Just the other day, after HP pulled the plug on the TouchPad WebOS tablet after less than two months on sale, they offered them for $100 each. Customers lined up to get them, and they were soon out of stock. Was price the reason the TouchPad failed?

Consider the TouchPad in relation to the iPad 2. It was a huge failure at the same price or for $100 less. The reasons are obvious. In addition to having a somewhat unfinished OS, and a heavier and less comfortable form factor, there were relatively few WebOS apps available. Without the apps, a tablet is a useless blackboard. So customers ignored them, and many who bought TouchPads just returned them. Not a good beginning.

At $100, HP loses a bundle on those things, and I gather people bought them up out of curiosity, or just to have a cheap gadget on hand to see how it worked. I haven’t actually interviewed these people. It may also be that they simply couldn’t afford the real thing and had to take a cheap substitute that, on the surface, seemed similar.

But that didn’t stop some pundits from foolishly declaring that $100 is now the magic price for a tablet. The manufacturers should make the rush to the bottom, but they will only be able to do so by building junk. Just look at any of those cheap tablets from such companies as Archos, such as the seven-inch 70 and the 10.1-inch 101, and judge them against the iPad. And they cost a lot more than $100. Both use a version of Android not recommended for tablets. But if it’s all about price, I suppose you could do worse.

Sure, a cheaper widget may be one way for Apple’s competitors to get a leg up on the iPad, but it’s not easy. Apple has a corner on components, buying them by the millions and getting the lowest possible prices. Custom designs help reduce the cost of production too, which is why Apple makes a healthy profit on each iPad sale. That competitors had to struggle to meet the same price points with their “iPad killers” demonstrates that profits will be slim or nonexistent on cheaper gear. That is, unless the product is cheapened in other ways, such as having an inferior display, slower processor, and a less powerful battery.

Even trying to equal the iPad in price, while perhaps adding an extra feature or two, didn’t help the competition. The Motorola Xoom sold in the hundreds of thousands, and you don’t hear much about it anymore. Maybe there won’t be a big push from that company until after Google’s acquisition is complete next year. Indeed, when you visit Motorola Mobility’s site, you’ll see that the Xoom is listed after their smartphone lineup, which has been far more successful.

You all know that the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook was a failure out of the starting gate. The peculiar decision to require a BlackBerry smartphone to manage email made little sense at the starting gate. The promise that email would be added later on clearly meant the product was released before being ready for mass consumption. Consider the lame ad campaign. Rather than tout the benefits of a PlayBook, RIM concentrated on its alleged ability to run a bunch of movie trailers together, on a tiny screen, without skipping a frame. Maybe they hoped you’d realize the gadget had a powerful processor, but it doesn’t tell you about what you can really accomplish with the thing.

But that’s been the problem with those other tablets. The user base isn’t enough to encourage developers to build custom tablet apps, and you have the chicken and egg syndrome. Or you buy an iPad and be assured of over 100,000 apps optimized for the product. Besides, the ads at least show you can do interesting things, unlike all the other competitors that only understand hardware specs. Maybe they should be firing their ad agencies and try to contact the services out to a firm that can actually help them sell their gear.

Or maybe they need new product managers who might have a clue about what might be needed in order to compete with Apple. But selling gear at a loss, hoping to make it up, say, in app sales, isn’t the answer. If there are no apps, there’s nothing to make up. Besides, if you consider how much money people actually spend on apps for their iOS gear, there’s not enough profit left to cover such losses. Apple has wisely decided to sell their products at a decent profit, and offer the apps in a way that delivers the majority of sales income to the developers. Sure, Apple is earning a profit from their 30%, though probably not a large one when you consider the cost of building out a server infrastructure, processing orders, and paying merchant fees to the credit card companies.

Yes, some day someone might come out with a better tablet solution. But right now, the tablet market remains an iPad market.

On the first day of availability, Apple announced that some one million copies of OS X Lion had been downloaded. In addition to being a record for a Mac OS upgrade, Lion’s initial success clearly represents a vindication of Apple’s marketing plan. First they built anticipation for some of those promised 250 new features, and they kept the price low, at $29.99, a mere 99 cents more than 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Now don’t forget that Snow Leopard wasn’t advertised as a major feature upgrade. There were a bunch of “enhancements,” but that’s somehow a different animal in marketing speak. Sure, it may well be that enhancements are meant to be less significant than new features, but not every Lion change is necessarily major. It’s fair to say the numbers are clearly fudged to make a little seem a lot, though I grant some of the new features are very significant, whether you like them or not.

Typical of any major OS release — Windows included of course — there are some “point-zero” bugs. More than a few Lion early adopters complain of black screens of death, Wi-Fi issues, and an assortment of other issues. Last week’s 10.7.1 update may have addressed all or most of the Wi-Fi problems, but the complaints persist. There’s also a report that a 10.7.2 update has been made available to Apple’s registered developers, but the rumor sites aren’t listing any changes so far, other than support for iCloud.

My personal experiences have been extremely positive so far. I didn’t have any legacy PowerPC applications to run, so the lack of Rosetta support is a non-issue. But I grant this is a serious problem that may prevent some of you from upgrading to Lion in the near future without being forced to buy new apps; an equivalent or an update if one is even available. Certainly, any software publisher who hopes to compete with Intuit’s Quicken now has a golden opportunity to make lots of sales, particularly if they can accurately parse your Quicken data.

I have avoided such eye candy as Launchpad, since I have too many apps to make the feature suitable. I still rely on the Dock for the apps I need on a regular basis, and the Applications folder for the rest. Yes, I have considered one of those app launching utilities instead, but it’s not a huge issue for me.

Mission Control, putting all your open windows and desktops in a single place, is probably less annoying than Expose. My major interest is Spaces, an OS X feature that lets you place an app or group of apps on its own desktop, with a separate background if that’s what you want. That’s a convenient way of compartmentalizing your workflow, but the feature has been perennially buggy in my experience. The 10.7.1 update fixed some of the flakiness, meaning that apps are better able to stick in their selected desktops, more or less. But I don’t know if those problems are all Apple’s fault, or the fault of app developers who need to take better advantage of OS X features.

On the other hand, Auto Save is a non-starter for me. Most of the apps I use regularly don’t support the feature, and I’m not about to unlearn the Command-S addiction until those apps get Lion-savvy updates. I also have problems with the Duplicate function replacing Save As. Try both and let me know if you feel that the former is a suitable replacement for the latter.

The new richer selection of gestures doesn’t interest me either. I still prefer a traditional mouse, and learning the proper movements to use only when I’m on my MacBook Pro seems a wasted effort. I suppose folks who are migrating to the Mac platform from an iPad or iPhone might appreciate the similarities. But that doesn’t help me.

Most performance benchmarks I’ve read state that Lion is pretty much on a par with Snow Leopard. Some functions are a little faster, some a little slower. As Apple continues to build maintenance updates to fix problems, perhaps that situation will change over time.

Or perhaps not. The usual scheme to make an app or OS run faster is just to get more RAM, a speedier hard drive, or a speedier computer. Developers don’t seem to have much incentive to optimize their code as much as they had to do in the early days of personal computers, when even the most powerful models could be taxed to perform routine chores.

In any case, I’m not seeing a spate of system crashes or any other untoward behavior that would tempt me to revert to Snow Leopard. Lion’s seems a pretty stable beast overall, despite all the changes.

Some of you have asked me if you should upgrade to Lion. Assuming your Mac is compatible, and your apps are all or mostly compatible, you are safe in performing that upgrade. But I still think Apple should better emphasize the need to have a full backup in case anything goes wrong. But if the reports of persistent problems from Apple’s discussion boards and elsewhere trouble you, there’s no harm in waiting for a few more updates before diving in. But if you buy a new Mac, with Lion preloaded, it’s not as if you have a choice.

It’s hard to make a profit from PCs these days. Cutthroat pricing and the rush to the bottom have resulted in cheap computers and cheap profits for the manufacturers. HP, for example, is the number one PC maker on the planet, although portable sales are second to Apple if you include the iPad in the sales figures. But HP also makes a single digit profit on those sales, a fraction of what Apple earns on the sale of each and every Mac.

That’s a reason why Apple won’t play the low-end PC game. They regard such products as junk, and it’s quite true that the lowest cost parts and assembly methods are used. Reliability isn’t apt to be as good as the more expensive gear. While I grant that some of you may find the $399 PC kit, complete with display and input devices, to be sufficient for email and Web access, I wouldn’t depend on that box’s longevity, and don’t forget the annual fee for malware protection software.

So entry-level PCs are killing the profits of the PC makers. IBM realized that years ago, which is why they sold off their personal computer division to Lenovo. HP appears to be coming to a similar conclusion, and they are considering a spin off or possible sale of the PC division. Once again, this is coming from a company that’s at the top of the heap when it comes to global sales. If HP can’t earn enough income from that division, where do they go? Well, to them, it’s all about software, services, and, of course, printers. Printers are profitable when you factor in the revenue from consumables. But people (and particularly corporations) accustomed to buying gear from a single company may have to change their shopping plans if HP gives up on PCs.

Dell is also warning of reduced profits, but the company is not yet diversified enough to focus strictly on other products and services. But the handwriting may be on the wall.

I suppose the big question is whether passing off the PC business to Asian manufacturers who can build them cheaply is sufficient to save the industry. It’s almost as if Apple lives in another universe.

Despite the great success of the iPad, Apple appears to be moving Macs at a pretty decent clip, confirmed yet again in a new NPD Group survey of July retail sales. For several years, Mac sales have grown faster than the overall PC market, largely because Apple offers a better value than most of the competition. The price of admission may be higher, but on the long haul, customers get reliable machines, relatively easy to configure, and they can actually get things done rather than worry about those notorious system slowdowns caused by malware and other problems.

Indeed, putting up with misery is normal in the PC universe. Even if your computer works all right after being set up, over time the system will slow down, and you’ll experience performance anomalies. There are online businesses these days that will offer, at a price of course, to scan your PC from the cloud, banish malware, and provide needed tuneups. Those services exist because they fill a need.

In the Mac universe, yes, there are some maintenance utilities that will clean up system caches and perform other chores that may, in some cases, speed up your computer. There have also been scattered malware issues, most recently that MAC Defender scareware episode, involving an app that offered to remove non-existent virus infections from your Mac if you bought a user license. That problem appears to have died down, although Apple reported continues to push anti-malware protection strings in recent OS X versions.

Yes, Macs do break and require repairs from time to time, but it’s not unusual to see Macs running in full production environments five or even 10 years after they were bought. An example: Around a decade ago, I sold a scanner to a graphic artist. He still uses that scanner, and a vintage Power Mac G4, along with content creation software of that period. Evidently he still manages to run a business with that setup. Buying a new Mac isn’t on the radar yet, because he’d then have to invest in all-new versions of his software. Some day soon, but not yet.

I have a relative using a PowerBook G4 from 2003. It has had a couple of repairs nice then, to replace a defective optical drive and another component (I forget what). But it still chugs along reliably with Mac OS 10.4. The owner is mostly interested email and Web research. That’s all he needs, and he’ll keep that old PowerBook till it drops, or otherwise stops working.

Longevity has always been a hallmark of the Mac platform, where computers remain in use long after their expected lifetimes. So even if the purchase price seems much higher, the cost of ownership will ultimately make the Mac a better investment.

So where does that leave the PC makers struggling to make a living from the sale of all those PCs? Well, I suppose they could try something new, such as a tablet. But, so far anyway, they have totally failed to compete with the iPad in any meaningful way. The real question is where Apple is going to take the Mac, and the answers make take us in many new directions.

After paying $1.2 billion to rescue Palm, a failing smartphone maker, you’d think HP had a long-term plan to make the deal profitable. Although Palm had come into hard times in recent years, the fledgling WebOS had been regarded as one of the strongest competitors to Apple’s iOS. Indeed, the chief executive at Palm, John Rubinstein, was an Apple alumnus.

HP’s latest foray into the tablet space, the TouchPad, debuted at the same price as the iPad 2. But with middling reviews and tepid customer response, HP panicked. In the space of one week, there were price cuts and rebates, ultimately resulting in a $100 price reduction. At the same time, there were complaints from Best Buy, the large consumer electronics retail chain, that they had been stuck with lots of unsold inventory. Customers weren’t interested in the TouchPad.

Just this weekend, I saw that silly and pointless TouchPad ad once again before hitting Fast Forward, but the ax had already fallen. HP will ditch WebOS, although I suppose it’s always possible someone out there might want to buy the remnants of Palm and see if they could do any better. Existing TouchPads are being unloaded as fast as possible, with reports you can get one for less than $100 if you care.

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