You know you can buy a netbook running Windows for less than $300, but the very cheapest Mac, the mini, is now $699. You also know that you can get a smartphone with the Google Android OS on it for next to nothing, but the cheapest iPhone is last year’s 3GS, at $99 with a two-year contract.

Now it’s also true that the very cheapest smartphone will probably handle the basics reasonably well. You’ll be able to make and receive phone calls on them, and be limited by your carrier’s network in your neighborhood. There will be email, Web browsing and other features you expect from such a device. Input will be done via touchscreen, tiny keyboard, or both in the more powerful models.

Certainly any plain PC will also be able to handle basic chores without a whole lot of pain, such as Internet access, email, and running some basic productivity apps. And, despite the claims to the contrary in Consumer Reports, you need a fairly powerful PC with a good graphics card for gaming. But CR lives in another universe when the real world is concerned.

So if your goal is basic functionality without the elegance and frills, you can see why so many people choose tech gear on the basis of price rather than quality. Certainly you can get a perfectly serviceable cell phone for free with a contract, so why bother with an iPhone?

It all comes down to this: What need should such a gadget — or even a personal computer for that matter — fill? Are you the sort of person who doesn’t mind getting your hands dirty fiddling around with rough interfaces and complicated and convoluted steps to alter settings or just access a basic function? If so, you might not care about the fineries of a great operating system, sexy hardware and predictable performance.

Yes, I realize some argue that Apple overprices their products, whether for greed or other reasons, and that you can supposedly get equal or better hardware for a lot less money. The fact that Apple also regularly reports high profits cements that impression.

Now when it comes to Macs, I have done fairly regular price comparisons in recent years. Of course, the comparisons have to be fair, which means both the Mac and the PC must have equivalent hardware and equivalent software, including the extras that include iLife on the former. That means that you can’t have a crippled version of Windows. You need the professional version with all features unlocked, and each and every element, from graphics card, to processor type and clock speed, must be as close as possible.

When you do this sort of comparison, you may be surprised to find that prices aren’t so different. Sometimes the Mac is actually cheaper. If not, you only pay slightly more. As you move up the ladder to higher-end gear, you’ll find that Macs have an even greater advantage. A Mac Pro, equipped with the latest and greatest Intel Xeons, for example, usually costs hundreds less than similar products from Dell, which would mean a Precision Workstation.

But even with similarly priced gear, there is something you can’t do on a Mac, which is to downgrade to the basics. Hardware customization is limited, except for the Mac Pro. You can’t eliminate extras that you might not need, such as Wi-Fi or a Web cam in an office where you don’t need either. I suppose that might present a problem in a business setting, where corporate purchasing managers are accustomed to equipping a PC just so, free of options that aren’t necessary.

I understand that point of view, and why, when a company needs to buy a few thousand similarly equipped PCs, customized in the same way, the Mac may not be on their radar even if it has other advantages. I’m sure Apple knows this. They don’t want to become bottom feeders or compete with the overall PC market in the rush to beat everyone on price and price alone. As Apple says, they won’t build “junk,” and having a heavy share of the premium PC market has been a successful strategy. They won’t earn a heavy market share in the enterprise, but that doesn’t matter.

When it comes to the iPhone, we’re still talking of a premium-priced device, and it may well be that the unit costs alone will result in lost sales to other smartphone platforms. But every single iPhone sold yields a hefty profit margin. So even if Android OS products ultimately become more popular than the iPhone worldwide — and they’re moving ahead in the U.S. now — that won’t stop Apple from remaining competitive and generating huge profits and sales.

More to the point, tens of millions of people appreciate an operating system that is smooth and, usually at any rate, just works. That can’t always be said for the Android OS, although it’s getting better, and the problems with Windows are well known, even though Microsoft has improved things.

Apple has succeeded with elegance; the competition just wants to make it cheap. You get to choose what you prefer.

You know that Apple is, nowadays, earning far more income from mobile products than from Macs. Right now, more people own products powered by iOS than powered by Mac OS X, so you begin to wonder where this all might be heading.

Recently, Apple applied for a patent covering touchscreens on regular Macs, which would appear to mean that you’ll be able to use them in roughly the same fashion as an iPhone or iPod touch, counting for the differences in screen size.

The possibility of running the iOS under — or in place of — Mac OS X has also gained traction among people who love to speculate about what Apple is up to.

There is also that statement that Steve Jobs made before he returned to Apple, that the company he co-founded should milk the Mac for all its worth, and then move on to the next great thing. That thing, it appears, must be the iOS, and now that it is more popular than the Mac, are we seeing the handwriting on the wall?

Consider, also, the last WWDC, where Apple almost pretended there was no Mac or Mac OS X, except for a few workshops. You could almost believe that Apple had put Macs on the back burner, except to release simple product refreshes to keep the products from growing stale.

Then there are those quotes from Steve Jobs comparing the PC to a truck, and the mobile platforms to slick cars. That indeed conveys the impression that Macs are becoming outmoded, and, except for a small devoted core of users, will soon become extinct.

But wait a minute! It’s also true that more and more Macs are being sold each and every quarter? Sales increases continue to lead the PC industry overall, and estimates score potential Apple sales as reaching — or perhaps exceeding — four million this quarter. Compare that to the final quarter of 2000, where Apple moved less than 400,000 Macs.

The continuing growth of the Mac segment comes at a time when Apple seems barely spending any marketing money to spur sales. New models seldom garner more than a simple press release; indeed, the last MacBook refresh didn’t even merit that. Apple is clearly depending on the “halo effect,” that sales of iPhones and iPads, and even iPods, introduce people to Apple’s cool and iconic technology, thus convincing them that their next PC purchase ought to be a Mac. That may be why those cute “Mac Versus PC” ads have been discontinued.

Now it’s fair to say nobody has said the PC is forever, although I suppose Microsoft would wish it so, since they wouldn’t have to spend so many billions of dollars in failed attempts to move beyond their core operating system, server and productivity software products. Then again, Microsoft makes huge profits from those legacy products, so it’s not as if they were in danger of folding anytime soon. Even if sales were to flatten and, ultimately, decline, that process might take years to complete. Microsoft’s executives still have plenty of time to fatten their bank accounts before the boom falls.

As far as Apple is concerned, I suppose it is possible to craft a version of the iOS for desktop Macs. After all, that OS is derived from Mac OS X. But the simplification is largely to make it possible to use touchscreens. A traditional setup with mouse (or trackball) and keyboard wouldn’t require so many sacrifices, although there might be things that could be ported over to help make Mac OS X more useful to beginners and those for whom a sophisticated Unix-based OS is just too much for their needs.

But the real question is why Apple would want to ditch Mac OS X and deploy the mobile version on regular Macs. I fail to see where that would make any sense, except perhaps to refine interfaces here and there. If people really want the iOS — and require many of the functions a PC offers — the iPad and its successors ought to fill the bill nicely.

Indeed, I have suggested on several occasions that the iPad is the Mac of the future, although a lot of changes will have to be made between now and then before that makes sense. I don’t need to bore you with a laundry list of what you can’t do on the iPad, beyond the lack of a conventional file system and — so far at least — the lack of native support for printing. At least you can get apps to print your documents and Web pages, but they require a desktop Mac or PC to connect to a printer for that to happen. The iPad also requires iTunes for syncing; it cannot exist all by itself, at least not yet.

As far as Macs are concerned, I’m not selling mine anytime soon. You shouldn’t either, unless the iPad does everything you need a computer to do.

Although I’m not regarded by Apple as a top-tier reviewer — in the fashion of a Walt Mossberg or my good friend David Pogue — they do ultimately get around to me and are gracious about honoring my requests for review products.

This week, for example, I got a big box containing a 32GB iPhone 4 with a pair of bumpers, a Magic Trackpad and a Battery Charger. You’ll see coverage of all three in the weeks to come.

Right now, however, I’m going to discuss everyone’s favorite whipping boy, AT&T, the first and still the only U.S. carrier for the iPhone. Yes, I realize that contract is not a forever thing and other carriers will carry the phone too, possibly as early as January of 2011, but we’ll cross that bridge later on.

First and foremost, my experience with AT&T, here in the Phoenix area, has been largely positive. Customer support has always been first-rate, and it does appear they’re making an honest effort to improve network reliability.

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Yes, we know the Michael Douglas character in the 1980’s film, “Wall Street,” said “greed is good,” but you wonder just how far that can go without hurting your customers. And, no, I’m not about to talk about how the character might have evolved in the forthcoming sequel, since I haven’t read the script.

To stay on point: We really didn’t talk much about Net Neutrality in the public space until a certain ISP started throttling torrent downloads, making them really slow. How dare they decide whether a specific type of download merits pushing the brake pedal, even if the downloads might be of questionable legality? I mean, they don’t actually see what you’re downloading, right?

The issue of Net Neutrality has become a political hot potato. Some feel it’s an insidious scheme on the part of the powers that be to control the Internet, whereas others say it’s a good thing, a way to keep your ISP from deciding which traffic you’ll receive, and at what level of performance.

To add to the confusion, there’s that recent suggestion from Google and Verizon Wireless, who partner on all those Android OS phones, that net neutrality should apply strictly to “wired” services, such as Verizon’s own FiOS, Comcast and loads of other services. Wireless services ought to have the right to do what they want, I gather.

In theory, that would mean that Google can pay a special fee to Verizon to allow their content to download at full speed, but other services would find their content delivery slowed unless they paid the price. I suppose the fees could be managed the same as Google’s pay-per-click ad scheme, where the ones who give higher bids get precedence.

Is this the sort of broadband service you want?

Now it’s perfectly true that you are already paying for specific levels of service. If you want to save money and you don’t mind tepid download and upload speeds, there’s probably a plan for you. If you seek the fastest available performance from your ISP, there’s a plan for that as well. Most ISPs have different tiers of service to accommodate customer needs.

If you happen to use too much bandwidth, I’m sure there’s something buried in your ISP’s service agreement that allows them to throttle service or charge you extra for your “abuse” of their system. Certainly we know that AT&T did just that when they modified their data plans ahead of the launch of the iPhone 4.

All this is perfectly legal and is an accepted way of doing business. What’s more, if the ISP decides that income from their broadband services isn’t sufficient, they can raise the rates. Sure, they might have to submit paperwork to a local or state regulatory agency first, but if their financials demonstrate potential losses, they’d probably get a favorable ruling. They usually do.

On the other hand, if that ISP sets up toll lanes to allow third-party services to send data through their pipes at higher speed, it becomes a have and have-not situation. A smaller company that doesn’t have the extra funds to finance higher traffic rates faces potential discrimination. If they deliver poor performance to their customers, they get fewer hits, and, as a consequence, sources of income, such as ads, might be negatively impacted. Talk about possible extortion!

Now it seems to me that all of this ought to be perfectly logical to anyone who seriously considers the situation and wants an open Internet. However, as soon as you expect government agencies, such as the FCC in the U.S., to intervene in the affairs of an ISP, there are all sorts of political considerations on many sides of the equation. The carrier wants to be able to conduct business fettered as little as possible by government regulations. Bureaucrats and elected officials, no doubt with pure intentions in many cases, want to protect the public they represent from being abused by heartless and greedy businesses.

Unfortunately, when governments meddle, there may be unpleasant and unexpected consequences, even if, as I said, the motivations were honorable.

I suppose it would be best of the ISPs simply got together and issued public guarantees that they’ll never throttle Internet traffic, although I suppose they’d have justification to give special priority to emergency services, such as 911 systems, under extraordinary situations. I don’t think that many of you would dispute an ISP’s right to open the floodgates for services that might save your life.

Otherwise, they should leave well enough alone. I do not think Google — or any other company — ought to have the right to use financial muscle to put themselves in the Internet fast lane at the expense of other companies. It’s not even the issue of enriching your ISP. They surely have the right to charge a fair price for their services.

But when the delivery speeds of those services can be bought and sold, the public is being cheated. Now maybe your broadband provider would prefer to have governments regulate their ability to control traffic, so they don’t have to do the right thing, and can make the excuse that they have no choice. They should be careful what they wish for.