There has been an ongoing meme among tech journalists (and even the mainstream media) over the years that Apple must fail unless it can be first in all markets served. This attitude is the result of the fact that Apple has been consigned to a small minority of the PC market.

In the PC industry, it has long been felt that only one player can live long and prosper, citing Microsoft’s near-eternal dominance. Even with their share declining some to roughly 90%, give or take a few, how can any other player in the industry possibly stay in business?

Of course, when it comes to open source operating systems, such as Linux, no company is actually earning anything from its distribution, except for those who provide support contracts. Indeed, when it comes to Web servers, the major player remains Apache, an open source app that continues to dominate at the expense of Microsoft. However, Microsoft still earns huge profits from the sale of server products, so being number one doesn’t necessarily matter.

Depending on which survey you examine, the Macintosh has a global market share of roughly 5%, but it’s reputed to be some 20% in the U.S. retail space. Regardless, Mac sales continue to grow ahead of the overall PC market, and Apple makes plenty of money from hardware sales.

In short, Apple can continue to deliver Macs successfully, even when and if the iPad takes over a large portion of the consumer and business PC markets.

Yes, I realize Apple dominates in the media player business, having essentially replaced the Sony Walkman as the verb for such products. Apple made smart moves early on, and turned a nascent product category into a multi-billion dollar success. Every single competitor was trounced. Microsoft’s efforts to duplicate Apple’s walled garden with the Zune failed miserably, and total sales are hardly a blip in the total.

With the iPhone, Apple entered an existing market where traditional handsets had plateaued. The largest growth was confined to third-world countries, where the cheapest gear had the best chance of success. With the arrival of the iPhone and Android OS products that mimicked Apple’s major features, such as touchscreens, smartphones have taken off big time.

As you’ve already heard, far more Android gear is sold in the U.S., in part because there are loads of models available that are offered by all the major wireless carriers. Apple is still tethered to just one, though that limitation will soon change. With a Verizon version of the iPhone, expected early in 2011, you have to expect some sales will be cannibalized from AT&T as contracts expire. Other customers who held off buying iPhones, because of real or perceived problems with AT&T’s network in their city, are expected to take the leap.

In the end, other platforms are apt to continue to do better overall than the iPhone. But as a single product, Apple stands to remain a top-tier builder of mobile devices, and the larger companies will retain their status largely because of all the cheap low-profit gear in their lineups. So long as iPhone sales gains remain in the high double digits, Apple succeeds, even if the Android OS is twice as popular.

For the iPad, nobody really knows how well the competition will fare. Up till now, tablet-based PCs have only flourished strictly in low-volume vertical markets. Apple made the product mass market, and the iPad’s aggressive pricing promises to keep this gadget at the top of the heap for a long while.

Indeed, Samsung’s pricing policy for the competing 7-inch Galaxy Tab is a huge misfire. You only pay less than the iPad for the entry-level product with a two-year data plan from a wireless carrier. If you just want one without the subsidy, the price is $599, despite the smaller display. Can you imagine Samsung’s hubris — or stupidity?

Yes, it’s quite possible that competing tablets will ultimately dominate, just as they have in the smartphone space. But for that to happen, they will have to match and beat the price of an iPad, and provide loads of extra features. Can they do that affordably? Well, maybe, but if Samsung, a company that supplies many key components for Apple’s products, can’t build a cheaper tablet, the fate of potential iPad killers may be decided even before they actually go on sale.

As with the iPod, Apple has taken a huge leap with the iPad, and owns the market, at least for now. As new models with more features, such as built-in cameras, become available, you can bet that Apple will continue to market them aggressively and keep the prices as low as possible. No other company seems able to come close.

But even if the iPad killers take a larger share, so long as Apple can continue to report fast growing sales and great profits, it doesn’t’ make a difference. Too bad far too many alleged industry pundits continue to be clueless about such matters.

It’s hard to realize that, at one time, Apple and Microsoft, in the person of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, were close friends. The very first versions of Word and Excel appeared on the Mac platform before Microsoft moved the lion’s share of development resources to Windows, in effect double-crossing Apple.

In the 1990s, when Apple was really down in the dumps business wise, Jobs crafted a deal with Gates in which Microsoft would continue to build Office for the Mac and, in turn, invested to the tune of $150 million. Now that money didn’t save Apple, but it certainly helped at a time when the financial situation was difficult.

In an unexpected turn of events, Apple beat Microsoft down with the iPod, the iPhone and, it appears, the iPad. Microsoft does well with its traditional office, PC operating system and server products, but consumer offerings haven’t fared well. That is, except perhaps for the Xbox gaming console.

Despite still pushing Silverlight as a viable alternative to Flash for Web-based multimedia content, it does appear that the stars are actually aligned between Apple and Microsoft when it comes to the end game. You see, both are now dedicated to advancing HTML5 as a standard for both traditional PCs and mobile devices.

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On this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, we talk with Laptop magazine’s Avram Piltch about Apple’s spanking new MacBook Air. Along with reports that the product may already be flying off the shelves, particularly the 11.6-inch version, the early reviews are nothing short of spectacular.

Piltch, who is certainly no ardent fan of Apple, has high praise for this revision of this sexy thin and light note-book, and it’s not just the performance factor. You see, compared to other note-books that use solid state storage, the Air is actually priced competitively. It may even be cheaper than some of the generic PC alternatives, simply because Apple is able to get the best price on flash memory.

With a base price of $999, the entry-level MacBook Air may not be the cheapest note-book on the planet, but the designs that come closest cost even more.

Now take a look at the promised iPad killers that are slowly coming to market. Some companies are tying them in to two-year data plans with wireless carriers to make them seem less expensive, but soon as you add up the price of admission — particularly in the months where Wi-Fi access is sufficient for you — you’ll find that the iPad is a much better deal.

Worse, without a 3G plan, such products as the Samsung Galaxy Tab, with a 7-inch display, may be priced at the same level or higher than the cheapest 9.7-inch iPad. Go figure!

Add to that the fact that Apple’s latest SEC filing warns of somewhat lower profit margins — still high compared to most of the consumer electronics industry — and that typically conservative outlook has spooked Wall Street and stalled the meteoric rise in the company’s stock price.

But remember that Apple never releases a product that fails to deliver great profits to the company, even if it’s a few percentage points less than some might hope. What that means is that Apple is going to be far more aggressive about pricing, not to mention the need to cover R&D for new product releases. In the end, as much as Apple is regarded as the BMW of the tech business, you can’t call their prices high compared to identically-equipped competitors.

So, yes, you can buy a big screen Windows note-book for $700. But now load it up with essentially the same options that Apple provides as standard issue, including a superior LCD display with higher resolution, and suddenly the Mac doesn’t seem so expensive.

When you move to the high end of the equation, the Mac Pro has almost always been priced similar to, or lower than, competing workstations from Dell and other top-tier PC box assemblers.

Yes, there are loads of PC boxes out there that are much cheaper than a Mac, and businesses may not particularly prefer to buy computers equipped with Wi-Fi, digital lifestyle apps, not to mention a Web cam. None of those features may be suited to an office environment, yet all of Apple’s note-books, along with the iMac, have them. It makes them more expensive to build, and the price of admission is higher, but Apple sharply limits customization. You can’t, for example, buy ten thousand copies without these and other features, and that is often a reason why businesses won’t choose Apple.

I wonder how things might change with Apple’s new enterprise push, and their deal with Unisys to mine the corporate and government markets. Certainly Apple is taking business customers seriously, but it doesn’t appear they’re going to sacrifice product design or customization to get there.

When it comes to the iPhone, pretty much any competing smartphone using the Android OS, RIM, or Windows Phone 7 OS, will have a similar subsidized price. There may be times when a carrier will cut prices to move product, such as those two-for-one deals at Verizon Wireless. But since Verizon didn’t grow its postpaid subscription roster as much as they hoped in the last quarter, the days may be numbered for such product giveaways.

You can rest assured that there won’t be any two-for-one deals if and when the iPhone joins Verizon’s product list. Apple wouldn’t accept such a marketing scheme for a moment, and Verizon clearly would have to cede major levels of control to get an iPhone to sell. That the iPad is already available almost certainly cements the likelihood such a deal is already in place.

In any case, the next time someone tells you that Apple’s gear is way overpriced, remind them of the iPad, iPhone and iPod. At $49 for an iPod shuffle, you can’t call it costly, nor can you say anything of the sort about the $499 iPad. Indeed, that trendsetting product is priced far more cheaply than pretty much any alleged analyst expected when it was introduced earlier this year.

The version 2.0 iPad will likely be priced the same, since there appears to be no incentive for Apple to drop the price. At the same time, it’ll have more features; consider the presence of a camera almost a lock.

But Apple did reduce the price of the MacBook Air, and that decision has made it tremendously — surprisingly — competitive, even against cheap PC gear.

The other day, Sony’s stock price soared several percent amid clearly unconfirmed rumors that Apple would make a bid for a hostile takeover. This would be an ironic development, in light of the fact that Steve Jobs said some years back that he wanted Apple to be more like Sony, not to mention his high admiration for the original Sony Walkman.

Certainly, the iPod become the modern day Walkman, quickly supplanting the sales rate of the original. By adding more consumer electronics gear to their lineup, Apple began to seem more like Sony, rather than just a PC maker with a predilection for building elegant products.

Nowadays, Apple boasts higher sales than Sony, and a far greater market cap. With over $51 billion of cash hanging around in the bank — or in investments — Apple is perfectly capable of buying up Sony, although the cash reserve after the transaction will be far less.

When making predictions, or spreading rumors, the tech media ought to use a little more common sense. You see, they should be examining Apple’s acquisition history, which doesn’t include purchasing sprawling multinational corporations. Instead, they focus on small companies that have developed technology or services they not only admire, but feel they could utilize for their own products.

So buying an online ad company begat iAd. The original purchase of NeXT gave us Steve Jobs in the executive suite of Apple all over again, not to mention Mac OS X and the salvation of the company. Buying P.A. Semi gave Apple the chip technology and the engineering talent harnessed to build those A4 chips in the iPhone 4, iPad, and other products. Indeed, iTunes is the direct result of another acquisition, an app known as SoundJam, acquired from a Mac utility publisher.

These clever strategic acquisitions were relatively inexpensive as such deals go, involved small groups of employees, and did not engender the severe issues that arise when two large companies combine into one, not to mention all those layoffs.

It makes no sense for Apple to buy Sony, a consumer electronics company whose best days are behind them. It’s not as if Sony has some fantastic invention that Apple craves, and, if they did, I suppose they could always offer to buy the rights for that alone, rather than a large company they don’t need, which would surely create problems that would dilute the combined firm’s value, not to mention the future prospects.

For the same reason, it makes little sense for Apple to buy up Adobe — although it would be a whole lot cheaper — or Face-book, Disney, or any of the other companies frequently mentioned as takeover targets.

I’d sooner believe that a couple of brilliant engineers in a garage, or a startup company with innovative technology, would stand a far better chance of receiving a phone call from Apple with a generous buyout offer.

On the other hand, picking a company that might be a little down and out and targeting it as a potential merger opportunity for Apple sure keeps traffic floating to certain sites. It’s also fun to talk about, though at the end of the day, you don’t see much logic behind these tall tales.

Of course, when Apple was suffering serious sales and profit shortfalls in the 1990s, there was loads of speculation that one of the larger tech companies, such as Sun Microsystems or IBM, would acquire them and fold their technology within a vast corporate bureaucracy.

If that were to occur, however, the impact would be very much the same as other mergers. Some of Apple’s assets would survive, but others would vanish, not to mention loads of employees who suddenly found themselves without jobs, or couldn’t tolerate their new bosses.

Take a look, for example, at Adobe’s merger with Macromedia. Flash was in, FreeHand was out, and Adobe fights to this day to justify spending billions of dollars to acquire an aging technology and make it relevant for smartphones.

There’s even some talk of a combination between Adobe and Microsoft, the better to compete with Apple, but that makes even less sense. If a company isn’t doing so well separately, such combinations rarely improve the situation.

Do you remember HP’s controversial acquisition of Compaq? Other than having another brand name with which to sell generic PC boxes, where was the advantage? Indeed, the executive credited, or blamed, for this merger, Carly Fiorina, was subsequently ousted from HP, and is now busy justifying that failure to potential voters in California, where she’s running for U.S. Senator.

The political implications, however, are beyond the scope of The Tech Night Owl. The point is that large corporate mergers seldom succeed. Focused acquisitions of smaller companies with products, services or technology that will advance the buyer’s portfolio and sales, are usually the most successful.

Apple knows that, which is why they will definitely not squander their huge cash reserves.