I suppose Steve Jobs is responsible. When he likened the PC to a truck and mobile computing gadgets, such as the iPad and iPhone, to a car, you had to think that he was reading the tea leaves of what the industry would be like in a few years.

Add to that the fact that Apple hasn’t really made any big Mac-related announcements of late. All recent Mac speed bumps have been heralded by little more than a press release. When the entry-level MacBook was updated a few weeks ago, it didn’t even merit that. The new model just appeared out of the blue in Apple’s online store.

More to the point, other than the Mac mini, which acquired an Apple TV look with an aluminum case, all of the model changes were fairly minor. Speedier processors, larger hard drives, more powerful graphic cards. Pricing was similar enough not to be significant, other than that controversial rise in the cost of a 2010 Mac mini.

At his WWDC keynote address, Steve Jobs seemed to pretend there was no such thing as a Mac. He never mentioned the subject, even though there were at least some workshops that catered to Mac OS X developers. It was mostly the mobile platform’s turn to shine.

Certainly sales of the iPad have already reached and perhaps somewhat exceeded the rate of new Macs, with over three million shipped in the first 80 days. There are also published reports that Apple is attempting to double the production rate, the better to at last catch up with backorders.

So where’s that leave the Mac? Is it truly yesterday’s news?

Well, not quite. According to a report emerging this week from the NPD Group, Mac retail sales in the U.S. jumped 35% in May over the previous year. That survey doesn’t include online sales, international sales and so on and so forth, but it does show a trend, which is that Macs are still moving at a pretty good clip ahead of the overall PC market, despite the fact that Apple appears to be ignoring them.

So if there is any cannibalization by the iPad, it appears to be minor, at least so far. This isn’t to say that Mac sales won’t be hurt in the long run, but not right now. Perhaps Apple has begun to feel that, at least for a while, the Mac can take care of itself with regular performance updates, and the mobile platform will drive traffic to the stores that’s sufficient to spur Mac sales because of the famous “halo effect.” Even the “Mac Versus PC” ads are history.

All right, I’m just guessing here, but it doesn’t appear that Apple isn’t doing anything overt to goose Mac sales. It’s just happening, no doubt because the larger PC universe is simply dead. There are no compelling new competing products, and, if you believe those dreadful TV ads, Windows 7 is only good for pinning document windows at the corners of the screen. Or at least that’s what Microsoft would have you believe.

However, Windows 7 is surely doing well enough in the business environment, where companies who avoided Vista like the plague are finally forced to upgrade simply because their existing hardware is too old. Besides, Windows 7 appears to address most of the serious problems that afflicted Vista, so might as well get with the program.

That is, of course, unless they jump to Macs instead, and Apple still maintains that 50% of new Mac purchases at their retail stores go to customers who are new to the platform. All this, of course, without any major initiative, or any initiative, to push Macs into the business market. That seems to be taking care of itself, as more and more executives go all or mostly Apple, and insist the IT departments deal with it.

On the long haul, it’s debatable whether all or most consumer PC users will migrate to a tablet-based device, such as the iPad. I tend to feel that an iPad actually does most of the things that a personal computer owner expects of a traditional PC. Only heavy-duty content creators will need their desktops and regular portable computers, at least for a while. In the meantime, the netbook market has stagnated.

Ultimately, if there’s enough demand, it’s possible that the folks who develop those traditional content creation apps, particularly Adobe and Quark, will begin to consider seriously whether iPad versions would make sense.

For now, the iPad is largely a consumption device, and surveys are showing that it’s a better read than an Amazon Kindle, so it’s quite likely a lot of the e-book business will come its way. But I wonder: Whatever happened to textbooks? After all, one of the great benefits of an iPad is to replace all the heavy school books that weigh down the typical student. So far at least, the traditional textbook publishers have made no announcements that things are about to change, though I suppose there’s still time before the next school year — except in Arizona and other states where it starts in August.

Some day, I do expect to report that Mac sales trends have begun to seem like today’s iPod. An aging product category catering to a diminishing market. But not yet.

I’ve used iOS 4 on my iPhone 3GS since Day One of the official release. For the most part, the experience has been essentially as I expected after examining the material from Apple’s hype machine.

That is a good thing, although there are some rough edges.

Aside from the minor interface quibbles, my biggest problem was the onset of crashes when I tried to login to my Web server, which uses an a Linux-based control panel app known as cPanel. Every time I’d attempt to bring up the WHM home page, or dashboard, which is the interface cPanel employs to manage an entire server, Safari would quit.

I managed to make it work without SSL enabled, which meant a less-secure connection, something I’m not apt to want to do on an extended basis.

This odd symptom was troubling, when you consider the fact that I’m able to access my backup servers, which use the same control panel app, without any problem.

Neither cPanel, a Mac friendly company mind you, nor the folks at HostGator were able to duplicate my problem, which seems to indicate that there was a problem with my iPhone setup that might be triggering those crashes.

My first fix attempt meant a Restore, using my most recent backup to eliminate the drudgery of redoing all my iPhone’s settings and network and online logins. But there was no change.

On the advice of one of HostGator’s Linux gurus, I reset the network configuration in the iPhone, without change. So finally I decided to really start from scratch, by using the Restore function and setting up the device as a brand new phone.

If you haven’t done much custom configuration of your iPhone, getting all your stuff downloaded via iTunes, including your contact lists, email accounts and Safari bookmarks, is a trivial process. But as soon as you decide to start from scratch, you not only have to reconfigure all your custom preference settings, but redo your app positioning, folders (that nifty new iOS 4 feature) and all the rest.

My efforts at customization were modest, so it took less than an hour from the beginning of the Restore process to having what was essentially a newly-activated and configured iPhone 3GS. Even better, the cPanel crashing problem was also history. In retrospect, based on my communications with various support techs, it appears that the stored information about my server’s SSL certificate might have become corrupted somehow, and there’s no direct way to fix that. You can kill stored passwords and cookies on an iPhone, but there’s no equivalent to Mac OS X’s Keychain Access, where you can delete not just passwords, by security certificate data. Unfortunate.

In running this clean restore function, I also encountered some of those minor iOS interface shortcomings that Apple has failed to address. Whenever I add new email accounts, I have to return and change the option of when to delete trashed email on all the accounts, not just the ones I’ve added. The default account also needs to be selected all over again, if it’s not the default, which is normally the first one on the list.

For some reason, Apple doesn’t make it possible to reorder your email accounts either, or if there’s a way, I cannot locate the secret handshake or touch to make it so. So Gmail is listed as number one, followed by MobileMe. Or at least that’s how it always turns out for me. The rest of the accounts are added in a random sequence having nothing to do with the way they are sorted in Apple Mail. No, it’s not alphabetical.

In order to fix part of this problem, I had to manually delete one or two accounts in my iPhone’s preferences, and add them again to have them appear at the bottom of the list. Maybe such things don’t matter to Apple, but I expected their iOS programming team would be obsessive/compulsive enough to strive for a little order in their mobile lives.

As a whole, iOS 4 is a credible improvement. The enhanced multitasking capability, however, makes at most a modest difference to me. I hadn’t configured a third-party audio or music app, such as Pandora, and thus didn’t have to worry about the loss of audio when switching to another app. I also don’t rely on turn-by-turn navigation. I’m one of those old fashioned folks who uses printed directions, mostly supplemented with output from Google Maps or Map Quest.

Although I have a few apps at hand that are supposedly iOS 4 savvy, the impact is minor. On the positive side of the ledger, Tapatalk, an app that lets you access special simplified mobile versions of your favorite forums — so long as they install the custom Tapatalk formatting files of course, as we’ve done with ours — does manage to save the state of your previous login. Then again, it was doing that before iOS 4, since programmers have long been able to add that feature via their own special code. The custom WordPress iPhone app remains unduly flaky, and I still have problems going through the initial setup process to store my various blog sites.

In a few weeks, there will be an iOS 4.0.1 update, primarily to address that alleged mistake in displaying the right number of bars for your wireless carrier’s signal. Perhaps Apple will use the opportunity to smooth out a few other glitches as well. But I have no regrets installing the update, despite that Safari glitch when trying to login to our server.

Some time back, AT&T ran a series of ads that proclaimed their service would deliver more bars and fewer dropped calls than the competition. Well, maybe they were more accurate on the former than they ever imagined.

Just the other day, Apple, in its latest excuse about the source of alleged antenna woes on the iPhone 4, claimed that the real problem is not the deteriorated reception, but the way signal strength is displayed. In short, they claimed to have been producing too many bars for too little signal.

Worse, this particular problem has evidently afflicted all iPhones from Day One, because Apple used the wrong algorithm to produce the bar display. Instead, they will henceforth be relying on AT&T’s algorithm, which is said to be more honest.

Of course that raises a bigger question, which is how on Earth did this serious defect escape Apple’s notice until they were inundated with complaints about reception problems with the latest and greatest iPhone? Did they not think for one second to test the accuracy of these displays in real world conditions? I’m just asking.

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All right, you know that most anyone who doesn’t much care for Apple must be cheering now. The company may be facing some serious trouble with the spectacularly successful iPhone 4 rollout, because of alleged antenna issues.

As you’ve no doubt heard, if you hold the iPhone 4 in your left hand and move your palm and fingers in a certain way, sensitivity goes down the tubes. This symptom is produced by covering those brand new, super sensitive antennas.

This claim appears to be true. Even if you don’t have an iPhone 4 at hand to test, there are loads of YouTube videos showing just how it’s done. But once you master the one-handed salute, is there any way to cope with that state of affairs, other than returning your iPhone for a refund of course?

Well, Apple has given several answers to complaints about the problem. The first, echoed by Steve Jobs, is to just hold it differently, which begs the question of why should you be forced to hold this iPhone any different from any other smartphone, or regular mobile handset for that matter?

The subsequent explanations were rather more descriptive, claiming that this is a problem that can affect any mobile phone, so live with it or use bumpers or a case to shield the antenna region from your sweaty palms.

All well and good, except for the nasty fact that this is the very first time large numbers of people have found reason to complain about a huge drop in performance with an iPhone. More to the point, if you live or travel to an area where signal strength is pretty high, you might not be seriously impacted. Otherwise, you may lose your connection, be it Internet or that important business phone call.

In recent days, the dialog between Steve Jobs and Apple customers on this and other subjects has grown more verbose, although a recent email exchange is reported by Apple to be bogus. But Jobs has hinted at a forthcoming fix in other communications, and Apple has now admitted the problem is actually due to incorrectly displaying signal strength; in other words, you’re seeing the wrong number of bars. According to Apple: “We will issue a free software update within a few weeks that incorporates the corrected formula. Since this mistake has been present since the original iPhone, this software update will also be available for the iPhone 3GS and iPhone 3G.”

At the same time, the legal ambulance chasers in our midst are busy with their class action lawsuits, designed to force Apple to pay for its failures and possible stonewalling about the existence of such a serious product defect. Unfortunately, legal actions of this sort may take years to resolve, and if the complainants actually emerge victorious, the lawyers get paid first, and the customers who were actually hurt end up with little more than a discount coupon so you can buy something else from the company that allegedly injured you.

The real issue is how Apple might have allowed this alleged defect to slip into production, in fact admitting that the signal display has always been incorrect ever since the first iPhone. And why would that bug suddenly become so significant, after tens of millions of iPhones have been sold around the world?

Of course, the truth is that pretty much all mobile phones will exhibit some sort of signal strength degradation if held the “wrong way,” which can vary from device to device.

Such design compromises are evidently the result of FCC regulations, which mandate that handset makers move the antennas as far away from your head as possible, so you don’t fry your brain or develop tumors from excess radiation. That posture forces certain design constraints that certainly make sense, although you’d rather believe you could hold your phone any way you want without hurting performance.

Now if Apple’s promised fix succeeds in its intent, which is displaying the real signal strength on your phone, so it doesn’t change so drastically when you hold it the wrong way, it will only be yet another product glitch in a long line of product glitches.

Apple didn’t help themselves, though, when their initial efforts at corporate spin control were not just uninformed, but sometimes downright insulting. Hold your iPhone differently indeed! At least Steve Jobs seems to understand that this was a serious PR misfire, but his assurances that Apple has the problem under review didn’t come soon enough.

I do hope that the fix is simply software. For Apple to be forced to recall millions of iPhones because of serious design defects might cause a huge black mark on their reputation for unparalleled success, not to mention money lost. It would also give Apple haters and rival companies lots of ammunition to grab a piece of the pie for themselves, and I’m sure Apple didn’t expect it to turn out that way.