No doubt consumer electronics companies around the world are trying to find a way to tap into the reasons behind the iPad’s incredible success, and leverage them to their own advantage. Even when sales in the last quarter weren’t quite up to industry expectations, Apple simply stated it was the result of the “mother of all backlogs,” and that they were doing everything they could to catch up with demand.

Had there been more product out there, the sales figures would likely have reflected it, they said. Sure, I suppose it doesn’t take much cynicism to conclude that Apple COO Tim Cook was in high spin control mode when he made that telling pronouncement about the iPad 2?s inventory situation. But it’s also true that the product is really backordered. Go into any store featuring the iPad 2 — as I have done in recent days — and you will see precious few units available. If you want to order one from Apple’s online store, which ought to have the best inventory outside of one of their retail outlets, expect to wait one to two weeks.

Clearly the channels aren’t flooded with the iPad 2. And it doesn’t matter what the cause might be, although Apple denies that the catastrophe in Japan is having any material effect. The fact of the matter is that the demand still can’t be satisfied.

Would that Apple’s competitors would confront such a “problem.” More to the point, it doesn’t appear as if people who can’t get instant gratification from Apple are going to competitors to pick up a Motorola Xoom, a BlackBerry PlayBook, or any of the other iPad wannabes. The situation isn’t playing out that way.

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One of the more telling statistics from Apple’s quarterly financials this week is the fact that Mac sales are still growing ahead of the overall PC industry quarter after quarter. This time, Apple recorded a 28% sales boost over the same quarter last year, while the PC industry remained flat. Now maybe such arcane issues as how many Macs were sold isn’t terribly important to you, but the trends are fascinating.

First and foremost is the fact that most Mac hardware updates these days aren’t touted with special media events, but with simple press releases. Yes, there are signs that a refresh might be coming, usually signaled by a drop in inventories, or messages received by dealers and distributors not to place new orders for existing product. Perhaps Apple feeds a few stories under “deep background” to the media to fuel demand, but the roll out tends to be otherwise relatively low-key.

Despite that, the latest and greatest MacBook Pro family, along with last year’s major upgrade to the MacBook Air (which did earn a media event), evidently resulted in extremely high sales. The iMac is reportedly doing well too, and there are rumors afoot that its refresh, incorporating the new Intel Sandy Bridge processors and the Thunderbolt peripheral port, will arrive in the next few weeks.

But why are PC sales stalling and Mac sales soaring? Well, when I asked Stephen Baker, a VP for the NPD Group, about this, he said the PC industry was coming off huge demand for upgrades, as more and more customers were buying new gear equipped with Windows 7. Certainly, after the Windows Vista debacle, the new OS must have been a revelation, since it seems largely freed of the ills that impacted Vista’s acceptance.

At the same time, if PC demand flattens, where’s that put Apple? Is Apple to be considered immune to the perils of the PC market? Or does Apple play in a different sandbox? Probably the latter, because Apple has gone through several years of growing the Mac marketplace ahead of most PC makers. Well, some of the latter did get huge boosts for a time at the low end because of the short-lived advance of the netbook.

There are also suggestions that PC sales are stumbling because of demand for the iPad. Baker places the main impact in the mid-range of the PC note-book market, rather than the far cheaper netbooks. Regardless, if anything, Apple’s mobile gadgets are building a collective “halo effect” that is luring more and more customers to the Mac. Certainly, the smoothly integrated ecosystem and the reputed freedom from serious malware has helped, and there doesn’t seem a need for those Mac versus PC ads anymore. Apple seems to have moved past that.

Certainly Apple has plenty of room to grow their portion of the PC universe. Market share remains in the single digits for the most part around the world, so Apple may have little place to go but up so long as they can keep he growth curve ahead of the industry. More to the point, while the tech media raves about the newest developments on a Mac note-book, such as the increasing availability of solid state drives, and Thunderbolt, when was the last time anyone made a big deal of a new PC from the likes of Dell or HP, the market leaders?

For years, PCs have largely been commodity products, with little to distinguish one model from the next. Usually, a PC builder will offer loads of verisons with tiny, often indistinguishable, differences in an effort to coax sales out of every nook and cranny in the market. Having so many choices, however, is apt to confuse all but the most technically savvy customers. Just remember what happened to Apple years ago when there were so many Performa models, even Apple’s executives couldn’t figure out which was which.

By having very few models, along with strictly a modest set of build-to-order options, Mac users have little difficulty figuring out what model might suit them best. I challenge anyone, without a scorecard or advice from an expert, to make an easy selection at Dell’s site among the clutter.

Worse, the more models a company offers, the smaller number of identical components are ordered, which means each unit is apt to cost more to build. Apple cleverly leverages many of the same parts across as many products as possible, taking advantage of the economies of scale. As many of you know, when it comes to mobile gadgets, Apple has used similar parts in iPads, iPhones, and so forth and so on. The new components in the iPad 2, for example, will clearly appear in the next iPhone, whether it’s an iPhone 5 or an iPhone 4GS.

Further, Apple is making a smart decision with Mac OS X Lion by adding iOS-inspired features. That will help ease the Mac learning curve for new converts, not to mention boosting sales prospects. Yes, some industry pundits still insist Apple needs to build a cheap Mac — well cheaper than the $699 Mac mini. But Apple clearly has other ideas, and the sales figures to prove they are absolutely right.

Just hours ahead of Apple’s release of their financial statements for the March quarter, there was a story about how badly the supply chain interruption in Japan would hurt the company. This is a concern that’s been speculated on for weeks since the tragic earthquake and tsunami, considering that Apple depends on suppliers in that country for some of their parts. Or at least that’s how the theory goes.

Well, Apple didn’t just report another blow-out quarter, way ahead of analyst expectations for the most part, but COO Tim Cook announced during the regular quarterly conference call with financial analysts that sales impact had been minimal for the last quarter, but it will rise to $200 million for this quarter. Well, that might not be minimal to other companies, but with total sales for their fiscal second quarter of $24.67, it’s chump change. Net profit for the quarter was $5.99 billon, or $6.40 per diluted share. This compares to revenue of $13.50 billion and a net profit of $3.07, or $3.33 per diluted share, for the same quarter in 2010. Talk about growth! Talk about over $100 billion sales for this year!

When it comes to the supply chain, Cook, while saying they didn’t expect any material impact this quarter, did characterize the situation as “unpredictable.” Perhaps the picture will be clearer in July, when Apple releases their next financial statement. At the same time, Cook claims that Apple is continuing to successfully ramp up production of the iPad 2, where demand is still far outstripping supply. Cook predictably refused to give any breakdown of sales of the iPad and iPad 2, but referred to the current situation as “the mother of all backlogs.”

At the same time, the back order situation at many of Apple’s online stores around the world has decreased from two to three weeks down to one to two weeks. More and more retailers have them in stock, at least part of the time. So maybe Apple is getting a hand on the situation.

Now last quarter, Apple sold 4.69 million iPads. This appears to be down a million or so from what analysts estimated, but it’s not evidence that iPad demand is waning. Indeed, if demand is waning, it’s for pretty much all the would-be iPad killers out there. There doesn’t seem to be much of an uptake of the Motorola Xoom, any iteration of the Samsung Galaxy, and the new BlackBerry PlayBook appears to be stillborn.

On other fronts, Apple moved higher numbers of iPhones than anticipated, with sales totaling 18.65 million. These figures represent an increase of 113% over the year-ago quarter, which ought to surprise some media pundits who imagine that Android OS phones are taking over the world. The U.S. increase totaled 155%, and the large part of the increase was clearly fueled by the availability of the iPhone at Verizon Wireless, though specific breakdowns haven’t been revealed, and probably won’t be until Verizon releases their own financials.

As speculation grows about when the iPhone 5 will arrive, it was clear from the conference call that it won’t support the faster LTE technology that’s now being rolled out by some carriers. According to Cook, “The first generation of LTE chipsets force a lot of design compromises with the handset, and some of those we are just not willing to make.” So don’t expect Apple to be an early adopter, although other manufactures are diving in with both feet without regard to the drawbacks. They’ll support any new technology that offers something to boast about, even if that technology is a work in progress.

In the PC universe, amid reports that sales of new personal computers are flagging, Mac sales increased by 28% over last year, to a total of 3.76 million units. Certainly the new MacBook Pro family, where the high-speed Thunderbolt peripheral port debuted, was largely responsible. Demand is also said to remain high for the MacBook Air, which got a major refresh last fall. There are also reports of sagging inventories of the iMac, which may indicate that this line will get an update in the next few weeks.

What’s most interesting about these figures is that it doesn’t seem that the iPad is cannibalizing Mac sales, although industry pundits suggest that sales of netbooks and other PCs are being hurt by the rise of the tablets. That rise is clearly fueled by the iPad. Unfortunately, nobody thought to ask Cook whether sales of Macs would have otherwise been higher during the conference call. But it’s also true most questions tend to be related to sometimes obscure financial issues, and are often softball. If only a real journalist could get in there and attempt to ask the questions about issues regular people want to know about.

As usual, I’m keeping this commentary relatively spare of numbers. If you want to know more, you can go ahead and gorge yourself on all the figures that were included in Apple’s press release about their quarterly financials.

And, yes, Cook did rag on Google’s Android platform again, but what did you expect?

So I was reading an article this week from a columnist for a publication that I won’t mention, simply because of the belated nature of the comments. It’s not that the writer was wrong; in fact the conclusions where, as far as I’m concerned, essentially right on. However, I’m more curious as why such an obvious fact, one mentioned by lots of people over the years, suddenly came to that writer as some sort of revelation.

But I’m more interested in the problems confronting Apple’s competitors, few of whom seem to understand that it’s the software, stupid! Instead, they are busy selling their wares in the same fashion as an auto maker might sell a fast car, by specs alone. While I grant that having a car with a faster zero to 60 mile per hour score might give you some bragging rights, at least in theory, I hardly see where minor performance differences are so important in a mobile computing device.

Consider: One smartphone displays a Web site in four seconds, while another does the same task in 3.5 seconds. So? Is that going to impact your user experience? Would you even notice? What will your friends think when you boast that your smartphone can display a site a half second faster than theirs? Well, aside from suggesting that maybe you forgot to take your meds, I expect they’ll humor you for a moment, then change the subject.

As many of us have said over and over again — and the concept was expressed by Apple too, according to the quotes published in the article in question — if you turn off an iPhone or an iPad, you have a blank slate. It follows then that it doesn’t matter if the consumer electronics company down the street has a gadget with a slightly larger display, a little more memory, and perhaps a processor with a higher speed rating. What really matters is the user experience when you try to run the apps you need to run — and even if the apps you want are available.

Don’t forget that your brand new iPhone or iPad comes with minimal documentation. The tiny pamphlet you find in the thin box is barely readable without reading glasses. But it’s hardly necessary since, for many of you, “you already know how to use it.”

What Apple is offering, in addition to ease of use, is an elegant ecosystem that delivers a convenient way to download and install apps, sync content with your Mac or PC, and get updates for both the OS and your software collection. While this environment seems sensible, utterly logical, it is unfortunate that so many competitors fail at one or more of these fundamentals.

With the Android OS, you can’t be assured that you’ll be allowed to update to the latest and greatest version, even if there’s a critical security fix involved. That decision is not Google’s to make, but the province of the manufacturer or wireless carrier. If they decide to do it, fine. If not, you’re out of luck, unless you hack your device to accept an upgrade direct from Google, assuming the file is even available.

When it comes to apps, Apple has the rest of the crowd beat by a country mile. The second largest marketplace, from Google, is swollen with useless titles, such as ringtones, wallpapers, and other junk that would likely be rejected by Apple. Developers report fewer opportunities to make a living from Google’s marketplace, which is why so many flock to the App Store despite having to deal with a curator that may use arbitrary standards to accept or reject product.

The issues the media rants about, such as Apple’s “walled garden,” don’t mean much to regular people, who just want a device that works and provides a great user experience. Those who care will just jailbreak their iPhones, and deal with an instructed and not very safe open market.

When competing companies consider an Apple gadget, they’ll look at the specs, find features that aren’t there, or not fully implemented, and answer those shortcomings. They pay little heed to the operating system and app selection, and will often just plug in the Android OS with a few of their own theme-related “bright ideas,” or perhaps license Windows Phone 7. But, as I said, having performance ratings or hardware specs that look good on paper doesn’t necessarily mean anything if the OS is buggy, the apps don’t operate reliably, or the selection is poor.

Another huge mistake Apple’s competitors are making is rushing products to market before they’re ready, hoping, against hope, that they will somehow attract customers who won’t notice the shortcomings. The latest offender is the RIM BlackBerry PlayBook, a new tablet with snappy performance, and a great screen, but laden with software bugs, and restricted by a foolish decision on the part of the manufacturer to exclude such core functions as email and contact lists. Instead, RIM expects you to bridge your PlayBook with a BlackBerry to gain those features, or just use Webmail.

Even worse, it appears that PlayBook to BlackBerry bridging is, at least so far, reportedly being blocked by AT&T, according to Jim Dalrymple of The Loop. So there you go.

If all this sounds foolish to you, you can probably understand why the co-CEOs of RIM have been unable to clearly express a viable product strategy. They want you to think that being forced to buy a second mobile computer to use email on a PlayBook is a good thing, rather than an exercise in total stupidity.

But all of this should be obvious to most of you, even if it comes as some sort of revelation to one or more tech commentators who act as if they actually have something new to say.