, and that Apple wouldn’t last. That was then, this is now. Funny how it all turned out.