The biggest arguments made by Apple’s competitors center on the features you don’t have, assuming you actually need them to enhance your telephone, Web or general personal computing experience. This is the sort of bullet-point innovation that Apple has traditionally avoided.

That doesn’t mean that Apple doesn’t want to add the features that you are clamoring for, but they generally implement many of them in their own way, quite often in a fashion totally different from the competition. Indeed, even moving from the Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X, Apple actually threw out a number of system capabilities, including a highly configurable Apple menu, for a highly simplified version.

At the beginning, it was largely a matter of time to market. Apple had to delay the release of Mac OS X by several years because they had to devise a path to allow many software companies to easily port their stuff. Key among those developers was Adobe and Microsoft. In those days, coming off a near-death experience, with lots of skeptics suggesting they’d never survive, Apple couldn’t get away with a “my way or the highway” approach.

So Mac OS X arrived slow, somewhat buggy, and bereft of lots of features. Some of them were added over the years, although even Snow Leopard is far from a bloated OS. In fact, one of the selling points of 10.6 was that Apple actually removed old code and compressed system files so they’d consume less storage space. Many of the built-in apps also use less RAM, even though memory chips are much cheaper nowadays, but it meant that even the cheapest Mac usually has enough to spare for basic tasks.

When 10.7 arrives — and there appears to be only a slight chance you’ll learn anything about it during the WWDC next month — Apple will no doubt be forced to tout loads of sexy new features in order to entice you to upgrade. But even if there was a brief demonstration of a few new technologies, I wouldn’t expect to see it until late in 2011. Since the best Microsoft can say about Windows 7 is that you can pin document windows to the sides of the screen, I don’t see much incentive for Apple to rush another reference release of the Mac OS.

When it comes to the iPhone, already the uninformed critics are concerned that a product released last summer has been eclipsed in performance by recent Android OS smartphones. That may be true, although Apple is not in the business of releasing monthly updates. That would present a huge R&D outlay, whereas it’s far more efficient to release new products with significant new features when it makes sense, rather than to boast being able to open an app or a Web site a second faster. In the real world, such differences may seem significant to power users or as a sales tactic, but smooth often trumps fast, particularly when you’re trying to call up loads of different functions.

One area where Apple excels is in feature editing. VP Philip Schiller said years ago that good product development also means knowing which features to leave out. That would surely explain why it took a couple of years to find a workable solution for cut, copy and paste, and why Apple is only now working on implementing a system-wide multitasking system that would expand beyond their own apps.

Yes, people were clamoring loudly for both. But I can’t subscribe to the silly conspiracy theory that Apple was deliberately withholding those features in order to sell product upgrades. That doesn’t make sense. They could, after all, lose sales as well because iPhones lacked features that the media told you were essential for a great smartphone.

Even the lack of Flash has been a controversial issue. Is Apple just trying to kill Adobe? Hardly, since Mac users not only comprise nearly half of Adobe’s sales, but such industry-standard apps as Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop are mainstays in the content creator’s toolbox.

When it comes to the mobile platform, some might suggest that Apple is too much of a control freak to prevent developers from porting apps from Flash. But the end result is notoriously inefficient code, which fails to support the latest and greatest features of the iPhone. Who suffers from a subpar app? The developer and the customer, so even if it takes more work to build those apps, sales are apt to be higher because the end result is superior.

It would actually be in Apple’s interest to allow Flash on the mobile platform, if it could be made to work properly. I’m sure Steve Jobs doesn’t want to prevent you from visiting the sites you want. Where’s the sense in that? But if your experience is compromised as a result, Apple suffers, because you will be less satisfied with your iPhone or iPad. Indeed, those widely publicised demos showing a Flash 1.1 beta running on the forthcoming Android 2.2 OS indicate that Adobe has lots of work to do. It’s slow, buggy and there’s no evidence that battery life isn’t seriously compromised.

In other words, Steve Jobs was right.

So before you demand that Apple deliver the feature you feel you want, my advice is that you be careful what you wish for.

When the U.S. Department of Justice went after Microsoft, I’m sure lots of people cheered, particularly Mac users. Maybe it’s a sign of the times, or the vindication of the “turn around is fair play” concept, but now Apple is confronting its own potential antitrust issues.

The New York Times is reporting that Apple faces potential U.S. Department of Justice wrath because of possible anti-competitive behavior involving iTunes. Lest we forget, iTunes is the largest music retailer in the U.S., and holds an extremely dominant share of the online music space. So whatever Apple does when it comes to dealing with the competition can attract unwanted attention from the authorities.

The story goes that Amazon recently tried to get a one-day exclusive window of opportunity for new music releases, but Apple blocked the attempt by threatening to withhold iTunes promotion for the music companies who participated. Certainly being hard-nosed when it comes with dealing with one’s rivals is said to be the mark of good business, except when the alleged offender holds a position of dominance. Suddenly the rules change.

Now I don’t pretend to know the ins and outs of that specific deal, or how Apple had its way, assuming that’s what happened. You shouldn’t forget that the real problem in the music industry isn’t the vendors, but the entertainment companies that do the best they can to put restrictions on the sale of their product.

At one time, you couldn’t even download music tracks legally. You had to go to a pirate site and retrieve a digital recording made by ripping the data from a CD. Faced with a huge loss of sales, the music companies reluctantly agreed to allow their songs to appear in iTunes, originally with stringent DRM requirements. Similar deals were made with other online music vendors, while the industry worked hard to stop illegal downloads, even going so far as to sue their customers.

Over time, Steve Jobs was able to persuade the recording industry to remove DRM from their tracks, while at the same time providing higher bit rate content with audio quality noticeably closer to that of the original CD. Again, the industry was brought, kicking and screaming, to the bargaining table to sign new contracts.

So now Apple has become the villain, evidently a victim of their own success. This doesn’t mean that they are guilty as charged, though. It’s just an investigation. In the end, Apple could also sign a “sorry about that, we won’t do it again” sort of agreement, pay a small bribe to the DOJ — which they will label a fine — and get on with their business.

The potential for a negative ruling against Apple is less certain when it comes to that notorious change in the iPhone 4.0 software license that blocks the use of third-party development tools, with the main victim being Adobe Flash. For Apple to be guilty of wrongdoing, you’d have to expect identical treatment for game console makers, because they impose even more stringent requirements on building apps for their platforms. You can’t just pay an annual fee either, because you’re forced to pay through the nose for a special debugging version of a game console. At least with the iPhone, you can do your development work on a regular Mac, even if it’s a Mac mini.

Of course, it would be foolish to expect Apple to be treated in the same fashion as other tech companies. They are clearly in a different category, at least when it comes to public perceptions.

You see, when a company is struggling and trying to carve out a place in the marketplace, they will do pretty much whatever it takes, legally at any rate, to claw their way to the mountaintop. But if they use those same tactics after reaching the pinnacle of success, it suddenly becomes anticompetitive behavior and government antitrust regulators might try to shut them down. Certainly Microsoft, after paying hundreds of millions of dollars in fines to the EU, knows this full well.

But being targeted by antitrust regulators is something new for Apple, since they struggled for so many years as an also-ran. Suddenly pretty much any move they make will be subject to intense scrutiny by people in positions of authority. The same is true, of course, for Google

What’s more, if Apple is truly guilty of wrongdoing, and not just being penalized for success, they should pay the appropriate penalties. As I suggested before, this may mean fines and consent orders, but so be it. I have no problem with Amazon getting musical exclusives, and if Apple still offers a better shopping experience, iTunes will remain number one and would deserve that position.

When it comes to developer tools and Flash, that’s a distraction. Customers aren’t forced to buy Apple’s gadgets, nor are developers forced to build product for the Apps Store. There are alternatives, and nobody should expect or even want to have the government step in to enforce some sort of misguided vision of equality.

It seems to be a nasty habit on the part of the tech media. A company announces a product or service that appears to compete with something Apple is building, and the immediate conclusion is that Apple is in big trouble and needs to so something pronto!

This was particularly true in the early days after the iPod became a spectacular success. Everyone else’s newest digital music player was declared an “iPod killer,” without actually explaining how that could possibly be true. Well, I suppose it’s easy enough to add a bullet point feature or two to make the knock-off appear to be superior.

Even Microsoft got into the game when their PlaysForSure partners failed to deliver the goods. Instead, Microsoft tried hard to duplicate the iPod with the Zune music player, including the integrated ecosystem for syncing the device on a PC and buying music. Typical with Microsoft, however, the best they could do was imitate the iPod of a year or two earlier, which meant they leapfrogged nothing. In the end, customers stuck with the original rather the pale imitation.

This isn’t to say that Apple necessarily is first to market. There were digital music players around before the iPod, although they didn’t sell very well. Smartphones can be traced back, in part, to the original Apple Newton MessagePad and Palm Treo. In fact, when the iPhone was announced, the critics complained that Apple couldn’t possibly deliver a credible product, simply because the market was already saturated with the BlackBerry, Sidekick and loads of other entries.

With tablet computers, they’ve been around for years. Some were even announced during the CES in January, although two highly touted contenders, from HP and Microsoft, will probably never reach the marketplace. Yes, HP might produce a tablet device, but if they do it would use Palm’s WebOS instead of Windows 7.

In all those cases, Apple examined existing products and found them wanting. They fixed what they perceived to be the problems and came out with surprisingly successful solutions.

Even though the so-called mainstream media continues to tout the success of Google’s Android OS smartphone platform, sales of the iPhone more than doubled during the last quarter. Anticipation is building towards the next version, buttressed by the premature disclosure of what might be in the new model as the result of those notorious prototypes.

With the iPad, Apple hit the ground running with aggressive marketing and an equally aggressive opening price. Starting at $499 for the 16GB version, they can’t keep them in stock. Even as the iPad expands internationally, you will be mighty lucky to find one at your local Apple Store or Best Buy. The online wait remains 7-10 days as of this writing, which clearly indicates that there is a whole lot of pent-up demand for a tablet computer that really works.

Now in recent days, the forthcoming Google TV has been declared an overwhelming success, even though all you’ve seen so far is a product demonstration. There’s nothing on sale, and these gadgets won’t arrive until later this year, perhaps in time for the holiday season.

However, Google has a problem. They haven’t proven to anyone that they can succeed in the consumer electronics marketplace. They tried with the Nexus One smartphone and it flopped miserably. Android OS devices are marketed and sold in the U.S. by the wireless carriers, and even the manufacturer’s name is usually an afterthought. Buy two for one, and pay through the nose if you cancel prematurely. Then again, AT&T is also boosting early termination fees for their more expensive gadgets, including the iPhone.

And, of course, Google TV devices are slated to be marketed and sold by other companies, such as Sony.

So what is there that’s so attractive about Google TV anyway? The best I can see is that it is a device that interfaces with your cable or satellite set-top box to deliver Internet access and, of course, those targeted ads from which Google derives 95% of its income. Yes, there may be apps, but it’s still all about advertising so far as Google is concerned.

Besides, how original is this concept anyway? Anyone remember WebTV, which also provided Internet access on your TV? Yes, some people still use those pathetic gadgets, but they were very primitive and, in the end, weren’t that successful. Can Google TV do better? Remember it doesn’t replace your DVR.

Some choose to compare Google TV with Apple TV, but the latter is an utterly different product. It’s mostly an interface that sits between iTunes on your Mac or PC and transports your downloaded content to your TV. It doesn’t give you Internet access, or record your favorite TV shows from your cable or satellite provider. Indeed, Apple still regards the product as strictly a hobby. Some day they might find a killer function for it that will let them take over your living room. Or maybe not, but so long as Apple TV remains profitable, it doesn’t matter. But Apple doesn’t just pump loads of money into products year after year that ultimately don’t pay off.

That’s what separates Apple from Google and Microsoft, both of which continue to believe that if you write enough fat checks, you’ll make out just fine in the end. Unfortunately, that concept has yet to be proven in the marketplace, but they’ll never learn.

When it comes to Apple Inc., it’s hard to find a gray area for discussion. People love them or hate them, although Apple fans are known to complain loudly about things that don’t work, or features that are lacking.

The real problems come from some of the critics, some of whom are so abysmally uninformed you wonder how they manage to keep jobs as alleged journalists. There used to be a respect for facts, or maybe I’m just getting a little too old for this sort of thing.

In any case, I recently read a curious blog entry from Europe where someone suggested that Apple was blocking Adobe Flash from their mobile platform strictly because of money. But defining that alleged income source is murky. Certainly it would be to Apple’s advantage if you could visit most every site on an iPhone or iPad and not see the telltale icon that Flash is required. Isn’t that something that would actually please Apple customers and maybe add a few?

It’s a sure thing that Flash-enabled games are nowhere as flexible or immersive as the ones you buy at the App Store, so I doubt that sales of the latter would be seriously hurt by the ability to access the former. Blocking the ability to convert Flash to iPhone apps isn’t a bad thing, since that scheme is notoriously inefficient. You get far better results using Apple’s own developer tools, and by being able to take advantage of all the platform’s great new features, there’s the added advantage of making the resulting apps more attractive to potential customers. That means more potential income for the developer. Don’t forget that Apple’s 30% cut strictly covers the cost of doing business and not much more.

So it would seem to me that the suggestion that Apple blocks Flash for financial reasons is utter nonsense. It happens to be quite true that the objections cited by Steve Jobs are right on the mark in just about every case. If Adobe wants to prove him wrong, they can simply demonstrate a reliable version of Flash running on an iPhone. We’re still waiting, and the window of opportunity is pretty much closed. Putting an obviously flawed Flash 1.1 on Android 2.2 isn’t going to change a thing.

The concerns about the lack of Flash are also connected to the oft-mentioned concerns about Apple’s tight mobile platform control. This weekend, for example, I received an email from a loyal listener to the tech show with the outrageous claim that Apple controls “and know what you buy, read, and access.”

Let’s parse this statement.

First, all online merchants keep records of customer purchases and preferences. That’s how they do business, so there’s nothing wrong with Apple knowing what you bought from them (and nobody else by the way), because they have a better picture of customer preferences. That’s how you keep the profits rolling in. It happens to be a good thing. A brick and mortar merchant also keeps customer records, even if some are handwritten, so they know how best to stock the shelves. What’s more, if you want Apple to live long and prosper, you have to expect they will use customer data in a responsible and productive fashion.

Indeed, how often have you heard about Apple losing or compromising customer information? So far as I know, it hasn’t happened, whereas it’s hard to know what Google was doing when they were caught sniffing unprotected Wi-Fi data. Do you really have reason to trust that Google — or such social networks as Face-book for that matter — will do the right thing to ensure your privacy?

As to controlling what you buy, with the App Store Apple acts in the same fashion as any vendor. They have the right to stock the products they want and refuse others. What about a Kroger’s supermarket, Best Buy, Wal-Mart or any other store? Don’t they have the right to pick and choose the merchandise they offer?

Yes, I realize that you have a choice of just one vendor with the App Store when it comes to iPhone, iPod touch or iPad software, but you also have the option not to do business with Apple. And nothing prevents you from going online and buying other merchandise from just about any company on the planet if that’s what you want. Apple isn’t keeping tabs on those purchases, nor do they care what you buy and from where. Of course, if you do something illegal, you may get caught by the authorities, but that’s not something that impacts Apple, unless, of course, what you do somehow victimizes Apple.

And, so far as I recall, Apple doesn’t stop me from visiting the sites I want for the same reason. Other than the lack of Flash, I can go most anywhere. All right, I will be warned about suspected phishing sites, but the same is true with any modern browser. Nothing wrong with that!

What’s more, the “Apple Police” never tell me what to write, even though they’ve been aware of my existence for nearly 20 years. They may not agree with what I say, but they know they can’t stop me from saying it.