I think most of you agree that we often pay far too much attention to the goings on at Apple. Part of this may be the fact that they are not willing to share daily tidbits with us; it’s more like every month or two, when there’s a new product or service to promote. For the rest of the time, the media is left to fend for themselves.

So we have stories about something Apple is about to do, in all its granular variations, what they’ve done, what they haven’t done, and what they can do better. When all is said and done, it’s hard to find any Apple move that hasn’t been thoroughly analyzed by the informed and otherwise.

Sure, we cover Apple Inc. extensively, as we’ve done since 1999. Prior to that, I worked at several Mac-oriented magazines, and have also written about the company for such mainstream publications as USA Today. I suppose you can say I’ve fallen into the trap, but I’m also very much dedicated to getting things right. If Apple is going to be covered so minutely, at least let the coverage be based on reality as much as possible.

However, this state of affairs also means that some stories about Apple get overblown, far beyond their relative importance in the scheme of things.

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When you buy a consumer electronics product from, say, a Best Buy chain store, you are not just the customer of the retailer, but of the manufacturer whose product you purchased. If your Mac fails, you will generally call Apple, or visit the Genius Bar at an Apple Store, if one is nearby (yes, I realize that feature may also come to Best Buy soon). If you purchased a Dell PC instead, that company is your first line for support, at least while the box is still under warranty.

With the exception of the iPhone, when you buy a Motorola, HTC, Samsung, or any other mobile handset from your wireless carrier, you are the carrier’s customer. You’re not the customer of any of the handset makers other than Apple. Indeed, those other handsets, regardless of operating system, will also be customized by the carrier with their own logo, special OS features, and even the range of bundled and often crappy software.

But that level of control extends beyond the early termination fee you pay if you decide to go elsewhere.

Take overseas travel. You want to take your phone beyond the borders of your home country, prepare to pay a bundle to make calls. It’s not so bad in Canada or Mexico for U.S. customers. There are reasonably affordable packages that will accommodate calls to both countries, but once you go elsewhere, the price becomes absurd for anyone without boatloads of cash if you talk beyond a few minutes.

Indeed, when I examined how much it would cost if I wanted to call my son in Spain (he lives in Madrid). The price didn’t seem that bad. AT&T World Connect costs $3.99 per month, but would let me call Grayson from my iPhone for nine cents per minute for the landline phone at his apartment, and 25 cents per minute for calls to his cell phone. Compare that to the 2.3 cents a minute on Skype if you pay as you go, or $13.99 per month for an Unlimited World plan that lets you call both landlines and mobiles in North America and 40 countries.

If you dare to depart from the confines of AT&T’s network, however, and actually travel to Spain, prepare for a huge surprise. Their $5.99 per month World Traveler plan gets you modest discounts. Calling from Spain is reduced from $1.39 to 99 cents per minute. You better make sure your credit card is loaded for a potentially huge bill when you get home, if you dare to spend any time at all placing phone calls. At least, if you’re in a Wi-Fi hotspot, Skype becomes a great alternative.

This is actually a global problem. Once you leave your carrier’s country of origin, you’d be better off renting a different phone in a specific country, with a different phone number, but you’d have do the same for each country in which you travel. Or, as I said, just talk via Skype.

Now a true affordable global roaming plan would require that the carriers sit in a large room and negotiate some sort of arrangement that would be fair to them and affordable to most customers, particularly those who need to travel frequently for business reasons. While I presume they regard exorbitant roaming charges as an important profit center, the real truth is that they’d probably earn a larger profit with a cheaper plan, one that would attract a far larger number of customers.

A related issue is whether you can have your GSM phone unlocked, swap the SIM card in the country you visit, and sign up with a local carrier for the duration of your trip; your wireless number would change, of course. However, whether or not your carrier will unlock your phone depends on the make and model. My son had no problem convincing AT&T to unlock his Motorola RAZR when he moved abroad. But if he had an iPhone, the carrier would say no way.

Sure, there are unofficial ways to jailbreak your iPhone. The process is readily found in a Google search, and it is pretty efficient, at least until Apple delivers an update that blocks unlocked phones. But it also presents a potential security problem, and is best left to power users. But what would be wrong if AT&T had a policy that would permit unlocking an iPhone temporarily, for special trips? Perhaps the lure of 99 cents per minute calling income is attractive, although a fair portion of that income would be paid back to the local carrier. Or maybe AT&T is afraid you’ll take your business to T-Mobile, even though they use a different frequency, unsupported by the current iPhone, for 3G.

I won’t even begin to cover the logic where buying 200MB of monthly bandwidth in a data plan should cost $15 per month, but you get ten times as much bandwidth (2GB) for just $10 more. Does that make sense to you? More to the point, how much are they profiting from either plan. In any case, I understand that, under some circumstances — such as threatening to leave the service — they’ll restore the former $30 unlimited plan. And if you still have the original $30 plan, as I have, it will stay in effect, at least for the foreseeable future, perhaps longer now that Verizon Wireless has entered the picture.

Yes, I realize some carriers charge less. T-Mobile and Sprint offer better pricing but, so far at least, there are no iPhones in their catalogs.

Today, there are basically two versions of the iPad, each with three configurations: The Wi-Fi version and the 3G variety to allow you to access a wireless carrier’s network. Since the 3G radio is GSM, Verizon Wireless has been forced to sell a separate adapter with a Wi-Fi iPad if you prefer to use their data plan.

When the next iPad arrives, and the betting has that event timed for anywhere from late February until April, it is quite possible Apple will sell a single version supporting CDMA, for Verizon and a few other carriers around the world, and GSM. Perhaps the new LTE standard will be added to the mix, assuming that new chips are ready and reasonably bug free. That way, you can buy your 3G (or 3G/LTE) iPad, and decide later which carrier’s data plan you want.

To me, this combo approach would make the most sense. With a cell phone, most purchases are made of models tied to contracts. Handsets are generally unique to the carrier, sporting that carrier’s logo and custom features. Except for the iPhone of course.

For an iPad, you buy the product free of a contract (although that may be a possible alternative), and you should be able to decide later which service to use.

What’s more, if you move, or plan to spend an extended amount of time in a location where your carrier of choice doesn’t deliver a decent signal, you’ll never have to wait more than a month to switch free and clear. Of course, that assumes that carriers won’t be offering subsidized versions that tie you to the standard two-year contracts, with the usual exorbitant early termination fees if you decide to leave.

Considering the huge profits the iPad is generating, I also expect that Apple will be able to absorb the increased costs for using these parts, and possibly a display with double the resolution of the current model. They may even access some of their multi-billion dollar largesse to ensure decent quantities of cellular radios, along with flash memory, LCD displays, and so on and so forth. It’s not as if Apple tells us anything other than the amounts being spent. After all, they don’t what the competition to know which markets they’ve cornered, although they’ll discover soon enough if they can’t get certain parts in the quantities they need.

More than likely, the next iPad (call it iPad 2 or iPad Pro) will otherwise be available for pricing similar to the current model, although one would hope Apple will at last be able to offer larger storage too, assuming the higher capacity chips are more affordable.

Another possibility is discussed in an article from columnist John Martellaro, of The Mac Observer, where he suggests Apple adopt the marketing approach taken with the iPhone. So, for example, you can buy an iPhone 4 in two configurations from AT&T and other carriers, or get the 2009 model, the 3GS, for just $49. This is close enough to free that even the customer for whom a $199 or $299 smartphone isn’t on their radar might consider the low-end alternative. Verizon Wireless will only offer the iPhone 4, however.

What this means is that both the new and the original iPad would be offered at the same time. The older model would carry a price tag of $100 or $150 less for each configuration. Imagine a $349 (or $379) iPad, compared to, say, a $300 netbook? Even now, netbook sales have been slammed in large part because of the iPad, and, naturally, the fact that those tiny note-book PCs aren’t very good. Talk about buyer’s remorse.

Just as the iPhone 3GS isn’t materially hurting sales of the iPhone 4, I don’t see the new/old iPad arrangement hurting Apple’s prospects. Indeed, many customers who, as with cell phones, wouldn’t consider an iPad at $499 would be far more likely to buy the cheaper model.

This strategy will also seriously damage the prospects for success of iPad killers. Although over a million Samsung Galaxy Tabs have been sold around the world, there is no cost advantage over the iPad unless you buy the subsidized version from a wireless carrier. So far, Apple’s competitors haven’t been able to beat the iPad on price, and that will become more and more difficult because of the great supply deals that COO Tim Cook continues to make.

With the old iPad in the lineup, even a feature-bare version of an iPad wannabe will probably have difficulty gaining sales traction. Indeed, there are already a few knock-off tablets selling for less than $200 that aren’t doing very much in the marketplace, simply because they’re pieces of junk.

Of course, there’s precedent for Apple hitting different price points with its consumer electronics gear. In addition to offering a legacy iPhone, the iPod is available in a number of configurations starting at just $49. If you want an iPod, the affordability question is not a deterrent, unless it just has to be an iPod touch. This is one of many reasons why, even with eroding sales, the iPod remains top drawer in market share.

If you think Apple only wants to sell expensive gear, check their recent history and you’ll be in for a surprise.

To put things into perspective, don’t forget that a millisecond is a thousandth of a second. It takes 300 to 400 milliseconds for your eye to blink, and I don’t expect you can measure it on your stop watch.

Back in the 1970s, I drove a mundane-looking but innovative car, a Mazda RX2, which featured their new Wankel or rotary engine. The auto was about the size of a Toyota Corona (a predecessor to the Camry), and similarly equipped, but the Mazda was incredibly fast for a cheap compact. You could go from zero to 60 miles per hour in ten seconds flat. To show you how far things have come, today’s family car does the same thing in as little as six seconds with a conventional piston engine.

But the real change of perspective can be seen in the incredible and ongoing increase in computer processing speeds. Some years back, Steve Jobs touted the first Power Mac G4, with a 400 MHz processor, as having the power of a supercomputer. These days, your tiny iPhone 4, and competing smartphones, are closer to 1 GHz in processor speed, although I realize actual performance comparisons are extremely difficult. But imagine packing essentially the power of yesterday’s 40-pound computer into today’s portable computing device weighing less than five ounces. In a few months, the power players in this market will even be touting processors and graphics chips sporting multiple cores.

At some point, you wonder just how much computing power you need to manage your email or visit your favorite Web sites, not to mention playing music or movies on your Mac or PC. Just about any personal computer, even the ones costing a few hundred dollars, can manage these functions with decent levels of performance.

But we’re still addicted to speed, and tiny differences that are beyond your ability to detect can appear to mean a lot.

Take a recent Macworld review of Google’s Chrome 8 browser. Overall, it’s rated as fastest app of this sort on the planet, the king of the hill, at least for now. But when you look at the fine details, you have to wonder whether the difference, well, makes a difference.

Take the speeds of rendering their text XHTML page, clocking in at 0.55 seconds for Safari 5.0.3, and 0.64 for Chrome 8. Remember, as I said above, that it takes from .3 to .4 seconds for your eye to blink, meaning you won’t be able to detect the difference between the two. When it comes to displaying CSS content, Safari does it in 32 milliseconds, whereas Chrome 8 is much slower, at 54 milliseconds, if you can call that slow. But where Chrome 8 leads is in JavaScript rendering, scoring 372.4 milliseconds, compared to 388.5 with Safari. That, and a somewhat better HTML5 compliance score, supposedly makes Chrome the powerhouse and Safari the also-ran.

Understand that the author seems to fail to realize that the difference between the XHTML and CSS rendering speeds between Safari and Chrome 8 are more than enough to make up the latter’s minuscule JavaScript advantage. Hail the new king indeed!

Unfortunately, the test gear wasn’t state of the art, employing a basic MacBook with 2GB of RAM, so this essentially represents a worst case scenario among current Mac hardware.

Besides, if the best browsers (and you can decide which should be first or second) do all their key processing tasks in less than a second, how does that impact your perceived performance?

The answer is that it doesn’t. Both Chrome 8 and Safari use Apple’s open source WebKit rendering engine, although the apps are clearly tuned differently to emphasize some performance factors over others. The real determinants of real world rendering speed lie elsewhere. Consider the speed of your broadband connection first, then the level of performance provided by the Web server you’re calling up when you visit a site.

A slow site may be due to the Web host, the kind of service (shared or dedicated, for example), and what software the site is using. These days, they’re apt to be database-driven, such as the super-popular WordPress, or a forum, such as vBulletin. There are loads of factors, which I won’t bore you by mentioning here, which conspire to make one site using software of this type seem slower than another. I will tell you in passing that I am very compulsive about testing all our sites to make sure we’re giving you the best possible performance.

All things being equal, a site may also seem slower as the result of the path the data takes to reach your Mac. If a server is located in another part of the country, or in another part of the world, precious milliseconds may be wasted in reaching your Mac.

In short, the tiny portion of rendering time consumed by your state-of-the-art browser and reasonably fast Mac form only a part of the time it takes for the site to display on your computer. Of course, one browser may delight for other reasons, such as the available feature set, or the ability to fine-tune using an extension of one sort or another. Here Firefox holds a huge advantage, even if its rendering time is subpar. In that respect, the rest hold up the rear.

But does any of this really matter all that much if you’re not a power user? That’s a decision you can answer only for yourself.