I remember buying my first new car, long long ago. On picking up the vehicle, I noticed that the dealer’s name and city were displayed in a small decal affixed to the bottom of the trunk lid, and merely accepted the intrusion, at least then.

Over the years, I’ve found the dealer labels clumsily affixed to some of the cars I’ve owned, but these days the car stores mostly give you custom license plate frames sporting the name, logo and city. Yes, it’s a larger presentation, and more apt to be visible, but it is also easily replaced.

For a while, I didn’t mind. Maybe the dealer deserved the extra courtesy for giving me a “great deal.” On the other hand, they surely have a budget sufficient to cover advertising in daily newspapers, and on TV and radio. Why do they want their customers to assist with their ad campaigns without payment for those services? Why indeed!

Of course, the cost of buying all those “free” license plate frames is obviously a part of their marketing budget.

But that’s the car business. When I buy an appliance, I do not expect to see a Lowe’s or Best Buy’s emblem polluting the otherwise pristine interior, or secretly affixed to a shelf inside. Sure, when I buy a new electronic device, it will often be cluttered with decals of all sorts, announcing special trademarked features, or perhaps identifying the company who supplied one of the parts, such as Intel on a PC. But they are removable, and remove them I do as soon as they’re installed. After all, do these companies actually believe I want to show off all that junk to my friends?

Now to their credit, Apple doesn’t put decals anywhere, even on the Macs, which sport Intel processors. Labeling is minimalist. Only the Apple logo is visible unless you examine the rear or bottom of the unit. I suppose they’re giving up some marketing cash by making that decision, but it’s not as if profits are suffering. At the same time, gear from such companies as Dell positively overwhelm you with that irritating garbage, and it’s not as if that company’s profits are soaring. But maybe the profits would be less without the decals. I can’t imagine they’re doing that free of charge.

But perhaps the most intimate irritant to one’s desire to live ad free is the smartphone. You remember all those notices that a message was sent by a BlackBerry. Well, not to be outdone, Apple opted to deliver announcement that one’s email was “Sent from my iPhone” from the very first day. It came out of the blue and, by the frequency of those expressions, it became very clear very soon that Apple had made a difference, not just in selling lots of smartphones, but in craving free advertising for doing so.

As you can expect, the default signature on the iPad is “Sent from my iPad.” Just today I got a message from the editor of a large tech publication that was “Sent from my Kindle Fire.” Well, I suppose you have to expect that Amazon wanted to join the crowd. Since they are purportedly selling those things at a loss, I guess they feel they need all the publicity they can get.

Now I suppose I could just sit back and let this trend run its course. I mean, there’s nothing really harmful in giving Apple, or whatever mobile handset company you’re dealing with, a little free publicity in exchange for selling you such terrific gadgets.

On the other hand, you are paying hard-earned money for that gadget. Why, oh why, do you need to give them free advertising on every single email you write. Are they giving you a spiff for promoting their stuff? What about giving you an iTunes Reward for every 1,000 messages you send? Oh yes, there would have to be some sort of method of tracking the messages affixed with that signature, while at the same time ensuring your privacy. Sure, if you use the Webmail interface for Gmail, they are giving you targeted ads, in exchange for getting a free service; that’s why I access my Gmail on a desktop email client. But if you pay for something, that should be the end of the financial relationship, and giving a company free advertising ought to have some financial value, right?

Sure, perhaps I’m half serious about this. I mean, you can change the default signature on your smartphone. Nobody forces you to tell the world the name of the device you used to write it. That’s what I do, and, besides, my real concern about the whole thing, at least with the iOS, is the inability to create multiple signatures.

Of course, there is a way to stop the practice. Tell your car dealer you want them to remove the decals and replace the promotional license plate frames. With your tech gear, you just remove the decals. They usually come off without damaging anything, though you might have to struggle a bit to get some of those labels off.

And when it comes to my iPhone and iPad, well, the default signatures were removed on the very first day. Maybe I’m just being obsessive about the whole thing, but why should it make any difference to anyone what I use to write my email?

Aside from all the obvious reasons, such as being available from dozens and dozens of PC makers, and sometimes costing very little money, Windows has the advantage of being basically good enough to accomplish what users expect of it. Whether you’re doing word processing, or running a doctor’s office, there are plenty of apps available from which to select. They usually work, more or less.

The critics will rightly point out areas where Windows essentially mimics many Mac functions, or does the same things in a different fashion. Since many apps are cross-platform, the Windows experience may not seem altogether different from the Mac, except for obvious user interface variations.

This is where such publications as Consumer Reports shortchange their readers. They look over the specs, confirm that things more or less work as advertised, and thus fail to understand that a Mac is not the same as a PC, even if many hardware and OS features appear to be quite similar. They do not get the fineries of an elegant interface, and how it will empower the user to spend more time getting things done, rather than fiddling with complicated operating system setup procedures.

In the real world, Mac OS X tends to be more predictable, with fewer steps to accomplish many tasks — though I grant there are a number of complexities that Apple ought to fix. While Windows has grown better, underneath some glitter here and there, it hasn’t changed all that much. You may have more flexibility in setting system options, but that often comes at the expense of making things more complicated. It may be a power users paradise, at least to some, but for those who just want to run the apps they need for work or play, Windows may just be overly complex. That, and Apple’s trend-setting designs, have helped to make the Mac platform grow faster overall than PCs. Of course it doesn’t hurt that customers who love their iPhones and iPads are looking to a Mac rather than sticking with another PC. Well, that’s unless they give up on a traditional personal computer altogether and just use the iPad for many computing tasks.

The same sort of comparisons might be made with the iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone 7.x. They all support touch, they all provide full-featured email and at least passable Web browsing. Certainly there are app repositories of one sort or another where, regardless of the number of offerings, will share some basic selections. That’s more true with the iOS and Android, where apps are often developed for both platforms.

If you have the attitude that, at least with the iOS and Android, they are simply two shades of gray, each doing roughly the same things in somewhat different ways, you may regard the selection of a smartphone as a tossup. Like CR, you pick the specs you like, and see what sort of deal your wireless carrier can offer you. Obviously with an iPhone, the prices are essentially set in stone, except for the rare appearance of a refurbished unit.

But user surveys indicate a much higher level of satisfaction with the iPhone, compared to Android. If they are oh-so-similar, why should this be? But once again, it’s all about the user interface, and the ease of discovering the features you need without having to ask for help, or to go through some documentation, if you can find any that’s readable by regular people.

It’s also true that the Android OS isn’t always so fluid in regular use. It strikes critics as being less consistent and not quite as predictable. Because apps aren’t curated, you may end up paying for something that simply doesn’t work, or doesn’t work as well as you might have expected. It may even be just a pale imitation of a well-regarded product available from Apple’s App Store. Having loads and loads of apps might seem good on paper, but it’s not so good if there are lots of poor apps that just aren’t very useful.

But Android is good enough for many people who maybe haven’t been exposed to an iPhone or iPad, or just have modest expectations. The same is true for Windows. Besides, isn’t a Windows PC cheaper than a Mac? How can Apple continue to get away with selling overpriced gear when the perilous state of the economy makes it near impossible to keep up as it is?

But when you return to the real world, you’ll see that the iPad set the price for a full-featured tablet. The Amazon Kindle Fire is a lot cheaper by being bereft of features, having a smaller display and, of course, being sold at a loss. When it comes to top-of-the-line smartphones, the iPhone remains highly competitive, and it’s well known that the Mac is not always more expensive than a PC. You just have to compare the features carefully, but if you’re on a budget, that $399 Windows system may be all you want from a computer.

It still comes down to your budget and your expectations, and Apple is really good about exceeding the latter.

So the manager at our favorite pharmacy takes out a white iPhone 4s from his pocket and announces, sadly, “I really didn’t need this. My iPhone 4 was working just fine, and Siri isn’t of much use to me.”

I asked him if he’d tried it much, and he said, “yes, but I don’t need to ask about the weather. I just tap twice and there it is. Besides, how would it look if I started to talk to my phone while working?” With a smile, I thought about his customers staring at him as he filled their prescriptions.

Of course, Siri isn’t the only attraction of an iPhone 4s. The interface feels noticeably snappier than its predecessor, and the camera is good enough to have made more and more people set aside their regular point and shoot models. Wasn’t that sufficient to justify the upgrade?

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So iTunes Match debuted earlier this month to mixed reviews. The concept, having your music library matched to one of the millions in Apple’s stockpile via iCloud, seems laudable. Potentially, it should be far more convenient than the cloud-based services offered by the likes of Amazon and Google, where all you get is a place to put your stuff, but uploading thousands of musical tracks can be a chore and a half, particularly if your broadband bandwidth is challenged.

Among the problems with iTunes Match is that 25,000 limit for your $24.99 annual fee. If you have a larger music library, as some do, particularly those who have been collecting music for several decades, Apple will not just offer you a better package at a higher price. You can’t just pick and choose which songs in your iTunes library will be matched to keep under that limit. You’ll just be shut out.

This is a curious move, since it shouldn’t be so difficult from a programming standpoint to establish a hard-coded limit to the number of matched tunes, so those with larger music libraries can join up and make their own decisions which songs to exclude. Of course, the music companies, who had to approve this grand scheme, might have decreed that there shall be a 25,000 song limit, and take it or leave it. So Apple took it, but that’s simply a guess.

The music industry’s demands may also be the reason why some customers saddled with multiple Apple IDs are being forced to wait 90 days to switch to the right one for iTunes Match to work on a Mac, PC or iOS device. It seems if you happen to associate any of these devices with a different ID after subscribing to iTunes Match, one other than the one you used to set up the service, there’s a hard-coded 90-day limit to change things back.

This seems a stupid move on the surface and below the surface, but it appears to be the result of music industry fears of piracy being caused by constant ID switching. If you happen to make that switch once and only once, by mistake, you may be out of luck.

I say “may be,” because I complained to iTunes support over a period of 10 days after I encountered this problem with my iPhone 4. Now I didn’t deliberately switch to the wrong ID. That appeared to happen while working with Apple’s Express Lane chat support over an iCloud setup mismatch. I followed their directions, which did not include making any changes on the iPhone, and suddenly that iPhone was evidently registered with Apple under the wrong ID. I’d get the warning when trying to activate iTunes Match or turning on music and other downloads in the Store settings. Sometimes I’d see it checking email. Each day, the number of days would appropriately increment.

I happened to check my two other Apple IDs, including the one to which the iPhone had supposedly been inadvertently linked, and it wasn’t listed as an registered device, but it apparently showed up that way in Apple’s network.

Fortunately, I learned that being stubborn was a good thing. I didn’t insult them, I didn’t use inappropriate language, I just insisted on a resolution, and I got one. On Thanksgiving Day, I got several letters from Apple indicating that they had removed that inscrutable hard-coded device link that I could not find, and that my iPhone could thus be associated with the same ID that was used for iTunes and iTunes Match.

Sure enough, when I checked the iPhone, I found that it was, at last, perfectly integrated with iTunes Match. So if you find yourself confronting the same dilemma, just patiently explain your situation to iTunes support — which only delivers help by email — and you should get a satisfactory resolution — eventually. As I said, be insistent, and don’t take no for an answer. I’m also sure this will be a one-time exception, and that if it happens a second time, you’ll have to entire a full 90-day waiting period before the ID can be changed yet again.

There’s yet another annoying issue with iTunes Match, and it has everything to do with the ability to sync the songs you import into your iTunes library with comparable tracks in Apple’s database. For some reason, the process remains imperfect. Assuming the album is part of the iTunes online catalog,  most of the tracks may be listed in iTunes as “Matched,” while others, for no discernible reason, will be listed as “Uploaded,” meaning that they had to be uploaded to iCloud. And, yes, I found a few where everything matched.

The first example came with “Abbey Road” from The Beatles. I had the original 1980s CD issue, rather than the 2009 remaster. All the songs were matched except for “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window.” It wasn’t a question of having the older CD version, because this oddity seems to happen with the remastered album too.

For most albums, I have found that from 10% to 20% of the tracks won’t be matched. But some albums fare worse. With The Beatles “Past Masters Vol. One,” for example, seven out of the 18 track total weren’t matched. With “Past Masters Vol. Two,” seven songs out of 15 failed to make the grade.

Now I’ll be charitable and suggest the database just needs some more work, and that Apple will revise and rework things and provide a fix one of these days, a fix that will merely require choosing the “Update iTunes Match” function in iTunes to activate. And I hope I’m not being a little too optimistic here.