When I wrote yesterday’s column, I lamented over the major scaling back of iOS 4.2’s AirPrint feature. Despite Apple’s original promise that you’d be able to print to shared printers on your Mac or PC, that feature died during the development process. For now you’re limited to a smattering of HP devices that support wireless, driverless printing. Period.

This doesn’t mean there’s no solution beyond buying a new HP printer. You can buy one of those third-party printing utilities for the iOS, or you can experiment with a hack that restores the deleted AirPort shared printing features to Mac OS 10.6.5.

I never say never, and yesterday I said I didn’t want to try one of those hacks because of potential incompatibilities. After considering the question, though, I decided that it was worth a try, because it’s so easy to apply. You can find the down and dirty details over at the Ars Technica site, if you’re curious.

Now I don’t pretend to know why this highly-touted feature was dropped. Some suggest unexpected bugs, or perhaps some intellectual property and/or licensing concerns. Regardless, I did install the hack and, as others have reported, found that it was easy to select a shared printer and get pretty decent output results.

I’m currently reviewing an Epson Artisan 835 multifunction printer. Without going into extensive detail, it’s a mite pricey, at $299.99. But output quality is mostly first-rate, particularly with photos, where Epson usually excels. Even text is more presentable than previous Epson devices, although the “Draft” mode, which speeds up printing substantially and saves ink, gives you mediocre results.

In any case, I was readily able to access the Print function from mobile Safari on my iPhone 4. In the next dialog, you’re able to select your printer, choose the number of copies, and click Print to activate the function. After applying the 10.6.5 hack, the iPhone could see the Artisan 835 printer. Clicking Print was seamless. The Print screen soon vanished, and I was rewarded with pretty respectable output a few minutes later.

To be fair, this is a no frills feature. You don’t have any way to select specific print quality or color options, for example. There’s also no guarantee that your printer will work using this hack; I made no effort to try any other printers. That may be one of the reasons Apple dropped the feature. On the other hand, there were no downsides that I could see. My Mac was no less stable, and the iPhone didn’t hiccup during the process.

As for the future, there’s a published report about another of those legendary one liners from Steve Jobs on this subject. This one states that “Lots more coming soon. It’s what it takes to make a giant leap to driverless printing, which is huge.”

Assuming the letter is genuine, and that’s by no means certain, it’s always possible Apple is signalling a new generation of printers with embedded drivers. You won’t need to install printer software on your Mac and PC and suffer potential incompatibilities. Print dialogs will be consistent, and the OS will simply derive custom configuration information when querying the printer hardware. It’ll also save loads of storage space on your computer, since you don’t have to worry about the extra files.

Meanwhile, there are published reports of a mid-December release of iOS 4.3, which is supposed to add publication subscription features of some sort, such as the proposed digital newspaper from News Corp. Nothing has been said, so far, about restoring full AirPrint functionality, though that might be a useful accompaniment to the subscription feature.

In any case, one hopes that AirPrint will ultimately realize its potential, or more people will decide that they don’t need printing, but, despite the skepticism from some quarters, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

On to other misses in iOS 4.2.1, I still wonder why Apple hasn’t figured out a way to allow you to have more than one signature in Mail. They seem not to realize that you might have different addresses for business and personal use, and you don’t want “Sent from my iPhone” or “Sent from my iPad” to pollute your responses, although they can be easily removed.

You should also be able to set rules, or be able to import the ones that you may have already established in the desktop version of Mail. Certainly, if your Mac is running most of the time, and is retrieving email on a regular schedule, the messages you retrieve on your iOS device will be organized in various folders in accordance with those rules — that is if you’re using an IMAP-based account. Otherwise, you’re out of luck.

A built-in spam filter would be nice as well. Early on, one tech commentator suggested to me that Apple didn’t add that feature to the iOS because the scanning process would consume too much in the way of precious system resources. That train has already left the station. I have little doubt that today’s iPhone, iPod touch and iPad are quite powerful enough to handle the demands of catching junk mail. While it’s true that many email services these days, from the one provided by your ISP, to such popular offerings as Gmail, are quite capable of handling spam filtering to a reasonable degree, a selectable feature of this sort would be really helpful.

I haven’t even begun to address Smart Folders and other needed email enhancements. For me, the mobile version of Mail is too basic, and adding an integrated Inbox and threaded messaging is just a poor beginning.

When Apple announced the launch of AirPrint for iOS 4.2, I hoped that a workable solution had been found for printing on one of Apple’s mobile devices. But I was wrong!

Originally, AirPrint was supposed to work wirelessly with printers that supported that feature without external drivers, which is essentially limited to a small number of HP devices, or to printers shared by your Mac or PC. That was the promise, but only the former remained; the latter vanished during the development process.

In fact, the original 4.2 itself died in the test labs, to be replaced by a bug fix version, 4.2.1. Certainly Apple didn’t need any grief during the crucial holiday season, especially from iPad owners who had been lusting after this update to deliver key features for the number one tablet computer on the planet.

Now to be fair to Apple, it appears that you can enable shared printer support for AirPrint in Mac OS 10.6.5 via a hack that you can find on several sites you can search on Google. And, no, I haven’t tried that trick, because I prefer to concentrate on something any user of an iOS device is apt to use, rather than something that’s strictly experimental. Perhaps Apple encountered some last minute glitches, or intellectual property obstacles, but I hope that situation will soon be remedied, perhaps with a 4.3?

In a sense, this is a sad development to me. I had high hopes of being able to print from my iPhone 4 without the need of third-party software, or jumping through hoops. While I understand the hopes and dreams for a paperless revolution, there comes a time when hard copy is still necessary in these parts.

As for the rest of the iOS 4.2.1 package, AirPlay sounds promising, or would be if I actually planned to stream content from my iPhone to my Apple TV. Having the ability to search the text on a Web page in Safari is also promising.

Most of the other significant features are probably more compelling on the iPad. Not having multitasking, a unified Mail Inbox and all the other iOS 4.x goodies, was something that left iPad users feeling second best, I gather. Not that it hurt sales much. In fact, with the rapid expansion of sales outlets, I expect Apple is going to do everything in their power to make sure that the iPad of your choice is readily available somewhere close to you. You shouldn’t have to travel very far to pick one up in person; no need to wait for the delivery person to bring it to you, unless you live far away from a chain store that carries consumer electronics gear.

As to getting the update, online checking in iTunes appears to be staggered and is repeated every few days. If it doesn’t show up in iTunes when you connect your eligible iOS device, click Check for Update. If all is well, you should be offered the ability to Download or Download and Install. If you’re antsy about installing updates until the dust settles, choose the former. You don’t have to actually install 4.2.1 until you are confident that it won’t brick your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

Now there was yet another update to be had Monday, and that is Apple TV 4.1, which applies strictly to the new, tinier version introduced a few weeks ago. If you own an original Apple TV, you’re out of luck. It uses a different OS (the current model contains the iOS), and it’s highly likely that you’ll see nothing but a critical bug fix or security update from here on.

In any case, Apple TV 4.1 adds support for AirPlay, and VoiceOver, the latter providing a reading of the contents of the gadget’s menu, using one of Apple’s famous digital voices.

The Apple TV update went well, though I wasn’t offered it when I first opened mine. Instead, I had to navigate to the Updates screen (under the General) category. What’s more, while I was offered the opportunity to Download and Install, I didn’t notice any descriptions of the changes and fixes. That’s taking simplicity too far, though I should mention that I also got a notice about a firmware update for my Samsung Blu-ray player, and, other than some impenetrable version numbers, no list of fixes was offered there either. I suppose that’s the way and the truth for consumer electronics gear.

Apple TV 4.1 updated in about 10 minutes or so, from the start of the download to the launch of the device with its main menu. Samsung’s download was endless, consuming more than 30 minutes by the time I left my home on some errands. When I returned a while later, I noticed the OK button on the screen which, after selecting, promptly turned the device off.

Although my Apple TV, before the update, behaved reasonably well, there was one glitch. On several occasions, while watching an HD movie rented from Apple, playback would stop and the device would enter some sort of buffering loop. My Internet connection was solid, and the only way I could resume playback was to click on the Menu button on the remote control, to back out of the Play interface, and select the Play option again for that movie. After a few moments, the picture usually returned. I’ve heard of scattered reports that other Apple TV owners have been afflicted by the same bug, and I’m curious to see whether the 4.1 update addresses the problem.

As usual, of course, Apple provides scant details of bug fixes, so the only way to know is to recreate the circumstances where the bug appears, and hope it’s gone.

Yes, we all know that an iPad version 2.0 will be out early next year, probably in February or March. With the onslaught of supposed iPad killers from Samsung, HP, RIM and other companies, this comes as no surprise. Despite having trouble keeping up with demand, Apple moved the iPad into the top slot among all existing tablet-based computers, with 95% of the market.

This almost leads you to wonder if the iPad will remain as dominant in its market as the iPod, for similar reasons. The competition will try to trump Apple with extra features, but they won’t be able to topple the iPad so easily. The fact that the highly-touted Samsung Galaxy Tab can barely match the iPad’s price, even though it incorporates a much cheaper 7-inch display, clearly indicates that Apple has the pricing issues down pat.

Now that they are building loads of them, perhaps economies of scale will even make it possible to drop the price. When industry analyst Stephen Baker, of the NPD Group, suggested that a $499 entry-level price isn’t quite “mass market” when he appeared on The Tech Night Owl LIVE this weekend, I suppose he was largely correct. But if tens of millions of people pay more than that for even a fairly basic personal computer, you have to wonder.

The original iPod, which blew the digital music player market wide open beginning in 2001, started at $399. Yes, it was considered overpriced then, but customers didn’t seem to notice; today’s cheapest iPod is $49. The iPad’s pricing, on the other hand, is supremely aggressive, and this is confirmed by the inability of competitors to match it.

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Apple’s stock took a bit of a hit a few weeks back when they disclosed, during their conference call with financial analysts, that profit margins would be down this quarter. All this despite the fact that the company was still tallying record sales and profits.

Of course, low profit margins for Apple are extraordinarily high for most other tech companies, so it’s not as if you should be concerned that their continued survival is at stake.

In fact, when the iPad first came out, industry analysts were surprised that the opening price, starting at $499, was so much less than they estimated. Certainly that raised expectations that netbooks, regarded by some as a main competitor to Apple’s tablet, would suffer, and it appears they have.

In an interview recorded for this weekend’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, Stephen Baker, vice president for industry analysts for the NPD Group, suggested that the iPad, though perceived not to be a costly gadget, was actually priced higher than lots of popular tech gear, suggesting that a starting price of $499 doesn’t quite take it into the “mass market.” With soaring sales, he offered a prediction in response to my question of whether iPad 2.0 would have a lower retail price: “I think you will see in 2011 much cheaper iPads, yes.”

Baker didn’t contradict my suggestions of prices for the entry-level model starting at $349 or $399. More to the point, whether or not Apple makes the iPad any cheaper, it’s a sure thing you’ll see one or two cameras as part of the package. It’s not because the alleged iPad killers have beaten Apple to the punch with such features. Rather, it’s a natural evolution of the product. Besides, it’s not as if sales have suffered any.

When it comes to the iPod, when it first came out, at $399 for the debut version in 2001, so-called expert analysts said it was too expensive. There was no way people would buy a digital music from a company at that price. Besides, and this is awfully familiar nowadays, what experience did Apple have in building consumer electronics gear? They had conveniently forgotten Apple’s earlier forays into that arena, such as the QuickTake digital camera.

These days, sales of the iPod are declining slightly. Nonetheless, Apple is safely ensconced in the number one spot, and also runs the number one legal digital music resource on the planet. The cheapest iPod is $49 in one of several colors. Nothing expensive about that.

The iPhone was pricy at its debut, largely because there was no carrier subsidy. Today, you can get a 3GS remnant for $99 in the U.S., assuming you sign the standard two-year service contract. The iPhone 4 is $199 and $299, depending on storage capacity, and all these prices are identical to most competing gear with the Android or Microsoft mobile operating systems. The exception is where carriers want to dump product into the market place, and offer a two-for-one special. But even two pieces of garbage isn’t exactly a replacement for one quality product, but I’m half serious. I’m not really suggesting that phones from the likes of HTC, Motorola, and other handset makers, are necessarily junk. They certainly seem usable enough.

When it comes to Macs, the price versus value equation is cloudier. Some suggest it’s hard for Apple to justify a $999 price for the MacBook when mainstream PC box assemblers are offering supposedly full-featured note-books for as little as a third of that price. Of course, when you actually look at the features, option them appropriately, the price disparity is almost always sharply reduced.

A thin and light portable, such as the revised MacBook Air, actually appears to be a bargain at the $999 entry point, especially compared to competitors who traditionally offered somewhat similar models for quite a bit more.

Moving up the price scale, among all-in-ones, the iMac remains extremely competitive, particularly when you actually do the proper feature comparisons. The Mac Pro historically tends to be ahead of Dell and HP workstations, particularly when they all sport the same expensive Intel Xeon hardware.

I am troubled, though, at the slowly rising prices of the Mac mini. The original G4-based model debuted in 2005 at $499. Intel-equipped models began at $599, and the current version, with a tinier, fancier aluminum-clad case, is $699.

You’d think Apple might have found a way to upgrade hardware, offer a slimmer case, and keep the mini at the original price. Yes, I understand the server version, at $999, is a downright bargain. But those who crave a cheap desktop computer may just find that the elegant mini is just a little too rich for their blood.

In that case, I’m going to avoid the price and feature comparisons. At the same time, there’s no reason whatever for Apple to drop the price or even consider cheaper gear. They know how to butter their bread, and they have no incentive whatever to change their ways.