There’s a report this week that pegs growth in the PC industry as roughly 4%, a lot less than the good old days. Although PC purchases by businesses are said to be increasing at a decent clip, consumers are sitting on the sidelines. Or are many buying iPads and Macs. Can you guess which?

Take the tablet market; well, make that the iPad market. HP is already staging fire sales on their new WebOS-based tablet, the TouchPad, just a short time after the thing was introduced. In the space of a single week, there were three price cuts, including a $50 rebate program. When a company is forced to do that to a product that’s just released, you have to think they are desperate to control flagging sales.

Now some in the media what to think this maneuver, which smacks of desperation, means that the tablet market is going to be more competitive. But it really seems that the industry is already littered with previous failures, and they are struggling to move the millions of devices they’ve foisted onto their dealers into the homes and businesses of customers.

Is it going to make a difference?

I suppose if some are avoiding an iPad because it’s too expensive, maybe a cheaper HP TouchPad will gain some traction. But when people start to use the thing and realize that there are pathetically few apps available, they might change their tune. Consider that returns of the iPad wannabes are reported to be unusually high. Meantime, Apple continues to sell as many iPads as they can build.

High returns, for example, forced Logitech to shave several hundred dollars from the retail price of their Google TV set top box, the Revue. According to published reports, most customers have actually returned them. Dumping Revues in the marketplace, or selling them at discount outlets that carry remainder merchandise, does little to validate Google TV. The Revue was meant to be a flagship product that would set the standard. Clearly it’s a standard the public doesn’t care about.

Now it’s not that Apple always succeeds, but they are quick to pull the plug on products that do not realize their potential. One big example is the Power Mac G4 Cube, a stunner of a design, but one that had serious flaws and failed in the marketplace. Unlike Microsoft and other companies, Apple doesn’t put vast amounts of money into products that fail. Even Apple TV, which hasn’t set the world afire, appears to at least earn a small profit, and Apple is still experimenting on finding a hardware and software combo that will soar. But remember that Apple doesn’t sell products at a loss. If the Apple TV was a money loser, it would disappear real fast.

In the PC industry, I wonder if anyone can name a single interesting new model in years. Most of the products out there these days are simply the same old cases with newer internal workings. Sure, Apple will leverage a design through several revisions, but will, after a while, change things. The MacBook Air is surely a major example, particularly since the PC makers are having a whale of a time figuring out how to build similarly tiny note-books with comparable specs at equal or lower prices.

That turns the Apple-is-overpriced meme on its ear.

This doesn’t mean that Apple is necessarily immune from competition. There are still more Android OS smartphones out there than iPhones, but it’s largely because there are loads of models from a number of manufacturers, many sold for next to nothing with the usual wireless contract. But surveys have shown a surprising number of Android smartphone owners are actually considering iPhones when their contracts are up. Google’s platform clearly isn’t getting quite as favorable a response. That Google and/or their licensees might confront royalty fees from patent holders may also make the platform less compelling. In that event, many of them might consider Microsoft Windows Phone 7, even though that platform has yet to gain traction. Or maybe roll their own, which will make the smartphone market even more fragmented than it already is.

And how is Microsoft coping with flagging PC sales? Well, they are paying lip service to the mobile/desktop integration scheme with Windows 8. It will sport interface elements lifted from Windows Phone 7, perhaps to mimic what Apple has done with OS X Lion. But Microsoft’s concept of a tablet is still a PC that runs Windows and Office. They’ve tried that approach for years without much success, but Microsoft still believes that throwing more and more money at a problem must inevitably produce a solution. There’s little if any evidence such a thing works, which means that PC makers, and, of course, Microsoft, may have a rude awakening if Windows 8 fails to power a successful line of tablets.

At this point, the biggest danger to Apple’s success may well be Apple. A serious misstep could cause problems, but right now they remain on a roll.

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “You are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.” When you look at this oft-quoted statement, the meaning is clear, even though far too many people ignore the meaning.

So let’s consider all those reviews of consumer products you read in such magazines as Consumer Reports, or publications dedicated to a specific product category, such as cars and personal computers. Are the reviewers fair, do they use reliable methodology in deciding what’s good and what’s bad?

More important: Are those reviews tainted because of possible influence from manufacturers who want to see their stuff get high ratings? If a publication is receiving advertising from a company, thus depending on them for some of their income, how can they in turn criticize that company’s products and not suffer from the possible consequences?

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Some months back, I wrote a piece suggesting that the high-end Mac Pro workstation might be on the long-term endangered species list. In other words, Apple won’t continue to build them indefinitely, that they ultimately planned to phase out the line, but I also didn’t expect that to happen for at least a few years.

In response, a few people, including someone who also hosts a Mac oriented radio show, erroneously concluded that I was referring to something that might happen now, not at some amorphous time in the future. However, I have begun to alter my view, largely because of what Apple has done in revising other Macs.

But I want to caution the reader that I still expect to see new Mac Pros for a while, just not for as long as I might have otherwise expected. But this is strictly a matter of sales. So long as there are reasonable numbers of customers who want the most powerful Mac on the planet for business or home use, it seems sensible that Apple will continue to build them. This might also be a matter of prestige, since having one of the world’s most powerful personal computers in their lineup counts for a lot when it comes to content creators who need to do such tasks as movie special effects, which are incredibly processor intensive.

At the same time, Apple has clearly made the lower priced models far more powerful. Indeed, the differences are lessening over time.

Take the Mac mini, once the image of a no-frills compact computer with essentially low-end performance. It didn’t even come with a mouse and keyboard, unlike the standard desktop Mac. However, the latest version is delivering performance benchmarks that take it really close to more expensive Apple gear, even the iMac. What’s more, the new Thunderbolt connection port, developed by Apple and Intel, essentially means you can add external peripherals that perform identically to the internal accessories you put inside the Mac Pro.

So if you find the internal drive pokey, you can add external RAID drives and get amazing performance. Sure, you can add an internal SSD as well, if you want to take the thing apart. More to the point, you can leave your heavy-duty externals at the office, and shuttle the Mac mini between both locations in a smaller container than you’d need for a note-book.

The MacBook Air has also acquired an amazing level of performance with the latest Intel processors. In some respects, it can match the MacBook Pro, although you have obvious tradeoffs, such as the lack of an optical drive; the same holds true for this year’s Mac mini.

For power users, a fully decked out iMac is capable of amazing benchmarks, outfitted with the top-of-the-line Intel i7 processor, internal SSD and standard hard drives, and 16 GB of RAM. Sure, all the extra internals can up the price to close to $4,000 with an AppleCare service contract. But don’t forget that the Mac Pro easily becomes a five-figure purchase if you go for all the extras.

This doesn’t put the iMac on an equal footing with the Mac Pro. Certainly having two multicore processors and twice the RAM of the iMac is going to have considerable impact in some installations. Maybe you don’t want to have to buy a display every single time you buy a new Mac, but don’t forget that the Mac Pro can be over three times as expensive as the iMac, and a business is going to have to do some careful number crunching in order to justify that sort of investment. It’s far from a trivial purchase.

I suppose the other question is where Apple wants to take the Mac Pro for as long as it remains under development. Some suggest the next model will be slimmer, configured for installation in a rack, where you’d have a bank of them rendering movie special effects, mathematical calculations and other chores that would still tax even the most powerful iMac.

Being able to add extra internal drives and graphic cards is also a huge plus. Today, Thunderbolt remains a promise. Very few peripherals are available, although that should change now that all Macs, other than the Mac Pro of course, have Thunderbolt ports. Certainly Windows PCs will be getting them too over time, meaning that peripheral makers will have a rapidly growing population of potential customers.

There is one other factor, which some might regard is the more overt consumer focus on Macs these days. The changes in OS X Lion, ostensibly to bring it closer in concept to the iOS, also simplify user interaction. Even the home or user Library folder, repository for preferences and other files, is hidden without going through a special process, such as holding down the Option key when choosing the Finder’s Go menu. That is a deliberate decision that isn’t so much dumbing down the OS as making it more difficult for most users to screw things up. But the critics are also complaining about missing features in the server version of Lion, which will make it less attractive for business customers.

And I haven’t begun to talk about the ongoing controversy over the changes in Final Cut Pro. The key issue is whether Apple is on the road to abandoning high-end customers who don’t deliver huge revenues for the company. If that’s the case, the Mac Pro may also be on life support, and it’s questionable how long it’ll be built.

For years, Apple has been credited (or blamed) for charging premium prices for their products. In many cases, the critics were right, but only until you actually compared the hardware and software with the competition. Suddenly, the prices ended up being highly competitive.

The situation changed considerably with the arrival of the iPad. Apple continues to contract for huge supplies of components up front. This means lower prices. In addition, by creating their own custom chip and battery designs, they also save money. So high profit margins are retained, but the iPad is less expensive than it might otherwise be. Remember that early projections had the original iPad selling for up to $1,000. You all know how that prediction fared.

Meanwhile, the competition has struggled to keep up. At first, you could only get seven-inch tablets at anything close to what an iPad costs. These days, prices for larger screen models are comparable, but the companies who build those devices aren’t making near as much as Apple on each unit sold. And it’s clear they aren’t selling many. It remains an iPad market, not a tablet market, even though some industry pundits, and even Consumer Reports, want you to believe otherwise, if not now, maybe next year or the year after.

Certainly, the subsidized price (with a carrier contract) of an iPhone is pretty much on a par with the subsidized price of Android OS competitors with similar hardware specs. Some hope that Apple might offer a cheaper model, but right now, that cheaper model appears to be the previous version, which may be the most expedient approach. AT&T continues to sell as many copies of the iPhone 3GS as any individual Android OS product. Yes, Android has a higher overall market share, but that share is spread across a number of manufacturers and dozens and dozens of models. Besides, owner satisfaction ratings among owners of Android gear aren’t as high as the iPhone and iPad.

Another area where Apple has managed to confound the price critics is the MacBook Air, which remains a hot seller. So-called thin and light note-books that are roughly similarly configured tend to cost as much or more than the $999-$1,599 price points for the four standard MacBook Air configurations. Intel’s new “Ultrabook” reference design is intended to integrate components in a fashion similar to what Apple has done in order to reduce size and weight, not to mention power efficiency. But it doesn’t appear at this early stage that the prices will be any lower. The first Ultrabook products are not due until 2012, perhaps in time for Apple to refresh the MacBook Air yet again with faster processors and other enhancements. And maybe more aggressive pricing if they can leverage the improved economies of scale.

As to the rest of the Mac lineup, since Apple never played in the cheap PC sandbox, they continue to look expensive. You can buy an entry-level Windows note-book for $700 or so, but look at what you’re getting. The inevitable comparison of hardware and bundled software tells a different story. Mac versus PC prices suddenly don’t seem so far apart, and the Mac platform continues to outpace the sales growth of Windows PCs. With a worldwide market share of an estimated 5.1%, Apple has lots of room to grow, although the iPad has clearly reduced some of those growth possibilities.

Apple is also going after software companies who charge an arm and a leg for their products, with low pricing on apps and OS X. I really wonder whether Microsoft is going to attempt to compete with Lion’s $29.99 asking price for the online version; the physical USB thumb drive will cost $69 when it arrives later this month.

If you’ve priced the upgrades lately, you’ll see you pay many times that for the top-of-the-line version of Windows 7, and there’s no indication Windows 8 will be priced more reasonably. Remember that the price of the Windows license is part of what you pay for a Windows PC. This may be yet another reason that will keep the PC makers from being competitive in Ultrabooks without, of course, accepting minuscule profits.

Sure, Microsoft wants to integrate some of Windows Phone 7 with Windows 8, but they also mistakenly believe that a tablet is just another PC that runs Windows and Office. That’s the same wrong-headed approach they’ve taken for years now with little payback. The market said no. Apple used the iOS, custom-made for mobile gear, on the iPad, and the rest is history.

And history is something Microsoft has trouble understanding. That is likely another reason why they continue to dump billions of dollars into online services and other initiatives without evidence that profits will come soon or ever. Then again, the Bing search service appears to have potential, if Microsoft can stop hemorrhaging cash to keep it going.

In the end, I don’t think all those new Apple customers believe the products are overpriced.