The news spread like wildfire Tuesday morning. Consumer Reports, America’s largest product review publication, has granted the iPhone 4s a cherished “Recommended” status. This seems especially important, because the original iPhone 4 wasn’t recommended, due to that notorious antenna defect.

As most of you recall, the iPhone 4 got a bad rap because, if you held it in a way where your hand covers the separation in the antenna on the lower left of the unit, reception would seriously degrade, particularly in weak signal areas. Consumer Reports duplicated this problem in a laboratory, they report, rather than in a real world setting. But for some strange reason, they were unable to confirm similar problems with other phones, perhaps because they were looking at the same “G” spot, which is, of course, downright foolish. There are, after all, loads of YouTube videos showing how you can create similar symptoms with every other smartphone, to a greater or lesser degree. But the sensitive locations happen to be different. Some handset makers warn you about such problems with labels affixed to the product, or in user manual warnings.

So why didn’t CR get that? Are they suggesting all those videos and handset maker warnings are wrong? Antenna experts, and I don’t know if anyone in CR’s testing department is qualified in that regard, have made it quite clear that Apple’s position on the Antennagate controversy was correct. All mobile handsets exhibit reception problems if you hold them in a way that covers critical portions of the antenna. So what are we missing here?

No doubt you’ve read the specs, that the iPhone 4s has a diversity antenna system, similar to what you find in many autos, in which the unit switches to the antenna that gets the best reception. The system works, and thus CR encountered no further troubles, though it appears they simply tried to duplicate the same symptoms in the same position as they did with the iPhone 4. Does that make any sense to you?

But that doesn’t mean the iPhone 4s was rated number one with a bullet. CR found some Android handsets that got better marks because they have larger screens (4.3 inches) and support 4G, or LTE, networks. Yes, the iPhone 4s offers higher download speeds with GSM wireless networks that are optimized for better performance, employing a technology known as HSPA+. Real world benchmarks make it competitive with “genuine” 4G, but CR seems to be religiously devoted to specs above real world experiences and usability.

So the question arises: Is a larger smartphone, with a larger screen, as convenient to use as an iPhone? Does the larger form factor make it more difficult to place in pocket, shirt pocket, or purse? How does it feel during routine handling, or is the larger gadget perhaps a little too large?

Unfortunately issues of usability elude CR. It doesn’t mean that the somewhat bigger smartphone is going to be inconvenient, although I can tell you that any gadget larger than the iPhone would be somewhat difficult to place and remove from my pants pockets, and the pockets of the few fancy shirts I own also seem able to accommodate Apple’s smartphone, but nothing much larger.

And what about iOS 5 versus Android? Where’s the hands-on comparison to demonstrate which offers a better, more reliable, more fluid user experience without having to engage in complicated setups? What about the software repositories? Which platform offers a richer selection of titles? What about getting critical OS patches when bugs are discovered, and forget about a new, feature-laden upgrade? You know the answers, I’m sure.

Did CR consider such critical concerns in their tests? If they did, it would be a huge change, but there’s nothing  to indicate that CR is aware of such practical considerations? If they are, they don’t reveal it in the reviews posted on their site (though you may have to be a subscriber to read all but the summaries).

But CR is notorious for a serious lack of understanding about tech gear. They do not, for example, attempt to grok the differences between Mac OS X and Windows when evaluating personal computers. They concentrate strictly on specs, unspecified performance measurements, and the perceived ability to expand hardware. Here, Apple suffers because, except for the Mac Pro, internal upgrades are limited to memory and, with sometimes extreme efforts, the hard drive. But the actual user experience, and how the OS might impact that experience, eludes them. The Mac is just a pretty, premium priced computer, and nothing more.

Even worse, although CR reps make frequent appearances on radio and TV shows, they are seldom tasked to provide answers to such critical questions. The interviewers generally fawn over CR’s supposed expertise on all consumer matters, and ask the expected softball questions. You will never see the magazine’s spokespeople being forced to consider possible flaws in their test methods. Yes, I realize lots of readers complain about CR, but not enough, clearly.

Any time a product or service gets high marks, or a huge thumbs down, CR will be quoted without question. But not here, of course, and not until they own up to their shortcomings and change their ways.

Under the iOS, applications are sandboxed, which means, more or less, that the app runs in its own virtual space, separated from other apps. If something goes wrong with that app, such as a crash, or perhaps because it has been compromised with malware, the OS and other apps are protected. This is one key reason why iOS security issues have been few and far between.

A similar feature is included in OS X Lion. The ability to send and receive data to the OS and other apps is strictly controlled, via a system known as “entitlements” (and don’t get me started, please, about the political use of that term). Sandboxing, you see, is a perfectly sensible means of protection for most of the apps you use. This scheme may work fine with mobile apps, but on a Mac, there are potentially serious pitfalls, because some of the key apps you may be using aren’t suitable for Apple’s current implementation of sandboxing, and therein lies a developer’s dilemma.

In recent days, Apple has notified developers that, as of March 1, 2012, all apps submitted to the Mac App Store must be sandboxed. If the apps perform functions that aren’t supported, those functions will have to be eliminated, or the app won’t be able to remain in the Mac App Store. While Apple has granted exceptions to some of these entitlements, those exceptions are strictly temporary. They can be cancelled at any time, meaning that the apps in question will be removed from the store.

The impact to the Mac user may be slim to none in most cases, but for many of you, it can be serious. Let me explain.

When I record episodes of my two radio shows, The Tech Night Owl LIVE and The Paracast, I use audio apps that capture the signal from Skype and combine it with the audio from an analog mixing console that’s plugged into my iMac. Two such apps, which can also capture audio from Internet streams, iTunes and other software, are Ambrosia Software’s WireTap Studio, and Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro. I’m sure the developers behind these apps are pulling their hair out, or suffering sleepless nights, hoping for a clever solution, or praying Apple will relent and allow them to do their thing. With sandboxing, neither product will perform these basic functions.

Now I realize most of you don’t need an audio capture program, though they can also be used for such purposes as making a scheduled recording of an online audio event, similar to what you can do with your TV and a DVR. That’s a real plus.

Perhaps the most critical product that may be hurt by sandboxing is the backup app. Sure, Time Machine may be all you need, but some of us prefer more granular solutions, such as Shirt Pocket’s SuperDuper! Even such FTP apps as Panic’s Transmit (the one I favor) will suffer from similar issues, because they all need access to the entire Mac OS X file system to do their thing. A similar limitation also impacts Jon Gotow’s great Open/Save dialog enhancer, Default Folder X.

As you can see, the sort of sandboxing Apple visualizes can have unintended consequences, particularly when it comes to backup apps and other software that serve important functions that Mac users need. Now I do not pretend to understand the programming hurdles involved in providing safe support for such features, or whether Apple could enhance its repertoire of “entitlements” to allow these apps to continue to deliver all the features you expect.

I realize that no developer is forced to use the Mac App Store. The excluded products can still be offered from a software publisher’s own site, if that’s what they want. But that’s consigning these companies, many of which are run by one or two people from their home offices, to the back of the bus. It’s going to be understandably difficult to compete for attention with Apple’s own approved software repository.

Now between now and March 1st, it’s quite possible Apple will reconsider the entitlement setup, at least to the extent of offering workable solutions for the affected publishers. As it stands, if they want to stay in business, they’ll be forced to devise feature limited versions of certain apps, while discontinuing others unless selling them outside of the Mac App Store environment continues to pay off.

Sure, I realize staying out of the Mac App Store may make sense for a large company, such as Adobe, which also has limited versions of some of their products available from Apple. But the products that require special installers, which put files in all sorts of places on your hard drive, will never be compatible, unless developers find the means to simplify such setup routines.

As far as Apple is concerned, I do not subscribe to the theory, voiced by some, that they don’t want you to buy software outside of their App Store environments. I also do not believe that they want to somehow “ruin” the Mac experience, which is what one article claimed. It seems to me that Apple wants to make Mac OS X as safe as possible, but they need to consider the consequences more carefully. It makes no sense to limit the functionality of Mac apps simply to exert control. But it won’t hurt to make your views known to Apple. The more messages they get, the more they’ll look favorably upon doing the right thing.

To some misguided pundits, Apple’s supposed “Antennagate” scandal last year is an episode they will never live down. Even though other smartphones exhibit signal loss if you hold them the wrong way, meaning that you manage to cover the antennas with those big bad bags of water we call hands, the iPhone 4 got the bad rap. Of course Consumer Reports only reinforced that myth when they falsely claimed that particular device was the only one that had the problem.

Clearly sales didn’t suffer. Maybe Apple could have done a better job in handling the initial PR fallout, but a media event pretty much set the matter to rest, although giving away free bumper cases for a while didn’t hurt. Maybe a few lessons were learned along the way, and certainly one is the improved antenna design in the iPhone 4s.

Now when it comes to the iPhone 4s, you have to expect there will be early release bugs. There almost always are with new products of this sort, so it’s inevitable that early adopters will report problems. So within days after the refreshed iPhone got into the hands of users, some complained about subpar battery life. Another crisis in the making?

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Only a short time after newly-minted CEO Tim Cook said Apple wouldn’t change, it was reported in the Wall Street Journal that, yes, there have been changes, at least from an organizational standpoint. Where Steve Jobs ran the operation by his gut, the story says, Cook, ever the engineer, has made moves towards making the company more efficient.

So we have reports of a reorganization of the educational division, a key marketing promotion, and perhaps a more consistent, open method of communicating with his “team.” Obviously, you expect Cook to use his own management style, and having worked as interim CEO for a while, surely he was ready to make some changes as soon as the position became permanent. These aren’t things he’d be able to accomplish when Steve Jobs was watching over his shoulder. None of it is meant to put down Jobs’ management style. But different people have different methods.

But certainly Apple’s development team remains in place, and that’s where the magic happens. From reading the best-selling Jobs biography from Walter Isaacson, it’s clear that design guru Jonathan Ive is going to have more visible authority since he appears to have been the one person with whom Jobs could regularly “mind meld” and devise new products. How Ive will fare without having that mercurial sounding board watching his every move is any guess, but he, too, must have been preparing for the transition.

It’s also reported that Jobs, knowing his time was short, developed a product roadmap for what has been variously described as three or four years. This roadmap will evidently cover Apple’s core products, such as the Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad, along with Mac OS  X, iOS, iCloud and so on. If he really “cracked” the secret of building a true Apple designed TV set, it’s very likely that device will become available some time in 2012, assuming Jobs’ solution proves practical.

What that solution might be has been subject of lots of speculation. But it has to come down to content, Apple’s ability to sign up entertainment companies and, no doubt, TV broadcasters, so that you can get a full complement of channels, perhaps in the form of apps. It would clearly involve deals with broadband providers — many of whom offer their own TV content delivery services — to allow for the higher bandwidth consumption. Imagine if your new TV set was streaming high definition content from Apple six or eight hours every single day, and your ISP sets a serious bandwidth cap.

Otherwise, it doesn’t seem as if Apple is acting any different from before. The iCloud and iOS 5 rollouts were predictably shaky, but you had to expect the servers to be saturated for the first few days. The iPhone 4s has been a smashing success. And yes, there is that irritating bug or series of bugs that severely shortens battery life on the new iPhone, and older models upgraded to the new OS. But it does seem that Apple did the right thing by having engineers contact customers to work with them to find the sources of the severe battery drain. Within a few weeks, there will be an iOS 5.0.1 with that and other bug fixes.

You have to wonder how Google would handle such a problem, inasmuch as it often takes months to deliver Android updates to end users. And more often than not, they never get those updates. What if something in an Android release causes battery life to crash big time? How will customers be treated?

Also remember that, when you buy an iPhone, Apple provides the support; the carrier will generally deal with network and billing issues. You are still Apple’s customer. When you buy a Samsung phone, how are you treated by Samsung? Do they just pawn you off to the carrier if something goes wrong?

I suppose the real question is how Apple will fare when the innovations Steve Jobs left them have been launched or abandoned. What will happen five or ten years from now, and how well will Apple succeed moving forward? Will some other company, maybe only in the planning stages and seeking venture capital right now, find better ways to implement solutions than Apple?

Surely, that’s always a possibility. It’s enough to keep Apple executives awake at night, but that’s the danger that would have existed had Steve Jobs survived. As much as he has succeeded in many key areas that fueled Apple’s incredible growth curve, don’t forget that Jobs had some notable failures over the years. We admire Mac OS X and the long migration path from the NeXT OS. But it’s also true that NeXT failed utterly as a hardware maker, that the OS itself wasn’t selling very well before Apple, in a desperate move, bought them out and returned Steve Jobs to the company he co-founded.

What if Apple never bought NeXT? Steve Jobs might have prospered with the billions he earned from Pixar and Disney, but Apple’s second coming would probably have never happened. Indeed the company might no longer exist.

Predicting Apple’s future, therefore, is an exercise in futility. It’s hard enough to know where they’ll be next year, let alone 2016.