In the wake of a press release from RESCUECOM, a third-party computer repair service, that Apple remains the top-rated company, I have to wonder why so many people perceive Macs and recent Mac OS versions as seriously flawed. Clearly there’s a disconnect, since other surveys, from Consumer Reports and elsewhere, also show superior ratings for Apple’s gear. By the way, a recent BusinessWeek survey listed Apple as third in customer support.

Now in all fairness, RESCUECOM is not an authorized Apple dealer or repair shop, so they tend to get older Macs that are out of warranty. Still, it’s encouraging to know that Macs will continue to be reliable as they age. But despite this, I think you realize that Apple is still getting serious criticisms for bad quality control.

You can probably see that in some of the recent comments made in response to my article about whether Apple should delay Snow Leopard’s successor. One reason given to speed up the next version is reliability, which means that at least some of you have had problems with Snow Leopard.

The shipping delays and apparent quality problems with the 27-inch iMac have also fueled speculation that Apple is somehow falling down on the job and shipping gear that is seriously flawed.

So is there any truth to all this? Has Apple sacrificed its reputation for great product quality in exchange for the almighty dollar?

I don’t think so, and I’ll tell you why. You see, in order to suggest that Apple is releasing products prematurely or not paying attention to making them as defect free as possible, you would have to look over their entire history and see whether the situation has actually changed.

I still recall the legendary Mac IIcx/IIci/Quadra 700 line, which were outfitted with floppy drives that were serious dust magnets. Indeed, the system admin at one of the shops at which I worked was forced to clean out floppy drives on the company’s Macs every few weeks. If the drives weren’t cleaned, they simply stopped working and in those days that fragile media system was mission critical for far too many companies when it came to archiving your stuff, assuming you didn’t use one of those removable SyQuest drives, which weren’t so reliable either.

Through the years, Macs have always been subject to component failures of one sort or another. Power supplies were especially vulnerable. In recent years, Apple has set up extended repair programs for iMacs, and that’s just a single example. Years ago, if there was a special warranty program, you’d seldom hear about it unless the defects were particularly serious or widespread.

Remember the PowerBooks used in the movies “Mission Impossible” and “Independence Day”? They were among the buggiest ever. The cursed PowerBook 500/5300 series was delayed initially because of smoking batteries that were discovered during the prototype stage. Later on, warranty extensions addressed problems with the screen bezels, logic boards and other parts. It was one huge mess, even if those note-books saved the planet in one of the most popular science fiction movies of the 1990s.

When it comes to the Mac OS, the situation is predictable. There is a point-zero version riddled with defects, some of which can cause crashes and/or data loss, and it takes a few maintenance updates for things to settle down.

All through the years, vocal Mac users have complained that Apple is losing its edge, and marketing is rushing headlong into releasing products as quickly as possible, quality be damned!

In all fairness, there’s always an ongoing conflict between product designers and marketing. The development teams struggle to make sure everything is perfect, as the sales people demand something to ship so profits can begin to pour in. Even if something is certified as ready for sale, there will be inevitable bugs that somehow slipped through the quality control process, or couldn’t be confirmed when tested.

Of course, you have such issues in most every business sector involved in mass production. In the auto industry, Toyota has gotten lots of bad press because of those sudden acceleration problems, but every car maker has recalls of one sort or another. They can’t all be fatally flawed.

Let’s return to our corner of the universe: When it comes to the 27-inch iMac, this model has been a surprisingly hot seller, which is perhaps one key reason for the shipping delays, which have only recently been addressed. The flat panel display is also quite new — it’s also incorporated in a Dell product — and thus there are bound to be early production defects. You heard about some units shipping with broken screens, but that might have just been an assembly or packing problem. Some iMac owners reported flickering screens and an apparent yellow discoloration.

Apple released two firmware updates that appear to have fixed the flickering screens, and they are requesting that you visit your Apple dealer if you have other problems. The complaints have certainly diminished in intensity.

As far as I’m concerned, Snow Leopard arrived last August in pretty decent shape. There was one niggling problem, involving switching from a Guest account to a regular user account, which had the potential of destroying the latter. That situation, since rectified, was as dangerous as a Finder bug in the original Leopard release where files moved, rather than copied, to another drive or file share might be corrupted.

None of this convinces me that Apple is building defective products. You have to expect imperfect gear, and there is no indication that Apple is any less concerned about quality control than they ever were. More to the point, if you are not comfortable dealing with potential bugs, don’t rush to be an early adopter of any new product, from any company. Let people like me suffer through the defects instead.

Just the other day, author and columnist Kirk McElhearn said he was going to close his Gmail account. Yes, it’s free, so what’s the beef? Well, Kirk is extremely concerned about the way Google tracks everything you’re doing and delivers targeted ads, hoping you’ll click on them and thus boost their revenue.

I suppose that’s not so big a deal, since Google assures us that they are not actually reading your messages or otherwise invading your privacy. Besides, if you buy the premium version of Google Apps, at $50 per user per year, you can opt to ditch the ads in your email. After all, you are giving them guaranteed money in exchange.

Well, evidently the straw that broke the camel’s back when it comes to Google was their decision to enter the social networking fray with their new Buzz feature. Now there’s nothing wrong with Google wanting to incorporate the best of AIM, Face-book and Twitter in a single package. If they can succeed at this new venture and deliver value to their visitors and advertisers, all well and good.

But the people in charge of Google forgot to consider their users, the people who click on those ads and thus keep their cash registers ringing. You see, rather than give you the chance to opt in and decide for yourselves whether to use Buzz, they turned it on for you automatically, at least at the very beginning.

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Not so long ago, the question I’m asking in this column would be considered downright insane, and maybe it still us. But please take a look at the facts and maybe you’ll see where Microsoft needs to consider this matter very seriously.

In 1995, Microsoft released version 1.0 of Internet Explorer, an application derived from Spyglass Mosaic, a version of one of the original browsers. Through sleight of hand and outright deceit, Microsoft made IE number one on the planet and, in the process, kicked the sand over the slipping Netscape. Of course, the folks in Redmwond, WA also attracted the attention of the U.S. Department of Justice and, later, the European Union.

In making its $150 million dollar investment in Apple, Microsoft’s co-founder and CEO at the time, Bill Gates, crafted an agreement with Steve Jobs to make IE the default browser on the Mac desktop.

Because they pretty much owned the browser market, Microsoft set aside serious development of Internet Explorer. Why bother, since they had no competition? They were happy to enforce their proprietary Web standards, such as the notoriously insecure ActiveX, and let the product languish.

I suspect they were blindsided by the fast ascendancy of Mozilla’s Firefox, the open source browser produced by a company that was built from the ashes of Netscape. After just a few years, Firefox market share exceeded 25% — and even more in some countries. Microsoft evidently took notice, so they created Internet Explorer 7, which was only slightly better than the previous version, 6.

More recently, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8, said to, at last in part, adhere more closely to Web standards. While it is somewhat better than its predecessors, performance remains perfectly awful compared to any popular competitor. You wonder why they bother.

Over the years, when Microsoft essentially abandoned ongoing development of the Mac version of Internet Explorer, Apple created Safari, based on an open source rendering engine, KHTML, which then morphed into WebKit. The latter is freely available to other developers who want to build their own browsers. So WebKit powers Google Chrome and even the browser used in the latest Palm Pre smartphones, not to mention other mobile devices, even the ones not built by Apple.

But Microsoft has still taken its lumps at the hands of the European Union for making IE the default browser on the Windows desktop. More recently, they agreed to offer a ballot box on newly installed Windows desktops, which gives the user a choice of not just IE, but a number of others, including Apple Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera.

Microsoft is presently working on Internet Explorer 9, which they claim will deliver more competitive benchmarks, but few believe them.

Consider that more than a third of the browsers in use these days, according to current statistics, are not made by Microsoft, and there’s no evidence whatever that Internet Explorer is faring any better since the release of Windows 7. Even ahead of that browser ballot box for European customers, more and more people are just saying no to Microsoft. They are taking the time and trouble to download and install a competing product.

Indeed, the numbers might conceivably be higher, but most Windows users, particularly those who use their PCs at home, can’t or won’t bother to change any of the default setups, so they are hardly likely to go online to seek a new browser.

Since Microsoft’s control over Internet standards is rapidly diminishing, you have to wonder whether they’d do far better to simply give up on Internet Explorer or simply stamp the IE name on an open source version, perhaps based on WebKit, and be done with it. They could then redeploy most of the IE development team to more productive pursuits.

When you think about those rumors that Microsoft is working on a pact with Apple to move Bing onto the iPhone and iPad, you have to wonder what Apple might want in return, other than an appropriate cash payment. If a WebKit browser becomes the default on the Windows desktop that could, conceivably, take market share, and eyes for targeted ads, away from Google. Although Apple and Google both claim to be on cordial terms, nowadays the latter is more and more considered to be the enemy. Microsoft is regarded as a tired relic of the past that struggles without much success to remain relevant in a new world of online applications and mobile devices.

Certainly, Microsoft doesn’t need to waste time on a browser that most people only use because it’s there, not because it’s better. Unfortunately, if you can believe the recent published reports, their corporate culture is severely broken and logical decisions of this sort would elude them. Besides, giving up on IE would probably be considered an admission of defeat even if the name lived on with a different product.

But it wouldn’t be. It would just be a recognition of reality, so they can devote their considerable resources to more productive pursuits. However, the chances that it will ever happen remain mighty slim, and that’s just unfortunate.

It is widely believed that Apple will unveil iPhone 4.0 at this summer’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference and ship it shortly thereafter. There’s also a passing level of speculation that they will also deliver preliminary information about the next great reference release for Mac OS X, 10.7, sporting an unknown feline moniker.

The real question, however, is whether there’s a crying need for a successor to Snow Leopard, and therein lies a tale.

Now most of you know that 10.6 arrived last August, several weeks ahead of Apple’s promised delivery timeframe, with the usual amount of fanfare. But much of the advantages of Snow Leopard lie in its potential, rather than any visible improvements. Consider Grand Central Dispatch, which provides built-in tools to allow applications to better support all those recent Macs that are equipped at least two processor cores. Consider the plight of owners of those super-expensive Mac Pros, with eight powerful processor cores and not much to do with them.

Another advantage, enhanced 64-bit support, lets apps access more than 4GB of memory, which will surely make a difference when you are engaged in heavy-duty content creation, particularly when it involves image editing and 3D rendering. And don’t forget OpenCL, which passes off key processing tasks to the often underutilized graphics chips on your Mac.

As you have probably noticed, precious few apps have been updated to support the first or the last, and even Apple was slow to make their products 64-bit savvy. What this means is that Snow Leopard’s promised performance improvements remain just that — a promise. Yes, 64-bit can help some, but keeping all your Mac’s processor cores active as much as possible will have a more immediate impact. Even converting a big audio file from one format to another can benefit greatly, but how many apps out there use more than one processor core?

Now to be fair to the developers in our audience, I realize that supporting Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL isn’t trivial. Apple provides enhanced tools to get the job done, but lots of work is still required. On the large, sprawling apps that benefit most, you can expect it will take months and months to ship upgrades.

Just the other day, I was reading some preliminary information about the forthcoming Adobe Creative Suite 5, which will include a 64-bit savvy Mac version of Photoshop. Yes, there was a 64-bit Windows version of CS4, but Adobe gave the excuse that the switchover to Intel hamstrung their developers, not giving them enough time to complete the job and deliver a Mac version without a substantial delay. That’s because Adobe took the easy way out in the early days of Mac OS X by porting their apps to Apple’s legacy Carbon environment.

Regardless of the pros and cons of the programming issues, it stands to reason that the expectations for Snow Leopard have yet to be fulfilled for most of you. Yes, maybe it’s a bit snappier and, for most, a little more stable. But the under-the-hood stuff isn’t doing what it was intended to do — yet!

That being the case, where’s the rush to 10.7? Regardless of what Apple offers for the next major operating system upgrade, there will be those inevitable compatibility issues, even if the fundamentals of Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL remain pretty much the same as they are now. Besides, how could Apple resist the temptation to tinker with a few odds and ends of the system plumbing to make it work better? No doubt there will also be interface changes and new features that developers will want to support.

So would it make sense for them to be forced to essentially suspend their Snow Leopard compatibility projects and spend the time and money moving to an even later operating system?

I’m sure little of this is lost on Apple. The other question is whether there’s any incentive to rush to upgrade Snow Leopard by the end of 2010 or even by the middle of 2011. Maybe there is, but I don’t see it, not when the existing operating system is working fine and Mac sales are still raging at a pretty good clip.

While Microsoft appears to be doing well with Windows 7, in terms of early adoption and potential business migrations, there’s little evidence that they have managed to stem the gradual erosion of their operating system’s market share. They haven’t slowed Mac sales, and making the swichover from XP to Windows 7 so difficult isn’t helping matters.

This isn’t to say that Apple will not stage a 10.7 technology demo at the WWDC. It’s possible they will, just to indicate what they’re working on, and provide a 15 to 18 month estimate for shipping a final version. That step would move the full feature rollout to WWDC 2011, which would seem a more sensible move.

It would also help developers if Apple assured them that they could continue to deliver Snow Leopard upgrades without having to confront major compatibility problems when 10.7 finally ships. But there’s no rush for them or us.