In a recent iTunes review and forum thread, one of the listeners of my tech show dismisses me as just another “Apple fanboy,” simply because I favor that company’s products. But you’ve got to examine the actual definition of the phrase to see whether I fit that description. For that I am relying on a Wikipedia paragraph:

“A fan, sometimes also called aficionado or supporter, is a person with a liking and enthusiasm for something, such as a band or a sports team. Fans of a particular thing or person constitute its fanbase or fandom. They may show their enthusiasm by being a member of a fan club, holding fan conventions, creating fanzines, writing fan mail, or by promoting the object of their interest and attention.”

Well, I am not involved in any of those pursuits. I do have a Web site and a radio show covering personal technology, with an emphasis on Apple, but I am far from blind as to the company’s flaws. It’s all a matter of preference, not fandom. Since I’ve owned two Hondas, does that make me a Honda fanboy? But wait a minute, I’ve owned two VWs as well, not to mention three Buicks over the years. My position is not fandom, but expressing one’s preferences in the marketplace, and buying the best tools for the job at hand. For example, my router is a Cisco, not an Apple AirPort, simply because the latter doesn’t transmit an acceptable signal in my apartment.

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There’s an amazing amount of information out there in the wild about Mac OS X Lion. Apple has offered a reasonable description of the new features, buttressed by a host of articles that cover the ins and outs, even ahead of the official release. It also appears that Apple isn’t being hard-nosed about clamping down on the people who are reporting their experiences with the prerelease versions made available to registered developers and book authors.

At the same time, there are lingering questions that Apple might answer in the early days, with loads and loads of Knowledge Base documents. Other Q&As will come from hands-on experience, and quite often that information will be far more useful.

But there are already some issues that threaten to make a Lion upgrade a non-starter.

The basic problem is just getting a copy. About a quarter of the U.S. population doesn’t have broadband; some can’t get it, others don’t want it. But to retrieve a file estimated to be close to 4GB, you may have little choice. Yes, you can take your portable Mac to an Apple Store and use their wireless connection to download Lion. I expect that independent resellers will usually cooperate as well. If your nearest dealer is a long drive from your home, I suppose you can have someone copy Lion onto a DVD — and the legality of that act is questionable unless they share your iTunes account or you order a copy anyway, even if you can’t retrieve it.

Or just do without.

Another big reason to avoid Lion is the loss of Rosetta, confirmed by Intuit and others. If the apps you require for your work or leisure are strictly PowerPC, you’re stuck. I suppose if enough of you clamor for the return of Rosetta, Apple might do something, but that’s doubtful. A better possibility is that someone might license the technology, but Apple would have to offer it. That may be possible, since Intuit claims they are hoping to license Rosetta libraries to allow you to use, say, Quicken 2007 for the Mac under 10.7. But that’s just a lame excuse for a multibillion dollar corporation that’s seems unable to hire a handful of smart Mac programmers to restore the lost features in Quicken Essentials, or just build a new Intel-based version of Quicken that is otherwise identical to the Windows version.

However, logic is often lost on large companies, and I won’t exclude Apple.

When it comes to the snazzy new features in Lion, some will require a Lion savvy app, which means developers will have to update their software to support the new features. Full-Screen Apps is a key example, but don’t forget about Auto-Save. It’s a great feature, one offered by third parties for years, and it allows the OS to periodically save your documents in the background, so you don’t lose your stuff in the event of an app quit, freeze, or system hangup of some sort, if you forget the manual save. But those other auto-save utilities didn’t require developers to update their apps. It’s appears that Lion does, which will create the unfortunate situation where you will have to look for telltale indicators in the File menu to see if the only Save option is the one you’ve always had in a Mac app. Sure, some Mac apps, such as Word, provide built-in auto-save functions. But I expect some Mac users will be burning up Apple’s support lines complaining about the features they can’t find, even though it’ll be someone else’s fault.

Other features will depend on your preference. It appears Lion’s scrollbar scheme is reminiscent of the iOS version, where pushing down on a scroll bar moves the document down, which you might compare to a car with front wheel drive. But the traditional Mac (and Windows) scrollbar metaphor calls for scrolling down to make the screen move upward, which might be likened to a car with rear wheel drive. In addition, scrollbars will only appear if you touch (or mouse over) them, which may be OK in the iOS, but is otherwise a poor decision. Wouldn’t you want to know if a document’s length and breadth exceeds the screen size without need of a touch or pointing device? At least that feature will apparently be switchable.

As I said, even Apple does things that seem to strain one’s logic.

With over 250 new features, I’m sure you’ll find some that are difficult to live without. But Apple hasn’t said much if anything about Lion’s performance. Will all the eye candy and heavy-duty system enhancements bog down your Mac, or will it be as fast and fluid as Leopard? Yes, the minimum RAM requirement of 2GB, something you find in an Apple press release rather than in the current online description, may be enough to install Lion and run some apps. But will it be sufficient for snappy performance? If your Mac is stuck with 2GB, and a MacBook Air is a good example, you are going to just cope. Or stick with Snow Leopard.

Of course the real issue is whether there’s anything in Lion to entice you to upgrade. It’s cheap, and if you have a Mac with 10.6.8 and a decent broadband connection, it may be a no-brainer, assuming your apps are all or mostly compatible. Otherwise, you may wonder why anyone whould bother.

One definition of insanity is constantly doing the same thing, and expecting a different result. While I might be a little presumptuous in suggesting that Microsoft — or its leadership — could be considered insane, you have to wonder about some of the company’s questionable marketing decisions.

Take the Zune music player. Microsoft double-crosses their PlaysForSure partners, builds their own custom music ecosystem to mimic Apple’s iTunes, and releases their own branded line of music players. The first one failed, the second one failed, and it kept failing for several years until Microsoft had the good sense to pull the plug.

The same can’t be said about search. Whether it’s Windows Live Search, Bing, or whatever you want to call it, Microsoft has invested a boatload of money into attempting to beat Google at their own game. Microsoft even cut a deal with Yahoo! to replace their venerable search engine with Bing.

So how’s this scheme working? Funny you should ask. You see, it appears that, in large part, Google’s market share is fairly constant within a narrow range, getting roughly two thirds of search requests. Predictably, Bing has cannibalized Yahoo!’s search, if only because the latter isn’t promoting that capability. Microsoft’s pathetic commercials and product placement tie-ins don’t appear to help, since I doubt most viewers would care if someone on their favorite TV show uses Bing to look for something.

It’s easy to say you want to “Google” something, but not so easy to say “Bing” something. In fact, it almost sounds vulgar. Bing you!

But no matter: Microsoft will continue to pump billions of dollars into search, hoping against hope that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel.

The most notorious example of repeating oneself, however, is tablets. We have a decade of promises from Microsoft that we the year in question happens to be the year of the tablet. To Microsoft, a tablet is basically a PC running Windows with a display that supports touch. Year after year, this “amazing” invention was touted as the next great thing, but customers were wanting. Yes, PC tablets made their way into some vertical markets, such as medical offices, but that’s about it. The public didn’t care.

That explains why so much skepticism surrounded the introduction of the iPad in the spring of 2010. Tablets failed. Tablets would never catch on, so what business did Apple have in building one? Besides, didn’t it strike you as nothing more than an iPod touch with a weight problem?

It doesn’t matter that Apple continues to struggle to this very day to meet demand. It doesn’t matter that the competitors have come and gone, and there are already hefty discounts on such wannabes as the Motorola Xoom. The skeptics say that Apple must some day fail.

So far as Microsoft is concerned, it doesn’t appear they even plan to try to compete. A Microsoft executive in charge of Windows Phone, Andy Lees, states: “We view a tablet as a PC.”

In other words, a tablet must run Windows, and must be able to use the regular versions of Office and other apps. It has to be indistinguishable from a regular PC, except for the touchscreen, and Microsoft is adding a bunch of touch gestures to Windows 8, which is due some time in 2012.

Now if you go through all of Microsoft’s statements about tablets from the very first day, you’ll see pretty much the same failed logic. A tablet is a PC and, says Lees, customers “want people to be able to do the sort of things they do on a PC on a tablet.”

Clearly Lees needs a reality check. If customers really wanted a tablet to be essentially a tricked out PC with a touchscreen, why is it that they ignored every attempt by Microsoft’s OEM partners to build one? Why were those tablets confined to a small number of business customers? What am I missing here?

So Microsoft’s vision for tablets in 2012 hasn’t changed one bit, other than supporting hardware containing ARM processors, similar to the ones used by mobile handset makers. The only notable difference is letting your fingers rather than a stylus do the walking for you. Sure, Windows 8 will inherent some of the look and feel of the failed Windows Phone 7, if that makes sense to you.

To sum up, Microsoft wants you to believe that their failed vision, repeated year after year, will miraculously achieve a different result next year. Talk about having blinders on.

Now this isn’t to say that Windows 8 will be a bad OS. The early demonstrations appear promising, and offering at least a slight integration between the mobile and desktop interfaces won’t hurt. Apple is certainly integrating a decent number of iOS features in Lion, and that ought to be reason for Microsoft to want to do the same thing.

But when it comes to tablets, Microsoft hasn’t learned the expensive lessons of history. No doubt if it doesn’t happen in Windows 8, there’s always Windows 9.

It’s pretty clear that when Google hired that team of Android OS developers in 2005, they targeted Microsoft as the main competition. Google and Microsoft have been engaged in a virtual battle to the death over search, and acquiring a startup that created a smartphone platform would give Google more ammunition to compete.

But how things have changed.

Today, Microsoft’s mobile platform is stuck at the rear of the train, behind fading Research In Motion. Microsoft is struggling to gain more traction out of Windows Phone 7 by tossing billions of dollars the way of Nokia to sell smartphones featuring that OS. But nothing is guaranteed. As it is, Nokia has fared poorly in the smartphone game, and adopting a platform that is far from a proven success may be the wrong way to go. Besides, what are the other Microsoft licensees going to think, since they have to pay for the rights? Where are their bribes?

But it may surprise you to know that Microsoft may actually earn more money from the sale of Android OS gear than Google. You see, Google’s profits come from targeted ads. You click on an ad in a Google search window or app, and the advertiser pays Google. The actual OS is licensed free of charge, though it appears that Google is adding conditions to reduce the fragmentation that results from hardware makers and wireless companies embedding their own custom themes and bundled software. But Microsoft has asserted the rights to certain patents used by the Google OS, and handset makers are paying them for each unit sold.

So from the standpoint of the bottom line, Microsoft profits whether you buy a Windows smartphone, or an Android smartphone. But Google really targets Apple as their main competition, and few dispute the fact that Android’s look and feel is very much inspired by the iOS. But Apple hasn’t sued Google for patent violations. Instead, they’ve gone after Android smartphone makers, mainly HTC and Samsung.

However, Google is nonetheless suffering the wrath of Oracle, which has filed claims alleging infringement of the rights to the Java platform that’s part and parcel of the Android OS. I suppose some cynics might remind us that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is a pal of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and that may have influenced this lawsuit. But it does appear the lawsuit is strictly an effort to assert intellectual property rights. If victorious, Oracle stands to receive huge paychecks from Google. In passing you have to wonder how expensive Android would have to be before Google would just abandon the platform and leave their licensees to fend for themselves. It’s not that the Google Market, their imitation of the App Store, has demonstrated much potential as a profit machine.

Another potential issue confronting Google is the fallout from the recent auction to buy up the rights for thousands of patents owned by Nortel, a Canadian telecom company that’s in bankruptcy. Apple staked a consortium of companies that bid $4.5 billion to acquire those patents, but what strange bedfellows? This group included not just Apple, but Microsoft, Research in Motion, EMC Corp, Ericsson and Sony Corp.

The big losers were Google and Intel.

These patents, numbering 6,000, cover a wide range of mobile phone technologies, including 4G. Now that the courts in the U.S. and Canada have approved the transaction, expected to close this fall, it would turn the victors into gatekeepers that will be able to collect royalties from the losers and other companies that are using the technologies covered by those patents. And that includes Google. So once again, Google and Android licensees might all be required to write huge checks to continue to support the platform.

This is not a trivial issue either, even though Google has pretty deep pockets. One reason that handset makers have embraced Android is because it’s free, although paying Microsoft a check for every handset sold has to sting. But if those checks had to be written for perhaps much larger amounts, there’s a point where it wouildn’t make any sense from a monetary standpoint to continue to develop Android. Sure, Google could go the Microsoft route and charge for the Android license, but they will find far fewer takers.

Who benefits?

Well, if Android goes away, the iOS will have far more room to grow, if Apple can build enough product. But Apple’s competitors would certainly seek out a viable alternative, and Windows Phone 7 might be a default choice, even though the public has yet to embrace Microsoft’s mobile platform. That would leave such companies as HTC, Motorola and Samsung in a pickle. I suppose they could consider returning to separate platform development, but that choice is not going to be viable from a sales standpoint.

In the end, if Google wants to save Android, they might have to sit down and attempt to negotiate reasonable financial deals with the various patent holders, and hope that ad sales would be sufficient to cover those expenses.

It’s not that I want to see a viable mobile platform die because of arcane intellectual property issues, but this is a cutthroat business. Right now, Apple and several large unlikely partners have collectively placed themselves in the driver’s seat. I wonder how it’s all going to play out.