I read a headline today, referring to iPad owners as people who are somehow “shackled” to Apple’s hardware/software ecosystem. It conveyed the image of slaves sitting in the bowels of an ancient ship, chained to their seats and forced to manage the oars used to propel the vessel.

Sometimes the stories I read about Apple and its corporate policies are so outlandish you wonder how they were approved by supposedly reasonable editors and publishers. The image they present is that Apple is engaged in an insidious scheme to control the personal computing and consumer electronics worlds by forcing you to use their products and accept the terms under which those products are sold.

Now in passing, aren’t PC makers under contract with Microsoft forced to pay a Windows license fee even for computers that don’t have Windows preloaded on them? Or did that requirement disappear in the days when Microsoft suffered that antitrust lawsuit? Can you demand that Nintendo allow you to hack the product to allow “unofficial” games to be loaded onto the device?

The point is that there are loads of gadgets sold that contain proprietary operating systems of one sort or another, which require you to use specific “compatible” apps or accessories. Tell me the next time you try to induce an unapproved third-party DVR to operate with a DirecTV or Dish Network satellite installation and let me know how it works out.

Apple doesn’t sell its gear by creating false illusions about what the products can or cannot do. You know, for example, that the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad all work strictly with the software available from the App Store. Yes, there are unofficial techniques to jailbreak these devices, but then you are on your own and you bear full responsibility if something goes wrong.

When it comes to Mac OS X, the user license specifically states that it’s only to be installed on an Apple branded personal computer. You buy the product with that knowledge, or not, if that’s what you prefer. In saying that, though, it’s also true that there’s an active online community that will guide you towards a successful installation on a regular PC. Apple has tolerated the practice, although they will strike out if you attempt to create a retail business out of selling so-called “Hackentoshes.”

Even Macworld magazine performed such an installation at one time. Apple didn’t come down on them in any discernible fashion. They weren’t confronted with the prospect of the loss of advertising revenue. Instead, readers realized that it’s possible to induce Mac OS X to operate after one of those unofficial installations, but there may be unexpected incompatibilities, particularly when Apple delivers a maintenance update. There’s no guarantee all Mac software will function as well as it does on a real Mac.

In the end, the practice is perfectly all right from the hobbyist standpoint. If you are a power user, comfortable with assembling and disassembling custom systems, have a good time. But if you expect the end result to function as your work computer, consider the cost in terms of the time you expend to make the box function reliably. If your time is worth anything at all, how much of the alleged savings you achieve from buying a cheap PC are wasted making it work properly with Mac OS X? Wouldn’t a real Mac be a better idea, particularly since Apple’s products have good reliability records? After a couple of years, when your old PC is worth nothing, you can still sell your used Mac and get a reasonable return from your investment.

But the real issue is this: You weren’t forced to buy an Apple product. You knew the score when you wrote that check or submitted your credit card number. However, the Mac is a pretty open platform insofar as being able to install Windows under Boot Camp or a virtual machine is concerned. With the latter, you can also install a number of different operating systems, in fact. That makes your Mac perhaps the most compatible computer on the planet.

When it comes to the iPhone and iPad, Apple has decided that you want something that’s simple to learn, simple to use, and doesn’t require lots of decisions to be made about how to customize the product to your tastes. A limited number of setup choices are available, but you also have a rich selection of apps, with the number expected to hit 200,000 in the very near future. The phrase “there’s an app for that,” is a cliché and a truism. There are very few useful apps that you can’t get on Apple’s mobile platform. Yes, there are software categories that Apple won’t touch, particularly in the realm of explicit material, but it’s not quite Disney World.

When it comes to computers, smartphones and tablet-based PCs, you have a choice. It doesn’t have to be Apple. You aren’t shackled to anything or anyone.

Without going into all of the boring specifics, depending on which set of estimates you believe, Apple is well positioned to grow the Mac platform or, perhaps, they can’t keep pace with the PC industry’s resurgence.

But I will mention one set of numbers. According to Gartner, Apple sold 1.398 million Macs during the March quarter, while IDC sets the figure at 1.13 million. Houston, we have a problem!

Now I realize that these figures are strictly estimates, and there’s apt to be a fudge factor of several percent one way or the other, but when they differ by over 285,000 units, clearly something is very, very wrong. Should we attack their methodology, or do they have a hidden agenda that results in faulty numbers?

I am not about to hazard a guess whether either firm is faking figures here. I don’t know, but Apple will reveal the actual figures this coming week. In the meantime it’s very possible that people who believe that Apple isn’t keeping up against Windows 7 might dump their Apple stock, which would serve the greed of financial gangsters who profit from bad news. But it’s only short-term.

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From the developer’s standpoint, I suppose they have a point when they complain about the revisions in the iPhone 4.0 SDK agreement that evidently blocks use of third-party cross-platform compilers or Flash to build iPhone apps. Certainly it means they have more work to do if they want to develop software for different smartphones.

On the other hand, the critics busy lambasting Apple about that change need to focus less on Apple’s control-freak posture and more on the benefits to the customer. This is particularly true for developers who hope to make fair profits from their apps.

So with iPhone 4.0, Apple is promising 100 new features, and we only know a fraction of those in addition to the seven “tentpoles” revealed by Steve Jobs and company at last week’s media event. Chief among those features is the long-awaited support for multitasking. But other features are no less important for many of you, such as the changes in Mail that provide for a global Inbox, the ability to create folders and the proposed Game Center. Businesses will appreciate the enhanced security and other capabilities designed to benefit the enterprise.

But now imagine if you install iPhone 4.0 on your recent iPhone or iPod touch this summer. Next you install some fancy new app, but, while it seems to work all right, it doesn’t support any of the new features. Wouldn’t you feel cheated? Consider, for example, an app to read your favorite magazine. Multitasking will allow for a saved state, where you’re busy reading an article and, after switching to another app or taking a phone call, you return and continue right where you left off.

If an app doesn’t support that feature, it’ll basically start up from scratch, and you’ll have to locate the article all over again and scroll to the point where you stopped reading. Worse, you’ll have to do that each and every time you’re forced to switch apps. So maybe you should just block phone calls while you’re reading the latest issue.

Now if the publisher developed its app in accordance with Apple’s latest guidelines, they will have seven multitasking APIs available, one of which is the saved state. I can’t tell you what sort of work is required to add that capability, but it will still be a natural part of the iPhone SDK environment. So they would certainly have a good incentive — and keeping a satisfied readership is high on the list — to support that feature.

But if that app is simply ported from Flash or developed in a third-party programming tool, the needed multitasking features and support for all the other new stuff won’t be there. Not only will Apple’s customers be cheated, but the people who buy those apps that lack proper support for the latest OS.

So, yes, Apple wants to exert control, but what they’re doing by restricting the ways you can build an iPhone or iPad app is to make sure that, whatever new native features make sense for that product, they can be fully supported. When iPhone 5.0 comes out next year, it won’t be so difficult to add the new features, whatever they might be.

In short, the customer benefits. The developer benefits, and if the latter derives income from their iPhone apps, it makes sense to switch to Apple’s own development tools, even if it requires extra work at first to import the code. Certainly the job will be far less onerous than moving a large Mac app into Apple’s Xcode, since they often contain millions of lines of code.

Now when it comes to Adobe, yes, I understand they are highly pissed off that Apple won’t let them bring Flash onto the iPhone and iPad, nor will they accept iPhone apps ported from Flash when the next OS is out. On the other hand, Apple exists to benefit Apple and their customers, not Adobe. More to the point, the people who complain about Apple’s closed platform forget that Flash is also a proprietary platform, except that its owned by Adobe.

On the long haul, I expect Adobe is not going to sue Apple, since there’s no sense in doing that and probably no legal basis either. Indeed, Adobe will continue to build Mac apps for the simple reason that there’s lots of money to be made, and, at the same token, they will continue to provide apps for Apple’s mobile platform.

Yes, Adobe’s executives and developers might have to grit their teeth when they produce new Mac and iPhone products. But that’s how business works. Companies will sometimes compete with each other, and, at other times, cooperate in various business initiatives. Even Apple’s presumed worst enemy, Microsoft, makes products for the Mac that deliver decent profit margins. Google continues to build stuff for Apple’s platforms too, because it means more eyeballs for their carefully tailored ads.

Sure, maybe Google will find things more difficult on the iPhone when Apple’s iAd debuts, but it won’t stop them from earning click-through revenue from Safari and their own iPhone apps. Maybe Google will even find a way to build a better ad platform for their advertisers as a result of the competition, and that is a good thing.

So this week, we learned that Apple not only sold half a million iPads during the first week on sale, but that the overseas rollout is being delayed by a month because Apple can barely keep up with all that pent-up demand. That’s terrific news, and you can see that Apple’s stock price continues to soar as a result. Some are predicting it’ll reach $300 some time this year, but before that it will turn Apple into the second most valuable company on the planet.

In other words, Apple will finally beat Microsoft, at least when it comes to the company’s valuation, which may be a phantom figure but one that financial analysts pay attention to.

At the same time, you just know that the iPad is a highly flawed product. There are scattered reports of poor Wi-Fi connectivity, and don’t forget that the lack of multitasking, Flash support and the “albatross” of tight integration with Apple’s own software ecosystem are serious shortcomings.

Worse, Apple has dared to change the license terms for the iPhone 4.0 SDK so that apps translated via Adobe Flash or a cross-platform compiler aren’t welcome. The theory goes that Steve Jobs had another one of his legendary hissy fits and thus has declared war against Adobe and other companies. Indeed, one blogger is claiming that Adobe is prepared to sue Apple, though the basis of that lawsuit isn’t clear. I mean it’s not as if Apple doesn’t have the right to change the terms for its user licenses, or that they can be forced by threat or legal action to allow you to run Flash on the iPhone or iPad.

Now it’s possible that the rumors of lawsuits and other rash behavior are nothing more than an effort at corporate spin control from Adobe. Perhaps one of their PR people conveyed a misleading impression of the company’s future behavior in a conversation with the blogger in question, knowing that the details of the conversation would be made public pronto!

Forgetting Adobe’s concerns, which I find specious in light of their refusal to fully support the Mac in recent years, it does seem Apple has reason to be upset. Lest we forget, Apple helped Adobe establish a business in the first place by licensing PostScript for the original LaserWriter in the 1980s. From that grew the desktop publishing revolution, which provided a rich environment for all of Adobe’s content creation apps.

Even after Apple’s serious missteps in the 1990s put the company at death’s door, graphic designers around the world still continued to embrace their Macs — and Adobe’s products. In recent years, PageMaker’s successor, InDesign, has begun to supplant the mainstay desktop publishing app, QuarkXPress, at many companies. Sure, Adobe sells an awful lot of Windows product, but without the Mac and millions of loyal customers, they’d be in serious trouble. Talk about biting the wrong hands!

Unfortunately this is but a microcosm of the sort of criticism targeted at Apple over the years. No matter what the company does, the critics will find bad things to say, even if they have to stretch the truth. Sure, Apple makes decisions that should be questioned, such as that arbitrary App Store review process. I also feel that they release products prematurely and saddle early adopters with defects they shouldn’t have to confront.

That’s been true about every version of Mac OS X. When a reference release of what’s supposed to be an industrial-strength personal computer operating system ships with bugs that might cause the loss of data, you have reason to be extremely concerned. Yes, the most serious bugs are usually squashed within a few weeks, but sometimes too late for people bitten by those bugs.

The new Intel hardware, particularly the portables, suffered from gestation difficulties, such as hot chassis, premature battery failure and discoloration of the case on those early MacBooks. You’d think that if Apple let those products stew in the test labs for a few more weeks, maybe those problems would not have occurred.

Last fall, the hot-selling iMacs came out, but the 27-inch models were afflicted with screen defects, including image breakup, a yellow discoloration, plus problems involving the display backlighting and other issues. Yes, Apple was able to eradicate the most serious problems in a series of firmware updates, the most recent of which actually came out this week, but why did it have to go that far? Did the rush to push the iMacs out weeks ahead of the holiday season bring with it a failure to properly complete the Q&A process?

Sure, I’ll be charitable too. Sometimes defects of this sort are so random that a company can’t get a handle on them until enough units are built and subjected to the rigors of daily use. So even if some of those problems appear during the testing process, there’s not enough data to stop release. Perhaps consumer electronics and the software to run these gadgets have become so complex that it’s impossible to deliver near-perfect reliability the first time. Anyone who buys a new model or point-zero software release must suffer the consequences.

But I would hope the tech media would try to be more responsible in its coverage of Apple. We all want perfection, but it’s not going to happen, and trying to find fault where it may not exist just wastes everyone’s time.