It’s perfectly legitimate to criticize Apple for a host of reasons. Some of you might feel the company is too overbearing when it comes to enforcing a tight ecosystem on their mobile and personal computing platforms. Others don’t like the fact that Apple doesn’t sell cheap gear, and sticks to the most profitable price points. They’d rather have a $500 Mac, but at least they can get a reasonable substitute, the iPad, for that price, assuming you can find one in stock.

In recent weeks, though, a few uninformed alleged tech journalists have come forth to repeat the claim that Apple is losing luster with their customers, and that they are poised to desert, in droves, to other computing and smartphone platforms. This comes as Apple continues to experience record sales and profits, so I trust you see the disconnect between such allegations and plain old logic.

Whereas it was common in the old days to refer to Apple as a “beleaguered” company, the chatter today is that they’ve grown too large and they need to be stopped before they — what? — take over the world? I’m not sure from what we’re supposed to be protected.

Certainly you can look at all the speculation dressed as fact and perhaps find a few snippets of accuracy. But, like certain radio and TV talk show hosts that I won’t name, they use this scanty evidence as the basis for extrapolation to create the illusion of major developments.

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So here’s the eternal argument. Apple’s critics complain that the Mac and mobile platforms are clamped down tight, giving customers restricted freedom to do what they want. They want us to either convince Apple to change their ways, or make you switch to a more “open” platform, such as Windows, or perhaps Linux and the Google Android OS.

Of course “clamped down” can have a variety of meanings and impact different people in various ways. If you want a personal computer with a reasonably safe, stable and predictable OS, the Mac has almost always been ahead of the pack. Sure there were times when things got pretty dicey, as the original Mac OS got real old and failed to keep up with the latest and greatest features that you were told were required.

In those days, a key shortcoming was, strangely enough, multitasking. Apple’s system, cooperative, meant that your apps had to play nice with each other. If they didn’t, the system could come crashing down and even a simple application quit would be sufficient to force you to restart. Compare that to preemptive multitasking and protected memory, where the OS played the role of the traffic cop. That’s what Windows had begun to offer, although it took some years for Microsoft to get it to work reasonably well.

Now those of you who used Macs in those days might have felt, as I did, that they crashed too much, but the vast majority of you probably didn’t care what sort of multitasking scheme was used, so long as you could conveniently ran lots of apps with decent performance.

Of course, Mac OS X is far better at handling such things, but the difference probably isn’t near as drastic as you might have expected given all the hype.

It’s worse — or at least more stringent –with Apple’s mobile platform, because they decided early on that they were selling appliances, not personal computers. This meant a simplified, intuitive operating system that didn’t offer a whole lot of meat and potatoes for the power user. Sure, the interface was certainly snappy, and with the iPad it feels like an iPhone on steroids, but what about the things you gave up?

Multitasking was limited to Apple’s own apps, so you couldn’t run Pandora, an online music streaming app, in the background while doing anything else. A recent survey, however, indicated that only a small number of customers, in the single digits, actually felt they had been deprived because of the lack of across-the-board multitasking.

Rather than just let it happen, as developers of other smartphone platforms have done, Apple decided to actually make multitasking work with minimal impact on system performance and battery life. They came up with seven multitasking APIs that are intended to solve the key multitasking concerns. Of course, we’ll have to wait for the release of iPhone 4.0 to see how well it works in the real world, but since so few of you felt deprived anyway, other than some media pundits, it’s a win-win situation.

Another supposed symptom of Apple’s closed ecosystem is the lack of Flash. Steve Jobs has grown more and more disdainful of Flash over the past three years, finally concluding that Adobe is unable to make it work right and deliver smooth performance, decent stability and security and not seriously impair battery life.

Now it’s true that version 2.2 of Google’s Android OS is supposed to include Adobe Flash 10.1, allegedly optimized for mobile platforms. All well and good, but the reports that have emerged from Google’s demonstrations so far don’t reveal a stable, mature product. It seems to be nothing more than a beta version at this point, one still prone to crashes, but if that’s what Google wants to provide their cell phone partners — they don’t have direct customers except for that failed Nexus One smartphone — that’s their right.

I’m just waiting to see if Adobe can prove that Jobs is wrong in keeping Flash off Apple’s mobile platform. As of today, Adobe has failed to demonstrate a working Flash prototype on an iPhone or iPad. Let them show that Flash works properly, and they win the argument. But I’m not expecting that to happen anytime soon.

Now with an Internet appliance, such as the iPhone and iPad, it’s also pretty clear that most people don’t want to miss with complicated settings and power user features. They just want the things to work from the time the unit is turned on until it’s turned off, or the battery dies. This shouldn’t be a difficult concept to grasp, but it appears that Apple’s worst critics believe the company is taking the wrong approach.

But even Steve Jobs has said, in one of his famous email exchanges with some bloggers, that if you don’t like Apple’s way of doing things, the answer is simple. Buy something else. Apple doesn’t own the smartphone market, and, despite the initial success of the iPad, probably doesn’t own the tablet market either. At least not yet.

Even when finances don’t allow me to buy the latest and greatest gear from Apple, I do my best to spend as much face time with the products as possible so I can write about them meaningfully. That means frequent visits to dealers and indulgent clients to allow me to evaluate the good, the bad, and ugly.

Now way back when, screen resolutions on most displays were set at 72 pixels per inch or slightly smaller, said to be the ideal for being able to see text on the screen that was close to the size to the actual printed page. These days, of course, most of the information we read on a computer display will never appear in print.

In an effort to pack more content on the screen and make text appear sharper, display makers have increased the number of pixels. The fabulous 27-inch iMac, for example, has a maximum resolution of 2560×1440, which adds up to some 109 pixels per inch. What this means is that a document page viewed at 100% is actually much smaller than on the printed page, and text is proportionately tiner.

But it gets worse on recent versions of the 17-inch MacBook Pro, with a 1920×1200 resolution, which translates to 133 pixels per inch. Talk about putting lots of stuff in a small place, and all those pixels display ultra fast courtesy of powerful graphics chips and a superb display.

Getting that much content on a computer display may be well and good if you are young and you have near-perfect eyesight. For those who are a little older or whose eyesight is otherwise challenged, it can create serious problems when you actually try to read something.

This isn’t to say there aren’t workarounds. You can zoom the text in a word processor to a more appropriate level. I tend to set a default at 200%, which makes most documents quite readable, though it defeats the ability to view two pages side by size on the screen, which is supposed to be one key benefit of a large screen.

The zooming feature on my iPhone is constantly in use, but you have to expect that when you’re trying to read content on a tiny screen. The situation is better on the iPad, particularly when reading e-books, where you can see pages that are often not too far removed in apparent size from the original printed version.

When writing these columns, WordPress also displays text that’s quite small, but is otherwise fairly distinct. However, I often rely on the Zoom feature in Safari to double text size, to avoid eye strain and make it easier to catch silly typos. I still make mistakes, though not as often.

Yes, it’s possible to set a screen resolution to a lower setting in the Displays preference panel, which increases the size of text. But with an LCD display, departing from the native resolution makes text much fuzzier and that’s not an ideal solution, though I grant it’s necessary for some of you. This is a situation where the old fashioned CRT functioned better, since you didn’t suffer the negative consequences when you deviated from a “native” setting.

The real solution might be some sort of resolution independent system where you can scale the screen in a way that provides great readability and image sharpness regardless of the setting. But since I’m not in the business of developing display hardware or graphics cards, I won’t presume to understand the way technology must be altered to solve this problem.

Of course Apple isn’t alone in packing too many pixels onto a display. All the PC makers do the very same thing. Maybe Apple’s engineers simply have great eyesight, or they are required to submit to Lasik surgery before working on display hardware.

Or maybe, as is probably the case, enough Mac users aren’t complaining, so they continue to use the same approach. The more pixels the better, and may they some day double, even if the customer is hurt by that approach.

It may also be true that Apple expects you to zoom text or change the screen resolution if the default setting isn’t suitable, even if that approach forces you to take different steps for different functions, or put up with a subpar image.

But it’s not just folks with imperfect eyesight that are hurt. Even though the glossy screen on the latest Macs don’t hurt me in the least, there are loads of people for whom glossy means severe discomfort, because the tendency to pick up reflections. I do not pretend to know why, and it would be equally foolish to suggest they undergo therapy to see if there’s a way for them to change their perceptions or preferences.

For the iMac there is no matte or “Antiglare” option. Apple does offer that choice on the 17-inch MacBook Pro for an extra $50. If you want Antiglare on the 15-inch MacBook, you have to pay $150 extra, of which $100 covers the cost of “Hi-Res, which increases display resolution from 1440×900 to 1680×1050, meaning you have to put up with tinier text to get rid of the reflections.

Or maybe I should just acquire a magnifying glass and be done with it.

A published report today suggests that, although Apple’s products aren’t necessarily the fastest or contain the latest whizzy features, people are comfortable with the secure ecosystem and interface simplicity. That’s why iPhones are still hot sellers even though competing products have speedier processors, superior displays and more powerful camera chips.

Or at least, that’s the impression some of those tech pundits are trying to create, that Apple makes an inferior product that succeeds by the magic of great marketing and sexy looks.

The problem with all this is that the folks who make such claims really don’t have a clue about Apple’s magic. You see, hardware specs don’t necessarily translate into performance in the real world, and bullet point feature sets can’t ensure you’ll have a great user experience.

Take the iPad. It’s a really fast computer by most any estimate. Start up and shut down take seconds, and most apps launch almost instantaneously. This snappy response extends to almost every function. So it doesn’t matter if the processor clocks in at a “mere” 1GHz, a rating that would seem dreadfully underpowered on a regular Mac or PC. The real issue is perceived performance, and the iPhone and iPad continue to deliver that, even if competing products might look somewhat better on the spec sheets.

You see, other than Macs, Apple doesn’t make much of a deal about specs beyond the basics of size, screen resolution and estimated battery life. These products are sold as appliances, and the raw numbers don’t really make a difference under those circumstances. They don’t mean you’ll be able to get something accomplished any faster.

Where Apple excels, other than a sexy design, is in the operating system. While some may rave about Google’s Android OS, don’t forget that the iPhone OS and the full-featured Mac OS X are both based on the NeXT OS, which was originally developed back in the 1980s. Some of Apple’s present-day engineers have been developing and refining the OS since the early days, and that’s why it works so well. Not perfect, but surely far more predictable than other mobile platforms that claim features that Apple lacks.

Consider yesterday’s commentary, which quoted a blogger’s reasons for abandoning an Android smartphone. One of the most vexing issues was inconsistent performance. It would be fast, it would be slow as molasses, and you wouldn’t always know what to expect, since it felt like a beta OS.

If your toaster oven worked so unpredictably, wouldn’t you toss it out and get a new one? Well, if you keep your smartphone past the initial 15 or 30 days and say you’re unsatisfied, you will be subject to huge early termination fees, as high as $350 for Verizon Wireless customers who buy those ultra cheap gadgets or perhaps take advantage of a two-for-one deal.

Certainly Apple gets almost daily criticisms for the lack of unfettered multitasking on their mobile products. While the iPhone 4.0 software ought to take the wind out of those sails, the real truth is that few of you are really being hurt by this alleged shortcoming.

The lack of Flash is also said to be one huge deal, but again with over 86 million Apple mobile devices out there, are they being inundated with customer complaints because there’s no Flash? It’s clear why Adobe isn’t happy, but I still don’t see them actually proving they can build a version of Flash that will run on an iPhone and satisfy the objections voiced by Steve Jobs. Nor can Adobe produce a Mac OS X crash log that shows Flash isn’t the major cause of system crashes. But talk is cheap.

When it comes to Macs, sometimes Apple is first to market with a new Intel processor; sometimes not. The recent MacBook Pro refresh put Apple behind other PC makers, but those Core i5 and Core i7 chips were supposedly in short supply anyway. Regardless, with reports from the NPD Group that Mac sales soared by 39% in the U.S. retail market during April, it does indicate a great reception for the new portable lineup. And in case you didn’t notice, the regular white MacBook got a minor update this week too. In fact, it was so low-key, Apple didn’t even write a press release about it.

Yes, Apple publishes fairly detailed specs on their new hardware. Except for intense gaming and 3D rendering, however, even the basic Mac mini is essentially fast enough to satisfy most any computing chore with few shortcomings. Indeed, some folks have actually downsized from such boxes as the Mac Pro and have embraced the mini as an affordable machine that handles all the chores they can toss at it with aplomb.

The key issue of what’s best extends beyond such basic considerations as processor speed, the amount of RAM and hard drive size. There’s a lot more involved in building a computing appliance. Most PC makers haven’t a clue about any of that, which is why they continue to build mostly me-too products that can rarely be distinguished from each other.

But isn’t that also true with many of those Android-based smartphones? I mean, if you remove the manufacturer’s label, would you even know who made them?