Predictably, Apple has taken the iOS experience to heart in crafting Mac OS X Lion. In the first preview of 10.7, Apple focused on four major features, or “tent poles,” if you want to use the label applied to the initial demonstrations of iOS 4 earlier this year.

In keeping with that tradition, the first Lion preview made it clear how the iOS has influenced Mac OS X’s developers. This is particularly true of the first features to be revealed, one of which will actually debut for Snow Leopard users within 90 days.

That new feature is the Mac App Store, which is totally reminiscent of the iOS App Store. You’ll be able to search, browse, purchase, and, of course, download the titles you want. You’ll also be able to upgrade in place without having to run special installers, copy files from a disk image or anything of that sort.

How this will integrate with existing apps is a good question. I suppose many will be readily adapted, but I wouldn’t necessarily regard it as suitable for a sprawling productivity suite, such as Microsoft Office or the Adobe Creative Suite. Then again, I’ve been proven wrong before, and, frankly, I was hot and cold about the rumors of a Mac App Store when the rumors first arose some months back.

A key Lion feature is clearly influenced by an app from the Classic Mac OS, known as Launcher. Launchpad, however, lets you observe and launch all of your available apps from a full-screen of icons that will supplant your regular desktop and open document windows. It’s heavily influenced by the iOS Home page.

You’ll also be able to categorize apps into folders, just as you can with the iOS, so you’re not confronted with hundreds of confusing app icons to manage. You’ll also be able to use a swipe on a trackpad, or Magic Mouse, to switch from one screen to the next.

It’s not clear at this point whether you’ll have to manually add apps to the Launchpad — and they will be there automatically if you get them from the Mac App Store — or the system will scan your hard drives and put them there automatically. Without knowing much about the implementation, I’d prefer to just pick and choose the ones I want, perhaps by dragging them onto the Launchpad icon.

Lion’s full-screen capability simply extends a feature already available in some apps, including QuickTime, and makes it system wide. Click the Green “maximize” button on document window and you should, in theory, be able to view any open document in this fashion, free of menu bars and, I suppose, toolbars. I’m not at all certain how this feature is supposed to work with floating palettes, which may be necessary for you to do anything more than look in some apps.

The Mission Control feature evidently takes Expose, Spaces, the Dashboard, and full-screen app windows, and lets you see everything neatly organized on a single screen, with various and sundry tricks to get to the apps and documents you want.

In passing, I wonder if Mission Control wasn’t designed, in part, to make Microsoft look foolish for touting the ability to pin document windows at the ends of the screen as a compelling feature of Windows 7. I mean, you have to wonder how lame an operating system must be if the best they can say about it is how you manage document windows. With Mac OS X Lion, Apple is clearly using Mission Control simply as an introduction to what’s forthcoming.

Among the “lesser” features of Lion include:

• Improved Multitouch Gestures: These appear to be confined to recent MacBook and MacBook Pro trackpads (plus the new MacBook Air), along with the Magic Mouse. So if you’re using another input device on your Mac desktop, you may want to get with the program.
• Auto Save: This is actually a feature that should have been on the Mac OS from Day One. Inspired by the iOS, your documents are automatically saved as you work on them. With your Apple mobile device, an app is simply suspended when you switch to another, at which point data is also saved. The biggest bugaboo on any personal computer is forgetting to save your stuff. Your system crashes, and you lose all your unsaved data. You shouldn’t have to remember to press Command-S every so often to protect yourself, or keep lots of recent backups.
• Auto-Resume Apps: Also reminiscent of the iOS, apps will be suspended and reopen immediately once you launch them again. As with Auto-Save, it is likely that developers will have to update their software to support these new features.

All in all, it’s clear you’re only seeing a small part of the picture here. Apple is going to have to deliver a full palette of changes and improvements to justify a full upgrade price with Lion. Adding a handful of features from the iOS, however useful, won’t cut it.

I’m expecting a lot more, and, in the months ahead of Lion’s promised Summer 2011 release, there will be plenty of meat and potatoes to talk about.

There’s a report in AppleInsider, published Tuesday morning, which claims that the CEO of TweetDeck, publisher of an Android OS app incorrectly identified by Steve Jobs during Apple’s quarterly conference session with the financial community, and a Google VP, somehow refuted complaints about Android’s alleged “fragmented” nature.

However, when you read the article, you’ll find that nothing has actually been refuted. The headline is misleading, because what’s actually being done is typical corporate misdirection.

So we have the comment from Jobs that TwitterDeck must deal with 100 different software versions and 244 different handsets to fully support Android OS devices. Jobs called it “a daunting challenge.”

In a response sent via Twitter — evidently the new medium to deliver official corporate statements — TweekDeck CEO Iain Dodsworth calls the fragmentation dilemma a “small” issue. Notice he doesn’t actually disprove Jobs’ claims. He just says it’s not a problem, and that might be a matter of degree, that they can cope with the challenge, and thus they can claim success. Besides, why should he be believed? It’s not as if he’d confess to the claimed problems, even if they existed.

So far Jobs is not exactly being refuted.

Now we come to the response from Google engineering VP Andy Rubin (a former Apple employee, by the way), described as the “father” of the Android OS, which consists of nothing more than a silly Tweet that doesn’t directly address anything Jobs said.

Again, we see the supposed victims of Jobs’ complaints being unable to respond to his statements with factual information, and this harkens back to that famous blog entry from Jobs that attacked the technical viability of Adobe Flash, particularly on mobile platforms. When you got past Adobe’s clumsy smoke and mirrors, you noticed that they were never actually able to provide data to disprove what Jobs said.

Indeed, reviews of the version of Flash that was installed on Android OS 2.2 simply vindicates what Apple said. Although some Flash-based sites worked well, others delivered tepid performance, system crashes, and, worse, couldn’t recognize touch-based commands. Adobe has still been unable to answer the challenge to prove they can deliver a version of Flash for the iOS that answers all or most of Apple’s objections.

I realize there is an element of corporate spin control in Jobs’ outspoken complaints about the Android OS. Consider his use of the term “integrated” in referring to Apple’s walled garden of hardware and software, and “fragmented” when he mentions the open source Android OS.

I certainly understand why some of you do not feel comfortable with Apple’s restrictions in the iOS, particularly the inability to hack the system without jailbreaking, and use applications not in the App Store. You certainly have a right to object to the inability to make system changes you might regard as necessary to enhance your experience with the iPhone, and the inability to install apps that Apple refuses to offer.

However, I rather think that the biggest obstacle to the iPhone’s growth in the U.S. is not integration, but AT&T. So long as the carrier’s network is subpar in certain key regions of the country, such as New York and San Francisco, Apple is losing loads of potential customers. When the iPhone comes to Verizon Wireless, as it inevitably will, sales are likely to accelerate.

And remember that, when you buy an iPhone, you’re Apple’s customer. They provide support for the hardware. AT&T’s obligation is strictly the network. Compare that to any other mobile handset, where you are the customer of the carrier, and the handset maker is fundamentally irrelevant when it comes to getting support to help solve a problem.

While the media has labeled Jobs’ presence at the conference call as an act of defense, his posture comes across as precisely the reverse. He was there to crow over Apple’s record earnings, and the fact that sales of the iPhone were way ahead of even the most optimistic projections from analysts who are still wondering whether Antennagate was having a potential impact.

The Apple offensive will continue Wednesday with that highly-anticipated media event that will reveal new Mac products and reportedly provide the first preview of Mac OS 10.7, code-named Lion.

Certainly, when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer enthusiastically disparages the competition, coverage is usually uncritical. He is never asked the hard questions about Microsoft’s inability to make a dent on the mobile universe, the apparent tepid response to Windows Phone 7, and its oh-so-obvious failure to advance the state of the art.

More to the point, shouldn’t we regard Ballmer as being defensive, the result of Microsoft’s inability to expand its presence in the consumer market?

Now in the wake of Apple’s record earnings, the stock market price took a dump, though rebounded somewhat. Evidently Wall Street is concerned that Apple’s traditionally conservative guidance for the current quarter doesn’t contain expected profits that are quite as high as they hoped for. The fact that the iPad’s sales didn’t quite match the rosy projections is also dragging down the stock, though to be fair to Apple, they only managed to catch up with demand for the product in September. Up till then, it was on serious backorder, and, aside from Apple, few third party dealers handled the iPad.

We’ll have to see how the iPad fares in the current quarter, where there are no shipping delays to sap its sales potential, and lots more places to buy one. But that’s also true for the iPhone 4, which is still backordered and in short supply. Maybe we’ll never see that promised white version, and it doesn’t seem the customers care.

It has become extremely tiresome repeating the same old criticisms against faux analysts and journalists who think they actually know something about Apple, Inc. This is particularly true when it comes to their soaring sales and profits.

This past quarter, however, the reality was somewhat closer than you may have expected. Total revenue for the quarter was $20.34 million, with a net quarterly revenue of $4.31 billion, or $4.64 per diluted share. Compare that to a total revenue of $12.21 billion and a net quarterly profit of $2.53 billion, or $2.77 per diluted share last year, and you’ll see where sales were very much out of the ballpark in most respects.

Indeed, the specifics across the board were pretty impressive. Total Mac sales were 3.89 million, compared to estimates in the 3.7 million range. The iPad came in somewhat under what some suggested, at 4.19 million, but that Apple’s second PC line has, in its second quarter, already exceeded sales of Macs, represents a crowning achievement. Don’t forget that shipments only recently caught up with demand, and the dealer roster has sharply increased for the holiday quarter, so it’s hard to guess where the totals may go. What’s more, I haven’t begun to look at the sales impact if you combine, as some suggest, iPad and Mac sales, since they are two viable variations on the PC theme.

So far so good, but the real amazing sales number has to be the iPhone, totaling 14.1 million, which is up 91 percent from last year. All this success despite the fact that Apple has yet to catch up with demand, and normal delivery delays are still in the one week range. Don’t forget the alleged impact of Antennagate and the refusal of Consumer Reports to recommend the iPhone 4, which clearly meant next to nothing.

Now compare the iPhone numbers to the 12.1 million BlackBerry smartphones moved by RIM in its last quarter, and you can see where the analysts were thoroughly confounded.

It’s rare for Steve Jobs to be around for a quarterly conference call with financial analysts, but Apple’s mercurial CEO was at his feisty best fielding questions after an opening statement. Referring to the iPhone’s surprising momentum: “It handily beat RIM’s 12.1 million Blackberries sold in their last quarter. We’ve now passed RIM. I don’t see them catching up with us in the foreseeable future. It will be a challenge for them to create a mobile software platform and convince developers to support a third platform.”

If there was a negative figure, it was the sale of 9.05 million iPods, which represents an 11 percent decline over last year in unit sales. However, if you regard an iPhone as, in part, an iPod, the sales deficiency seems quite understandable.

You can find the rest of Apple’s numbers here.

After reporting the fact that the iPhone beat the Blackberry, Jobs went on to boast that no other smartphone platform can match the App Store’s 300,000 apps. He went on to denigrate what he regards as the fragmented user interfaces on the Android OS platform, and the difficulty for customers to get used to the interface differences from model to model and carrier to carrier.

“We think Android is very, very fragmented and becoming more fragmented by the day,” he remarked matter-of-factly. As regular readers of these columns know, I’ve been saying that for quite a while now.

Jobs also went on to point out what Apple perceives to be the deficiencies of the so-called iPad killers, pointing out a major shortcoming of the 7-inch models that have been recently announced. You see, those screens provide only 45% of the display area as an iPad, and, as Jobs says: “This size isn’t sufficient to create great tablet apps.”

So folks who might have held out hopes for a 7-inch iPad won’t get those hopes fulfilled anytime soon — or ever, if Jobs has his way.

On the business front, Jobs said, “We haven’t pushed it [the iPad] real hard in business, and it’s being grabbed out of our hands.”

Jobs, clearly on a roll, exclaimed: “We’ve got a tiger by the tail here, and this is a new model of computing which we’ve already got tens of millions of people trained on with the iPhone, and that lends itself to lots of different aspects of life, both personal and business.”

With the vast majority of Fortune 100 companies working with iPads and iPhones, it’s clear Apple doesn’t have to work terribly hard to expand the platform.

Says Jobs, again referring to those alleged iPad killers: “Our potential competitors are having a tough time coming close to iPad’s pricing. iPad incorporates everything we’ve learned about building high value products. We create our own A4 chip, software, battery chemistry, enclosure, everything. This results in an incredible product at a great price. The proof will be in the pricing of our competitors’ products, which will offer less for more.”

Even more intriguing is Apple’s guidance for the current quarter, with sales projections of $23 billion. Compare that to the industry consensus that Microsoft will report $19 billion in sales, and you can see where Apple won’t just be the tech industry leader when it comes to market cap but, at long last, in sales as well.

I can’t say I was surprised over your reactions to some of my suggestions about improving Mac OS X. After encountering a personal experience with one of those typical file permissions irritants, I got several responses with helpful suggestions to fix things.

But that isn’t the point. I know that the right Terminal command or third party utility can repair (or at least change) the wrong permissions. What some of these people don’t seem to realize — or are unwilling to accept — is the fact that a world-class personal computer operating system shouldn’t require manual labor to clean up such silliness.

I realize that power users might resent the mere suggestion that playing around with the guts of Mac OS X might not be a good thing, or that a more automated system management scheme was sorely needed long ago. But nothing I’m saying should in any way restrict you from getting down and dirty if that’s your preference. But for the rest of us, we’d rather just get our work done and not bother with such nonsense.

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