So I read a report this week that the spanking new 10-inch Motorola Xoom tablet computer will debut later this month for $799, according to a product listing at Best Buy. Sporting Android 3.0, a version specifically designed for tablets, it is touted as a potentially ultimate iPad killer.

That is, until you apply a little logic to the situation.

Ahead of the iPad’s introduction at an Apple media event, speculation had the new tablet selling for $799 to $1,000 per edition, as many tech pundits attacked its prospects for success. It was too expensive, tablets hadn’t shown much success in the marketplace, and so on and so forth. Even when Apple announced an aggressive starting price of $499 for a 16-GB version, the critics pronounced it as nothing more than an iPod touch in serious need of a diet.

How wrong they were!

But you know that, and I suppose most of you also know that you can’t compete with a $499 cultural icon for $799. It doesn’t matter if Android 3.0, code-named Honeycomb (the name of a 1950’s rockabilly song)) is equal to the iOS or possibly superior. Motorola’s starting price puts the entire Apple-is-overpriced meme on its head. In passing, the cost of the just-announced HP tablet, based on Palm’s WebOS, wasn’t immediately revealed.

The situation is not too different from the dilemma faced by Samsung with their 7-inch Galaxy Tab, which carries a $399 subsidized price. Yes, subsidized, which means you have to sign up for a two-year data contract with a wireless carrier, or pay hundreds more. So here we have a major consumer electronics maker, with a well-earned reputation for mostly well-designed gear, trying to compete by building an inferior product that costs more than the iPad unless you tie yourself to a data plan. Worse, the version of the Android OS used by the Galaxy Tab was never certified by Google to work on anything but a smartphone. What were they thinking? Can Samsung be that desperate?

Does that make sense to you?

As you have heard, over 15% of Galaxy Tab customers have returned them, which his quite high for such gear. The actual sales are unknown. Although Samsung reportedly shipped over two million units in the last quarter to dealers, real deliveries to customers wasn’t revealed. Samsung’s corporate spin department revised an initial estimate of “quite small” to “quite smooth.” The revision means absolutely nothing. Smooth might mean the sell-through is consistent, but it doesn’t explain why anyone would want one of these things, unless the iPad wasn’t available in their country.

The media still claims Apple applies premium pricing for its gear, implying that you can get the same thing elsewhere, without the Apple polish or label, for far less. In the real world, it doesn’t work for their mobile products. In addition to the iPad, the iPhone, at its subsidized price of $199 and $299 in the U.S., costs the same as competing premium smartphones sporting the Android OS, Blackberry or Windows Phone 7 OS. Even though you can get a cheaper smartphone, consider that AT&T still offers the 2009 iPhone 3GS for $49 with the contract, which makes it a great value even compared to those so-called free phones.

The iPod starts at $49. Tell me if you can find any portable media player with similar storage capacity for much less.

Where Apple usually earns the premium pricing label is for Macs. Even here, comparisons can be bogus. Yes, you can buy a generic PC note-book for $500 or so, but if you take a $999 MacBook or MacBook Air, and equip the PC portable with the same standard equipment, add the value of the software bundle (in other words the Ultimate version of Windows 7, not the cheaper feature-crippled editions), suddenly Apple’s pricing isn’t so far out of whack. On the higher end, Apple can sometimes be cheaper than any PC brand with a similar configuration.

The real reason the Mac is growing ahead of most of the PC industry, however, is that customers would prefer not to buy cheap junk unless they can’t afford any better. Macs last longer, require less maintenance, and generally earn a higher resale price if you choose to sell yours after upgrading. If you figure the real cost of ownership, rather than the initial purchase price, the Mac is usually cheaper. That was true even when all Macs were demonstrably more expensive than any really comparable PC.

I don’t expect Mac prices to change much, although the MacBook Air is priced aggressively compared to many thin and light note-books. On the other hand, Apple expects to move tens of millions of mobile gadgets every year. They leverage parts across platforms to allow them to buy larger quantities and receive better pricing.

With billions of dollars in spare cash to order those parts years in advance, Apple doesn’t just corner the market on critical components, but make it more and more difficult for even the larger players to compete on price.

It doesn’t matter if the Motorola Xoom has provable advantages over the iPad beyond adding useless extra features. The $799 opening price is a deal breaker. Worse, I doubt that Motorola can afford to beat the iPad on price unless it wants to take a huge loss on every unit sold. That’s no way to build market share. Besides, the iPad has pretty much become a verb for at tablet computer. Unless Apple screws up big time, how do you compete with that?

As the reviews and product tear-downs of the Verizon iPhone pour in, a few things are certain, and some fascinating possibilities present themselves. Of course, the early evaluations appear to confirm expectations that Verizon’s network is a superior environment for the iPhone. Indeed, the reason it appears to be difficult to duplicate the iPhone 4’s infamous “Death Grip” is that Verizon offers superior signal strength in many areas. Holding the iPhone the wrong way only has an serious impact when you have fewer bars.

The other prevailing question isn’t clear yet. Will the presence of millions of iPhones on Verizon’s network degrade connection quality, as it did with AT&T? Clearly, the latter was caught flat-footed, unable to provide a level of service commensurate with the quality of product they were selling. Sure, AT&T claims to have spent billions to bring their network up to par, but they are still rated as being inferior, and that’s a reputation that’s going to be hard to shake, even if things really change for the better.

Now during the run-up to the Verizon iPhone, some suggested the new version would be a “world phone,” meaning it would have a chip that supports both the CDMA and GSM networks.  In theory, that would make it possible to use the revised iPhone 4 most anywhere that supported either network protocol.

The initial teardowns show that the speculation is half right. According to published reports, Apple installed Qualcomm’s MDM6600 chip, the proper hardware for a CDMA/GSM world phone. Unfortunately, there is no SIM slot, required for GSM installations, and the antenna is tuned for CDMA. Reports from experts on the matter suggest that the task of offering an antenna that supports both would have required a fair degree of re-engineering, which would hardly make sense for a product that will be obsolete in a few months. There’s also the interior space factor to accommodate twice the number of antennas, and I don’t pretend to know the ins and outs of shrinking all that to fit comfortably within an iPhone (or even mounted externally).

On the other hand, this design decision appears to create a platform that may result in the iPhone 5 being the true world phone, assuming that Apple is able to devise an antenna system in a tiny form factor that will support all the requirements of these systems, not to mention the new LTE standard.

Now maybe you think I’m extrapolating from a small amount of data, but remember that Apple does try to leverage parts across products as much as possible. This to take advantage of lower prices for the higher quantities they’re able to order. It may also give them a chance to test the Qualcomm baseband chip to make sure that it will be suitable for the next iPhone, and no doubt the next iPad.

What this also means is that Apple should, in theory, be capable of building one 3G (or 4G) iPad 2, and it’ll be up to you to decide which data provider to use. That would surely encourage lots of competition to earn your business, particularly when there’s no service contract to worry about. So folks here in the U.S. could, one month, use AT&T, but if that carrier proves unreliable for your needs, you could go to Verizon Wireless the next month.

Having a single iPad 2 lineup also means fewer opportunities for confusion. Say you buy the GSM version, but, wait, you wanted the CDMA model instead. You return the first, take home the second, but then decide you’d rather use a GSM provider for your data. There you go!

With the iPhone 5, it would mean Apple could build a single model to serve in most countries, although you’d still be buying a subsidized version tied to a single carrier.

The rest of the speculation can take us anywhere. There are reports of more powerful graphics hardware that would probably appear in both the iPad 2 and iPhone 5. Ditto for an expected A5 chip from Apple, perhaps with dual-cores and a rated speed of 1-1.2GHz. Again, the more products that use the same components, the cheaper it is for Apple to build them and remain competitive in the marketplace.

This is a key reason why the so-called iPad wannabes have utterly failed to provide meaningful competition. They are almost always more expensive, unless limited to a 7-inch screen, or built so cheaply nobody would pay them a moment’s notice. As you might recall, Apple COO Tim Cook has already announced that they are investing some $3.9 billion of their spare cash to buy up components. Some suggest it’s LCD displays, others memory or processor chips. It may be a number of things, all designed to help Apple price their latest and greatest gadgets as low as possible, yet still earn record profits. These are the lessons the rest of the industry has yet to learn.

Over the past week, Apple’s stock has soared, after taking a small hit when Steve Jobs announced his third leave of absence to deal with his ongoing health issues. At the same time, some stockholders are demanding that Apple’s board of directors disclose the CEO succession plans, so people know who will replace Jobs when it comes time for him to leave the company for whatever reason.

Now it’s clear to me that Wall Street realizes that, at least for the near future, the fact that Jobs isn’t at Apple five days a week isn’t a significant issue. A number of market forces are converging that will keep Apple’s sales and profits at record levels. What’s more, Jobs has assembled a team of extremely talented executives that, collectively at least, can provide the innovation and management expertise to help the company live long and prosper.

The ongoing demands of a public disclosure of the succession plan have drawn a predictable response from Apple: That information would serve the interests of the company’s competitors, so it is being kept secret. Surely this makes a lot of sense. Any outsider being courted by Apple for consideration as a CEO candidate would be inundated with offers from other companies. The same holds true for executives who already work for Apple, such as COO Tim Cook, considered a prime CEO replacement. Don’t forget that Cook has already demonstrated he has the chops to keep Apple growing, what with his previous stints as an acting CEO. Yes, maybe he doesn’t have the vision of a Steve Jobs, but he’s clearly smart enough to get the right advice in order to make the correct decisions.

That said, for the time being at least, Jobs remains CEO and will reportedly be making the key decisions. He obviously doesn’t have to be at the office every day of the week, or at all for that matter. Between telecommuting and dispatching products and personnel to his home, Jobs should be able to perform to his best ability without major impact. Sure, he won’t be able to roam the hallways at the Apple campus, or visit the developer labs to see what’s going on first hand, but I expect he can trust his management team to do the right thing.

Meanwhile, financial analysts are now saying they wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple’s stock price soar to $450 per share and above. Surveys show a surprisingly large number of iPhone users at AT&T feel the grass is greener on the other side of the tracks, and are considering a move to Verizon Wireless. This makes a load of sense, since the biggest complaint is, as you might expect, dropped calls. While my experience with AT&T has been pretty good, the last few days have witnessed far too many lost connections, and I’ve even had a service ticket issued to figure out what’s wrong. They now claim the problem has been resolved, but we’ll see.

Of course, switching to Verizon has its difficulties. First and foremost is the possible exorbitant early termination fee. You can probably overcome that by trading your iPhone, or selling it on, say, eBay. The second problem may be important, depending on the way you use your iPhone. If you depend on the ability to have voice and data work simultaneously on your cellular connection, that feature is unsupported on Verizon’s network, at least for now; it can only function on a Wi-Fi connection.

I say “for now,” because the CDMA protocol will reportedly soon be modified to support simultaneous voice and data, but whether Verizon will add that capability, and, important, whether a simple firmware update to the existing iPhone will allow it to happen, is an open question. The forthcoming LTE network won’t be saddled with such restrictions, but you won’t see support until the next generation of iPhones, or maybe later.

Despite the possible obstacles, Verizon stands to grow big time, and the mass of Android OS phones they’re selling at fire sale prices stand to be heavily impacted as a result. With more and more iPhones being moved by Apple, investors are not going to focus so much on Steve Jobs.

You’re also seeing more and more rumors about the next generation iPad. No less than Sir Elton John, the rock legend, claims he has heard the new model will be out in April, but it’s not as if entertainment figures necessarily have deep insights into the tech world. More to the point, suggesting the iPad 2 will arrive in April seems to be a pretty conservative estimate. That’s a year after the first model arrived, and the rumor mills are filled with stories about front (and possibly rear) cameras, a slimmer, lighter form factor, a sharper screen, and other enhancements. But none of this presents a stretch, and most Apple watchers would be disappointed if the iPad 2 has less.

But all of this makes it quite clear that Apple continues to fire on all cylinders, but more important, nobody knows just how many cylinders that represents. I’ll rate it as twelve cylinders right now.

So I’m watching last week’s episode of the USA Network’s lightweight but breezy legal drama, “Fairly Legal,” when the iPad becomes a plot element. Seems an Assistant DA, once married to the show’s lead character, wants to buy her a birthday present, and please don’t ask me to explain the fine details.

Well, another character, who works as an assistant to the show’s star, suggested an iPad, and the ex-husband reluctantly agreed, and even handed that person his credit card. Well, to make a long story short, the assistant decided to keep the iPad for himself, and gave the show’s star a different present. As I said, don’t ask!

None of this probably means much if you’re not a fan of “Fairly Legal.” What’s most important, however, is that Apple gear is ubiquitous on that show. In addition to the iPad’s presence towards the end of the episode, just about everyone in the legal office where most of the indoor action takes place has an iMac on their desks. The smartphones are, you guessed it, usually iPhones. Apple continues to receive tens of millions of dollars worth of free publicity from their product placements.

This isn’t to say that other PC companies don’t have products on display, but it’s awfully hard to separate their logos without looking close. I’ve seen products from Dell and HP, but, as I said, you really have to be paying attention. The famous Apple logo is large, clear and relatively bright.

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