After all the speculation that Apple was consigning the Mac to the afterthought category, it’s fascinating to see how, in fact, the platform continues to survive and prosper.

After one industry survey opted to merge iPad and Mac sales figures, Apple’s portable PC market share on that survey soared to number three behind Dell and HP, and that approach appears to be catching on.

It doesn’t matter that they have different operating systems, or that the iPad may have sharply-reduced functionality compared to a Mac. Many of the chores for which a PC is generally used can be ably performed with both, particularly for home users who largely use their computers for consumption, such as Web surfing, reading e-books, playing games, listening to music and watching movies.

This doesn’t mean that Apple is going to abandon the Mac anytime soon, particularly since every model update is followed by an uptick in sales. The new iMacs are garnering rave reviews, particularly in light of the improved gaming benchmarks. There’s also loads of promise for the forthcoming Mac Pros, although getting those six-core Intel chips will raise the purchase price beyond the stratosphere. But I suppose that doesn’t matter for content creators who will justify the investment as business expenses, and can benefit from improved productivity.

Another positive development appears to be that Apple may no longer be delivering tepid support for gaming on a Mac. The stellar success of the iPhone and iPod touch — and very likely the iPad — as mobile gaming devices, might be the key factor.

So you already see more powerful graphics across the board on the latest Macs. More to the point, the forthcoming Mac Pro will incorporate higher-end ATI graphic cards, even as standard issue, which are nearly identical to the Windows counterparts except for minor tweaks from Apple, which may help attract some buyers who buy expensive gaming PCs such as Alienware.

Certainly the reports that some 15% to 20% of new game sales made under the Valve Steam application go to Mac users clearly indicates the demand is there. It’s also true, unfortunately, that frame rates for Mac games are a fraction of what comparable Windows boxes deliver. Yes, they are quite playable under Mac OS X, but if you want higher pixel settings, all the shading goodies and other features, it may not be enough.

Some of that might be due to the fact that Mac drivers haven’t been optimized for gaming. There’s also better support in those games for Microsoft’s DirectX graphics features, and the Mac graphics hardware has almost always been notoriously underpowered, because Apple has relied on lower power chips.

Now Apple has certainly remedied the latter to some extent with the latest updates, though it would be nice to see top-of-the-line chips available on all the consumer models as options. But enhancing the software is another matter entirely, and it would probably require an intense commitment on the part of Apple and their graphics chip suppliers — ATI and NVIDIA — to boost performance seriously.

Of course, nothing stops the devoted gamer from using Apple’s Boot Camp, where the native Windows games will run far better for a given level of hardware. But if gaming is a large part of your computing diet, it may not make a whole lot of sense to buy a Mac until they get their acts together in the native Mac OS X environment.

On the whole, though, Apple’s clear commitment to the Mac is again raising expectations for Snow Leopard’s successor. Sure, Apple pretty much ignored the Mac at this year’s WWDC, except for developer workshops. But it’s also true that it really doesn’t make sense to deliver a new version of Mac OS X every single year. It’s not as if there’s any evidence that people aren’t buying Macs because of an outdated operating system.

Sure, Microsoft is apparently doing well with Windows 7. But I suspect a large portion of the higher sales are to companies who held off upgrading to Vista. The hardware upgrade cycle, and the apparent end to the economic downturn, has fueled more orders for new PCs. Those PCs come with Windows 7 preloaded, and there’s less incentive to downgrade to XP.

To Microsoft’s credit, yes, many of the worst performance ills and other defects in Vista have been minimized. More and more software is compatible with Windows 7, so there’s a real incentive not to downgrade to a nine-year-old operating system.

At the same time, Apple doesn’t need to rush 10.7. It will arrive when it’s ready, possibly in the middle or latter part of 2011. You’ve already seen reports that Apple is hiring software engineers to help deliver on the promise of incredible new features. But that also may be part of the hype, since Apple knows that those want ads are seen by the media, and are thus quoted in order to keep the buzz going.

Over the years, the Mac remained a well-kept secret in the personal computing universe, nearly non-existent except for a devotees among content creators, including musicians, graphic artists and film editors.

This unfortunate disconnect meant that Mac software was generally confined to the back of a retail computer store in the days before the Internet went mass market, if you could find any at all. I remember locating a bunch of dusty boxes at some of those stores, and every last one of them was outdated. But I also discovered mail order catalogs that vindicated the Mac, having thousands of titles from which to select.

The situation grew worse in the mid-1990s, when Apple was on the brink. Steve Jobs recently admitted that the company was 90 days away from ruin, and that development would probably have made Microsoft happy, even though they were later persuaded, by Jobs no less, to invest $150 million in Apple.

However, it took years for the press to stop using the “beleaguered” appellation when it came to Apple, and there are still severe bouts of skepticism that you might accurately regard as fishy in some cases.

Take the arrival of the iPod in 2001. Store all your music, or at least enough to fill five gigabytes of storage space.

Up till then digital media players were poor sellers. They were difficult to use, hard to sync with your music library and, in general, inferior replacements for the venerable Walkman. However, the ease of use of the iPod, coupled with relatively fast download speeds, courtesy of FireWire, and the seamless syncing with iTunes, made the new gadget a revelation.

But how could Apple, a computer company, possibly succeed in the consumer electronics marketplace? Yes, we know the truth, but the news media naysayers made that complaint over and over again, despite loads of contrary evidence.

When the iPod soared to number one in the market with a bullet, while adding Windows support and a legal way to download music (and later movies), nearly every competitive product that came out was regarded as a potential “iPod killer.” It doesn’t matter that none made headway. It was inevitable for Apple to fall, since they were closed, while the rest of the industry was open.

When Microsoft double-crossed their PlaysForSure partners, meaning pretty much all iPod competitors, and begat the Zune (a closed platform by the way), success was widely predicted, but the predictions were dead wrong. Today, the iPod still has over 70% of the U.S. market, while the latest and greatest Zune sits at 1%. Microsoft’s “innovation” was to mimic the iPod of a year or two earlier, and maybe add a few bullet-point features to make it seem different. The customers didn’t care.

You know the score with the iPhone. Few believed Apple could make a go of it, yet sales continue to soar. Even that manufacturered Antennagate scandal, designed to bring the iPhone 4 down, has apparently failed miserably. People are still lining up to get theirs, even though some media sources are still trying to engage the issue with post-mortems over how Apple really failed to do right by their customers. Those customers, however, disagree.

Nowadays, we have almost daily revelations about iPad killers. With nearly 3.3 million sales during a shortened first quarter on sale, the iPad’s sales have nearly matched the Mac, even though this device is perennially backordered and, at the same time, becoming available in additional countries.

At first, those alleged industry analysts were talking of sales in the five million range for all tablet computers for all of 2010, and they were rushing to revise their figures. More to the point, it will be months before any supposedly credible alternatives ship, and it’s a huge question whether any of them will gain traction.

Remember that, until the iPad arrived, a tablet computer was basically a Windows PC with a movable display that sported a rudimentary stylus-based touch interface. Steve Ballmer, who still lives in the previous decade when it comes to his vision for the future of personal technology, somehow still believes that tablets must run Windows, even though that marketing strategy has been shown to be unsuccessful except for a few vertical markets.

True, there are possibly more credible iPad killers on the horizon. One, from HP, will use the WebOS they acquired in buying Palm, although it hasn’t been proven that this operating system can scale up to a larger mobile device. There will also be a RIM BlackPad, based on the BlackBerry smartphone, which will reportedly appear this fall. But does anyone really expect that RIM will fare any better, since they have yet to deliver a credible consumer-oriented smartphone initiative?

Then there are those reports a few months back that the FTC is looking into Apple’s affairs over such question as the closed iOS ecosystem, blocking Flash from the platform, mobile ad practices and whatever other evidence of potential wrongdoing they can unearth. However, an inquiry doesn’t necessary translate into the filing of an official complaint against a company. And even if that comes, Apple would likely make the fewest changes they can get away with, pay a fine, sign a consent decree and get on with business.

As I’ve suggested, at least some of the negative press Apple receives comes from their refusal to play nice with the media. Some of it may even be instigated by competitors who are hoping and praying to kill the Apple gravy train. But that prospect doesn’t seem in the cards, at least for now.

The other day I read yet another sharp critique of the iPhone 4, this one maintaining, that despite all the posted evidence to the contrary, the antenna is far inferior when judged against the competition and, worse, that the built-in cellular radio is of extremely poor quality.

In other words, except for the flashy extras, the iPhone 4 is basically a bad mobile phone, assuming you take that analysis seriously. Since I can’t, not because of any emotional commitment to the product, but in light of all the contrary evidence, I won’t bother to link to the source, nor to a notorious tabloid-style site that chooses to take such claims seriously.

At the same time, Apple has actually removed the comparative smartphone antenna information from their site, although you can still find the videos showing the consequences of a death grip on various models on YouTube. Naturally, this decision is apt to breed yet another conspiracy theory, that perhaps Apple was threatened with legal action or, in fact, had exaggerated their claims.

Or, perhaps more pertinent, maybe they just didn’t care to offer any publicity to the competition, now that the Antennagate scandal has died down and people are returning to their normal lives. And, of course, buying iPhones as fast as Apple can deliver them.

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So when Steve Jobs was asked once about whether Apple was committed to the PowerPC some years back, he replied yes, but added Apple always wanted options. Well, it’s certainly clear, in retrospect, what he was actually talking about.

At the time he made that pronouncement, Apple was evidently negotiating with Intel to move to that processor platform, while, at the same time, developing a version of Mac OS X to support the new chips.

As seamless as the transition might have seemed from a hardware standpoint, except for some teething pains with the first Intel-based Mac note-books, a tremendous amount of work had to be done to make it happen. Indeed, it took a while for software companies to get with the program, even as Jobs tried to show us how you could build a Universal app — native to both the PowerPC and Intel — by just clicking a check box in the Xcode development environment.

Of course it’s never that easy. There was a lot of hard work involve in making an app work properly under both platforms, and the process can often take weeks or months to complete —and sometimes years in a few notable cases.

But that was yesterday and these days most new or revised apps strictly support Intel. Apple helped pave the way with the release of Snow Leopard, which ditched the PowerPC as a supported platform with, surprisingly, little negative feedback from Mac users who had grown accustomed to these processor migrations. Besides, the user base of Intel-based Macs had already pretty much eclipsed the PowerPC.

Now recently, there have been suggestions that Apple is poised for a less severe processor transition, at least in part, from Intel to AMD. But why might this be so?

Well, according to some published reports, not confirmed of course, Apple isn’t too happy with Intel’s recent actions, such as the dispute with NVIDIA that prevented use of their integrated graphics with the latest Intel chips. For the current iteration of MacBook Pros, Apple opted to rely on Intel’s pathetic integrated graphics for basic tasks, with the ability to automatically switch to a discrete NVIDIA graphics card when resource damands required extra power.

It so happens that the newest iMac and Mac Pro desktops are all equipped with ATI graphics, which, as you know, happens to be owned by AMD. But Apple has switched between ATI and NVIDIA for years, depending on which graphics chips were best suited to a specific product family.

The other bugaboo is, allegedly, the fact that Intel is busy shrinking its entry-level Atom processors to power mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. What’s more, Intel will reportedly be building reference hardware and software platforms, so a handset maker could basically put one into production with minimal development expense.

So, in short, Intel might not just be Apple’s chip partner, but a serious competitor, assuming, of course, that Intel can truly build a processor to rival the ARM chips used by smartphone makers these days. Even Apple’s own A4 is, fundamentally, a customized ARM, and there have even been unfounded rumors that Apple actually wanted to acquire that company, although the logic of such an acquisition has yet to be explained to me in a sensible fashion.

I should mention, in passing, that Apple has contracted with Samsung, a rival smartphone maker, to build many of its processors. So Intel’s competitive move shouldn’t be the deal breaker.

Besides, Intel has supposedly had an edge in delivering the speediest PC parts, while AMD offers value at a lower price, and that may be important. If you look at the current Mac Pro configurations, you have to spend nearly $5,000 to buy a version with a six-core Intel Xeon, from the new Westmere family. Two processors takes the price well into the stratosphere.

It so happens that AMD has six-core versions of their high-end Opteron server chips, but they appear to suffer in straight-on performance comparisons with the Westmeres. At the same time, with a huge potential savings, maybe Apple could get away with an Opteron as a low-end bridge between the four-core Intel Nehalem chips and six-core Westmeres.

Offering interchangeable configurations with both AMD and Intel chips is a common practice among PC box makers, since they are essentially equal as far as operating system compatibility is concerned. While you may not be able to plug in one or the other, designing an alternate chassis for AMD’s parts shouldn’t be such an expensive proposition for Apple, nor would providing special support in Snow Leopard.

At the lower end of the scale, a Mac mini equipped with AMD might allow Apple to reduce the price from the exorbitant — for an entry-level PC — $699 to something more affordable without seriously sacrificing performance.

And, of course, losing a few sales might inspire Intel to make a few changes more favorable to Apple’s needs.