Those of you who have been following the ongoing 27-inch iMac soap opera are aware of the reports about display defects. These include screen flickering and a yellowish tinge. Early on, some newly-minted owners, including Macworld magazine, got units with cracked screens. Worse, this hot-selling model was particularly difficult to get, unless you were ready to wait two or three weeks for yours to arrive.

Now to put my cards on the table, I ordered one of the optional versions equipped with the quad-core Intel Core i7 processor in late November. I didn’t choose Apple, because MacMall was offering a $100 rebate, but I didn’t wait any longer than Apple’s promised delivery date. It took a little over a week to arrive.

I was certainly concerned when I picked up the unit from the local UPS Store, where we receive our business mail. No, I didn’t open the box at the store; I waited till I returned to my home office. As I drove home, I recalled a comment suggesting that Apple, in its quest to be environmentally compliant, used boxes that were just too thin, without sufficient protection, thus making the delicate contents more susceptible to damage.

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Some of you may have read a report the other day that Apple was behind the curve because there were no recent updates to the MacBook Pro lineup. This despite the fact that Intel had recently upgraded its mobile processors. So what’s wrong with Apple? Don’t they want their customers to have the latest and greatest and fastest note-books?

Of course, the real world doesn’t always work that way. Yes the chips may be available, but there are also complications in the way Apple has configured its recent hardware, using the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M chipset. Now this integrated graphics processor is way faster than anything offered by Intel, but both Intel and NVIDIA are embroiled in a dispute over the latter’s right to produce chipsets that support the new Core i5 and Core i7 mobile processors. Until that’s resolved, Apple can’t use those parts, so they’d have to devise a different solution.

Sure, it’s possible that particular problem will be soon resolved and Apple can go ahead and release MacBook Pros with the newest Intel chips and the latest NVIDIA integrated graphics. If not, Apple has to use either discrete graphics from NVIDIA and ATI, or just rely on what Intel has to offer for the entry-level model. That, however, means worse performance and that’s not something Mac users would expect to see in a product upgrade.

There’s also a report about Apple testing a scheme where they’d use the Intel integrated graphics for basic screen display chores, and when more power is needed, the system automatically and seamlessly switches to a discrete graphics processor. Yes, going to the faster graphics cuts battery life, but it may not happen often enough to matter unless you’re into heavy game playing or 3D rendering work.

At the end of the day, however, Apple doesn’t build products that cater to critics or the so-called geek crowd. That’s why, for example, Mac OS X isn’t stuffed with preference panel settings for every conceivable change in the look and feel of the system. The essentials are there, and most changes can be made without screwing something up. If you need a more granular setup, there are a number of third-party utilities that’ll either harness “hidden” features of the operating system or add new ones. That way, Apple serves both masters.

When it comes to the mobile platform, such simplicity has also caused trouble, at least if you believe some of the complaints. So there’s supposedly no multitasking on the iPhone and iPod touch, and the setup appears to be similar for the iPad. However, as has been pointed out here and elsewhere, the iPhone OS does support multitasking, but not with third-party apps. So you can make a phone call on a 3G network and check your email or visit a Web site at the same time. Apple’s argument is that if they allowed you to do that willy nilly the end result would be sharply reduced performance and battery life.

In exchange for the limited multitasking setup, apps are designed to basically suspend or quit on a dime, without much noticeable delay, and start up just as quickly. So the disadvantages of running only one app at a time aren’t apparent in most respects. Apple’s Push Notification feature allows messages to be sent to you from the apps that aren’t running, which is why you’ll see a popup screen with an AIM message if you’re logged into AOL’s network but working in a different app.

The question about the lack of Flash is murkier. One tech pundit wrote a piece — and the opinion is probably shared by others — that Apple blocked Flash strictly to prevent potential App Store competition from Adobe. However, Adobe does provide the tools to convert a Flash-based app to the iPhone OS. More to the point, most Flash content doesn’t consist of apps at all, but fancy menus, special effects and videos. So how does that compete with the App Store?

Recently, one Flash developer wrote a piece for Daniel Eran Dilger’s Roughly Drafted Magazine blog that brought up some of the serious issues involved in running Flash on a Multi-Touch screen. Without getting into all the details that you can read in the article itself, Flash-based sites would have to be reworked extensively to work properly on the iPhone OS. It’s not just playing a video, but navigating menus, playing games and other chores that don’t translate so well. Even if Adobe makes Flash less resource hungry, better performing and more secure, fundamental interface conflicts remain a serious obstacle.

This being the case, it would appear that Apple’s objections to Flash have serious merit, and maybe it should go the way of the floppy disk. In saying that, however, Apple still has to get its App Store act together. The recent debacle involving explicit content clearly indicates that they are still shooting from the hip and that they need to devise a clear, consistent policy so developers know what’s right and what’s wrong, and don’t waste lots of time and money building products that will never be approved.

Since Opera released the first alphas and betas for Opera 10.5 beginning last year, they’ve been able to boast of having the speediest browser on the planet. Test after test shows tiny increments of advantage over Google Chrome, Firefox and, of course, Safari. You hardly count Internet Explorer in such benchmarks, since it trails the pack by a such a huge margin.

Now the specifics of those tests aren’t important unless you live your life at a frantic pace where a few milliseconds here or there will somehow impact your earnings potential or your emotional stability.

But that hasn’t stopped the hard-working developers of all those products from working feverishly to unearth even the most miniscule cause of a rendering slowdown, and eradicating it pronto. I mean, just think how all this impacts your Web surfing experience.

Now I do not intend to put down the hard workers at Opera. I know some of them. They are good people and they pioneered many of the features that we take for granted these days, including tabs. However, they have fallen way behind in the performance race in recent years, except for Internet Explorer of course. So finding a way to jump to the top of the heap is a great thing.

However, such tests need to be put in perspective. The ones I’ve read recently are based on prerelease versions of Chrome and Opera, along with the nightly updates to Apple’s WebKit, against the release versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer. Already there’s a problem, since that which makes the browser faster may also create instabilities that, when fixed, will slow things down somewhat. The results you see today will change when the final release appears.

As a practical matter, what difference does it make in the real world?

I mean, when you scale differences down to fractions of a second, I can’t think anyone would notice. The vagaries of Internet connection speeds, network traffic and the amount of people trying to access a specific site will have far more to do with perceived performance than whether Opera is a hair faster than Chrome.

Past the miniscule performance differences, there are such mundane things as features, interface, usability and, naturally, stability. This combination of factors should be forefront when you consider which app to use. Since they are all free, nothing stops you from installing a few browsers and switching from one to the other to see which one offers the most comfortable environment for you. Yes, you want to know that your favorite sites will be rendered as accurately as speedily as possible. But, other than Internet Explorer, which thankfully is a Windows-only product these days, they are all quite accurate in most respects and do adhere to the latest Web standards.

In terms of security, we’re talking about responsible developers here. If there’s a problem, they’ll fix it. Sure, Apple gets brickbats for not getting security updates out as quickly as they should, but at the end of the day, Mac OS X still remains quite resilient. A widespread virus infection has yet to occur, and much of the existing malware out there is based on social engineering. If you download the wrong thing, or click on the wrong Web site and give out too much information, you put yourself in danger.

In all this, though, I have to wonder just what Microsoft is thinking, and whether their executives have even a modicum of a sense of reality. While the best browsers all perform pretty much alike in the real world in terms of rendering speeds, Internet Explorer remains far slower in nearly every benchmark. When I see apps that are at least a couple of dozen times faster than IE in those tests, you have to wonder whether Microsoft’s developers are basically incompetent at what they do. If much tinier companies can build browsers with more features, superior security, and far better performance and rendering accuracy, shouldn’t Microsoft start paying attention?

Sure, they tell us that IE 9 will be faster, that it will provide improved adherence to Web standards and so on and so forth. But as IE’s market share continues to tumble, how long will it take for its publisher to realize that something is wrong and needs to be addressed pronto?

Yes, I realize part of the problem is that Microsoft wants to retain legacy features, such as support for that notoriously unstable ActiveX scheme, but at what cost?

Now in a previous column, I suggested that they might do well to simply throw the existing IE code base overboard and embrace, for example, Apple’s WebKit. Maybe that seems a strange request, but don’t forget that Google did the very same thing with Chrome, even though Apple and Google are not exactly friends anymore.

Nothing stops Microsoft from building a WebKit version of Internet Explorer. They could even confer a different brand name upon it, so that it wouldn’t be saddled with IE’s sorry reputation. How about the Bing Browser? Has a ring to it, don’t you think?

All right you know that Apple Inc. is brilliant when it comes to spin control. They have managed to control their corporate message far better than any other company and, in fact, probably better than many governments. Whether it’s all due to the iron fist of Steve Jobs, or it’s a cooperative approach formulated by a number of executives, you have to expect that they will make sure things are done their way as much as possible.

When it comes to the products themselves, the situation varies. Mac users have a pretty good amount of freedom to run what they want, even if it screws up their computers. As much as Mac OS X is perceived as a proprietary operating system, it’s actually built upon a core consisting of loads of open source apps.

WebKit, the rendering engine for Safari, is open source and thus amenable to contributions from loads of smart programmers. It’s also used in Google Chrome, various mobile platforms in addition to the iphone 4 and previous models and, in fact, by any developer who feels they have a better idea for a browser.

But where Apple’s iron fist is most evident is the App Store, where they are the gatekeepers. While they are fairly generous about which apps get posted, they can also be extremely arbitrary. That explains why some software companies complain that they feel they have followed the rules, but Apple won’t post their apps. Every so often, Apple trots out VP Phil Schiller to explain what a great job they’re doing, while still conceding they aren’t perfect.

While I understand that some iPhone and iPod touch owners might not like having to go to a single source for all their legal apps, there are some benefits to this sort of setup, the most obvious of which are improved software stability and security. When you download and install an app for your Mac or PC, you trust that the download repository or software publisher is doing the right thing and isn’t trucking in infected or extremely bug-ridden software. If you click on a link that takes you to a phishing site and your bank account gets hacked, well, an innocent error can become catastrophic. Then again, that can happen on the iPhone too, as it did when my wife clicked on a bogus email link and mistakenly logged in while just playing around with the thing the other day. We’re still fighting the bank to get our money back.

Update: It appears that this episode was more in the form of a generic hacker attack than the result of phishing. We hope to have things restored once the “investigation” is over, whenever that is.

In any case, as a vendor, Apple has the perfect right to make a final decision about what merchandise to stock. The same is true whether it’s a local retail store or a national or multinational chain. They might take suggestions about which products to carry, but at the end of the day, they can’t be forced to select one product over another. Would you really want it to be otherwise?

While you may object to the fact that Apple maintains the only legal source for their mobile platform, nobody forces you to buy those gadgets. When it comes to smartphones, there are loads of choices, with the most compelling competitive offerings coming from RIM with their BlackBerry and the various devices that support the Google Android platform. Again, you have to weigh the positives and negatives, and that includes the freedom to buy the software and accessories you want.

As I said the other day, you only have to compare the way Apple does things to the approach taken by Google, where they track everything you do in order to serve up targeted ads. That’s often the price to pay for free, but even if you use the Google Apps version of Gmail, and upgrade to the professional version that carries an annual fee for every single user, the last time I checked you still had to turn off the option to display ads. They get you wherever you go.

In contrast, Apple may exert strict control over their various platforms, but they aren’t watching what you’re doing. Sure, they keep your credit card information on file so you can be billed for the stuff you buy from their online stores, but that’s no different from any online vendor. None of that extends to how you use their products, or what you do with them. When you pay $99 a year for a MobileMe subscription, you can rest assured that the contents of your email won’t be tracked in order to send you targeted ads. There are no ads, and the only mailings you might receive from Apple, should you agree to accept them, relate to the company’s products and services — and, of course, when your membership will expire.

Now I realize that many of you might chafe at the way Apple controls the medium, the message and the products. However, there is also a fairly decent amount of adherence to international standards rather than proprietary ones, particularly in OS X, and the technologies supported on all their devices. The good, to my way of thinking, far outweighs the bad.