I’ve said it a number of times that I do not expect Apple to get into the large screen TV business. There are a number of sensible reasons for this, one of which is the fact that this is a heavily-saturared market with companies already rushing to exit the business.

Now I suppose some of you could say the same about the mobile phone industry, but Apple picks and chooses its markets carefully. Rather than just built another boring handset, or a handset with a few flourishes, they chose to fill the perceived gaps in the smartphone space. That’s why the iPhone is such a great product not just for consumers, but the enterprise as well.

When you examine TV sets, yes it’s true there are higher-end contenders there as well, products that offer large plasma or LCD screens and loads of extras, such as Netflix streaming. But most of the people who used to buy such gear are starting to look at the entry-level, partly because it’s hard to pay the price for more expensive gear, and also because picture quality is pretty good across the board among most major brands, regardless of product position.

That’s a major reason why VIZIO catapulted to a top spot among LCD TVs in the space of just a few years, although they aren’t building plasma TVs anymore, because that market is declining. VIZIO is actually a small company physically although their reported revenue is in the billions of dollars. Founded by former PC industry executives, from Gateway and other companies, VIZIO quickly discovered that the way to success was to give you a product with good reliability, offering near as much picture quality and features as the high-priced spread. Indeed, they are credited with saving you lots of money, because the mainstream companies, such as Panasonic, LG, Samsung and Sony, realized that they could move a lot more units if they cut prices to the bone.

That, of course, is what they do in PC land. Take commodity hardware and compete mostly on price. With flat panel TVs, most of the basic hardware, such as the display components, are sourced from the same small group of OEM makers. A company need only add their own custom setup menus, a handful of uniquely labeled features that perform essentially the same functions as the competition’s uniquely-labeled features, the requisite brand name identifiers to the case and suddenly they’ve got a brand new product.

Playing the commodity hardware game is not Apple’s cup of tea, which is why they earn good profits from every piece of hardware they sell. Even the slow-moving Apple TV is certainly delivering sufficient earnings to keep the product going, even if it remains, as Steve Jobs says, “a hobby” that is evidently waiting for a purpose.

Would that purpose be flat panel TV?

All right, it’s true that the new iMacs, with their 16:9 widescreen displays, are flat panel TV monitors, to which you merely need to attach some sort of input element to receive broadcast, cable or satellite TV. Then again, with more and more TV content moving online, maybe that’s not necessary for some viewers who don’t need a selection of 350 stations at their beck and call.

I suppose, then, that Apple could just take the iMac, bundle an Apple TV, inflate the screen size to the proper 42 or 50 inches, and they’ll have a first-rate set with picture quality way ahead of most of the competition. Of course using premium grade displays means that, with such large sizes, the price will also be considerably higher than the TVs you usually find at a Best Buy or a Wal-Mart. I wouldn’t pretend to hazard a guess, but the $1999 27-inch iMac with the Intel Core i5 CPU might be twice as expensive with a bundled Apple TV capability and a 50-inch screen.

Would Apple be able to sell a few million of those machines each year in order to justify the investment?

Just as important, how would an Apple Store handle such a physically immense device? Yes, the 27-inch iMac comes in a pretty imposing box, as you might expect. But having helped set up large screen TVs that I received for review, or at the homes of friends and relatives, I can tell you that stock rooms and shipping departments have to be seriously revised to accommodate such products.

Yes, Best Buy and other retailers specializing in appliances and large screen TVs know how to handle this category of merchandise. Apple could learn as well, although their current retail outlets don’t seem suited.

It may be, of course, that if Apple built an entrant into this market, they would either ship directly to the end-user, or work strictly with third-party retailers that are appropriately equipped to ship and install such gear.

At the end of the day, I just don’t see it. Remember that the iPhone, another product people said Apple couldn’t deliver successfully because of the crowded marketplace, is competitively priced with most of its serious contenders. An Apple flat panel TV would only be able to compete in a very exclusive marketplace, and the question is whether there’s room for another player, even if the screen was truly better, and the product was more feature-laden.

Apple would certainly have some fascinating interface ideas to offer, of course. But I just don’t see it happening.

While Google seems to be becoming more and more competitive with the PC world when it comes to browsers and, in fact, operating systems, I think some of you might forget that they are in a different business. Although they get a small income from the enterprise version of Google Apps, the vast majority of their revenue comes from advertising.

So whenever you do a Google search, you see specially targeted ads in the results. Free versions of their products, including Gmail, also include ads that are focused on you depending on your email habits. Although Google claims they protect your privacy, they still know lots about you.

When it comes to the Android operating system, they give it away to wireless phone makers. But the apps that you run on those phones that are provided by Google include the ads from which they derive their real payment. The same is true for the forthcoming Google Chrome OS. All right, there is their new DNS service, designed to replace the one that is provided by your ISP, but their ultimate goal, other than tracking Web surfing patterns, isn’t clear.

As you might expect, Google is heavily involved in the Web browser business. A large portion of the funding for Mozilla, which delivers Firefox, comes from the Google search feature that is that browser’s default. Apple also provides a fair amount of income to Google courtesy of the search features in Safari for the Mac, Windows and the iPhone.

That takes us to the Google Chrome browser. Although it uses the WebKit rendering engine, same as Apple’s Safari, Chrome actually came out on the Windows platform first, surprisingly enough, or maybe their marketing people decided they could generate more paid clicks that way. Regardless, a Mac version has finally reached public beta, after being available in an alpha version for quite a long time.

Without going into the raw details, it’s always nice to see another entrant in the browser wars. But whether or not Chrome is something that large numbers of people will or should adopt is an open question. Frankly, I don’t find any reason to choose it in place of Firefox, Opera, Safari or any other contender.

I’ll be brief about features and capability, but I’m not going to render a final verdict, forgive the pun. It’s still quite early in the development process, and the missing features might eventually appear.

Since Chrome uses WebKit, I didn’t expect much of a difference between Google’s contender and Safari in actually displaying Web pages. Early benchmarks indicate Safari is faster, but these are the sort of differences that involve fractions of a second and thus can be safely ignored unless there’s some serious glitch one way or the other.

My particular bugaboo is the apparent inability of Chrome to display the QuickTime player on our radio show sites. This is actually the first time I’ve observed such behavior on a beta browser in recent years, and I wonder if it is in part related to the problem that I confirmed with their DNS service. In that case, Apple’s QuickTime Broadcaster, which is used to stream our radio shows to the Web server, would hang upon launch. Switching to OpenDNS, the one that I prefer anyway because of its expanded features for safety and reliability, cured the problem. And, yes folks, I’m in touch with a Google product manager about this problem and it does appear to have been resolved as of the last time I tested a Broadcaster stream. But performance advantages among the public DNS services are often so slight as to be barely detectible in the real world.

Another issue with the Chrome beta is the apparent inability to properly manage bookmarks brought over from other browsers. While that may not be a significant matter for some of you, I do know of people who have dozens and dozens of bookmarks and intricately-sorted folders for whom this missing feature will make Chrome a non-starter.

On the other hand, I suppose a minimalist application has its place and certainly Chrome seems to mate reasonably well into a Mac environment. Indeed, the advantages are certainly obvious. Fewer features mean a reduced learning curve, a smaller number of preferences to set and, in the end, make it possible for you to concentrate more on the actual browsing experience.

This isn’t to say I will never use Chrome except for brief testing. Competition is good, and I’m always looking for better ways to get things done. That’s why I always keep such innovative products as Opera in my Web surfing arsenal, since there are always great ideas inherent in that relatively lightweight application, ideas that once included the original iteration of tabs and other features that eventually were adopted by other companies.

In the scheme of things, it’s perfectly all right for Google to want to expand its income base with free software and operating systems. Certainly, Chrome has already gotten extremely positive reviews on the Windows platform, and the Mac version seems, well, promising.

On the other hand, I’ve seen nothing to make me want to switch browsers, at least not yet. But I could change my mind as Chrome is updated for the Mac.

Please Note: We’re a little late today. Your long-suffering editor is recovering from surgery and things got, well, a little complicated Tuesday. But the situation is far more reasonable today.

There was a time when publications had copy editors and technical editors to make sure that the material they published was as accurate as possible. This was particularly true for tech publishing, where lots and lots of intricate detail must be as accurate as possible.

Well, it’s not as if those positions have actually been exorcised from the ranks of a publisher’s staff, but you have to wonder sometimes if they are actually earning their paychecks. Consider a certain consumer-oriented magazine that doesn’t accept ads, and won’t even allow a company to reprint a favorable review. They even claim to buy all the products they test, so you can be totally assured they maintain an extremely high level of accuracy.

But in lots of ways, Consumer Reports falls down on the job. Part of the reason is that the magazine is often simplifying (notice I avoid the phrase dumbing down) down complicated information for a general audience, but you can also see a bias that should not exist in a publication with such high and mighty pretensions.

Take CR’s reviews of Macs. Yes, Apple’s gear gets high ratings, but you wonder sometimes the basis on which they arrive at certain conclusions and certainly about the outright factual errors or omissions.

Just the other day, in fact, I was examining the CR Buying Guide 2010, their magnum opus paperback work that contains the essence of all of recent tests evalating over 1,500 products. You would certainly come to believe that they are going to take extra time to recheck their facts before distilling down longer feature articles to be summarized in their annual book.

However, it’s the little things that count.

So in their roundup of reviews covering computers, phones, peripherals and related products, you can see subtle examples of a political agenda. In the section on RAM, for example, they conclude: “Computers with 3GB [of RAM] can be slightly faster; we don’t think any more than that is beneficial.”

Anyone who has seen their Macs slow down because lots of apps are running, and how they seem to just sing and dance with a memory upgrade to 4GB and higher wouldn’t believe that claim for a moment. But when you realize that millions of older 32-bit PCs can’t address more than 3GB of physical RAM, even when 4GB is installed, you can see that CR must be behind the times. And, no, the article doesn’t recognize the existence of a 32-bit and 64-bit version of Windows, nor what 64-bit even signifies.

CR also lists the processors used on PCs, concluding that Apple strictly uses the Intel Core 2 Duo, while mentioning the wider variety used on PCs. They ignore the existence of the Mac Pro, which has, since its introduction in 2006, contained Intel Xeons. While they do mention the arrival of the Intel Core i7, they say nothing about how many processor cores it contains or why this might be important, nor do they mention that one of the early models to be equipped with that new chip is the iMac; the one, in fact, on which I’m typing this article.

The review of smartphones mentions the older version of the iPhone (the 2008 3G in fact), and continues to claim the audio quality of phone calls on this device is worse than average. Unfortunately, CR’s precise methodology is never discussed, so I can’t tell you where they get that impression, or whether the problem is more carrier-related in their locale than attributable to the product itself. In any case, having used a number of mobile handsets from AT&T, Sprint and Verizon Wireless, I can tell you that the iPhone sounds as good (or bad) as any of them.

Unfortunately, the technical lapses can’t be blamed strictly on a single consumer product review publication. Various and sundry tech magazines also demonstrate the lack of technical chops. I am particularly concerned about Mac|Life, the successor to MacAddict, because they clearly need to beef up their review process. I do hope the new editor, Paul Curthoys, whose credentials include a stint at a magazine covering the NeXT computer way back when, will set things right.

In the meantime, we have that recent review of Epson’s Artisan 810 all-in-one printer that neglected to evaluate its copying, faxing or scanning capability, and conveyed the impression that print quality was the only factor worth considering. The reviewer also forgot to mention that niggling driver bug, where Mac OS X’s Collate feature, to print documents by the last page first for easy sorting, is unfortunately unsupported.

In the January 2010 issue of Mac|Life, they carry a review of a wireless charging product, WildCharger Pad, and give it a pretty unfavorable evaluation due to the ill-fitting charger case, but the conclusion is that the product is “Solid,” the equivalent of three stars, I suppose. Now yes, it does work, but the review appears to describe a product that’s noticeably subpar; the rating seems awfully optimistic.

I could go on. I have little hope that CR will mend its ways. But I would hope new leadership at Mac|Life will provide a sorely needed dose of technical authority to a rather middling magazine.

Over the weekend, Apple confirmed the purchase of Lala, a Silicon Valley startup that specializes in music streaming. That was sufficient cause to start the tech pundits speculating on how Apple would use its new acquisition, and whether we’re in store for an iTunes music streaming service in the near future, perhaps focused on the iPhone and iPod touch.

Of course, buying smaller companies is nothing new for Apple. With tens of billions of dollars in cash and investments, they can pretty much do whatever they want when it comes to adding technology to their portfolio. The price tag for Lala has been estimated at approximately $80 million dollars, which puts barely a dent in that cash hoard.

Last year Apple purchased PA Semi, a chip designer specializing in PowerPC-based CPUs. At the time, Steve Jobs was quoted by the Wall Street Journal as saying that the acquired company’s technology would ultimately turn up in the iPhone and iPod touch.

That, of course, hasn’t happened yet. It’s one thing to buy a company, and quite another to integrate it within a larger corporate structure that may have a different set of priorities. So even if a future Apple gadget, perhaps the tablet to start yet another rumor, contained technology based on the inventions of PA Semi, the timeframe of roughly two years since the original purchase would make quite a bit of sense.

When it comes to Lala, once again it will probably take a year or two for Apple to deploy their technology into a media streaming service, if that’s what they plan to do. As many of you probably know, Apple is spending upwards of a billion dollars to build a server farm in North Carolina. Put the two together and you can see where, again, there won’t be immediate payback.

Indeed, it’s quite possible that technology from Lala, PA Semi and other companies Apple has purchased in recent years won’t show up in any way that would make them truly recognizable. I suspect most of you expect a situation resembling that of iTunes. Apple bought a media player app, SoundJam, and morphed it into its own product. Even though they didn’t look exactly the same, it was no secret how iTunes came to be.

From a practical perspective, these purchases are a good thing for Apple. There are lots of small companies coming online each and every year trying to develop new technologies and find their place in the sun. Some will attempt to sell the product or service directly, as Lala is still doing, while others hope to be acquired by a larger company with deep pockets, so they can get huge paydays, retire early, or just continue to do their thing without worrying about the source of their next paychecks.

At one time Apple had a “not invented here” problem, where only a few outside technologies were licensed, and they kept trying to use their own expertise instead. Certainly that’s why there was once something called AppleTalk (now a relic of tech history) and you know that both FireWire and QuickTime an other technologies now widely accepted were invented there too, although some were ultimately embraced by other companies.

These days, Macs use loads of industry standard technologies and components. Mac OS X is built upon a tried and true Unix-based structure, buttressed with Apple’s own look-and-feel overlay.

When it comes to buying a new company, of course, there’s no certainty that the technology that comes to Apple will ever appear in a new product or service. Yes, that might be the plan, but sometimes plans change and the new employees and patent portfolio they bring to the table might be deployed in ways not originally anticipated. That, of course, isn’t going to be obvious for quite a while.

Now it’s also true that lots of people check out Apple’s patent filings for possible clues about new products. Certainly those filings can be considered precursors to the arrival of the Magic Mouse, and brought to bear in many of the new input device’s unique capabilities. But that doesn’t always happen.

You see, more often than not Apple will patent some new invention not because there’s an imminent product in the wings, or even something that might come out several years hence. You see, there are loads of patent trolls out there, companies that manage intellectual property portfolios but don’t actually build anything. They earn their income from license fees and often lawsuits filed in cities friendly to such legal matters, usually in Texas for some reason.

As Apple has come to realize, they must take a defensive approach, going through the time and trouble to get first digs on a new technology even though the product in which the technology is contained may perish in the test labs. In the end, that process is far more sensible than having to pay tens of millions of dollars in legal and licensing fees later on after a protracted legal battle.

So yes it’s nice to use company acquisitions and patent filings for clues about what Apple’s up to, but don’t depend on that information for reliable information. Sometimes nothing happens.