So I just set up that brand new 27-inch quad-core iMac, and decided to run a MobileMe Sync. Nothing unusual, right? Well, this is a problem I’ve had for a long, long time, but I haven’t seen many complaints about the situation. You see, whenever I choose the option to include my Mail accounts, Sync has the temerity to reorder my email accounts via its own internal “fuzzy” logic.

The battle commences. I move the accounts to the order that I prefer, and, on the next run, Sync puts them back in the order that suits it. The solution to this never-ending battle is to simply turn off the option to sync those accounts. Understand that this reordering phenomenon also occurs on my iPhone, but I can’t simply drag and drop the accounts to a different position on that device, so I put up with it. Yes, I know I could just delete the accounts and restore them in the order I want, and perhaps I’ll do that one of these days.

Other functions seem to run acceptably, or at least I don’t notice any problems worth mentioning. More to the point, I’ve seen this particular symptom for several years, and the transition from .Mac to MobileMe hasn’t changed a thing, nor replacing Macs, upgrading operating systems or simply resetting the sync information.

In all fairness to Apple, maybe some characteristic of one of my email accounts, configured a long time ago, is responsible for this problem. Or perhaps I have become far too obsessive/compulsive in my old age and I fret over matters that nobody else cares about.

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So I get a call from MacMall on Tuesday morning informing me that my custom-built iMac with the quad-core Intel i7 processor was still backordered and that I’d have to wait for another week for it to ship. Oh well, I wasn’t surprised since Apple had extended its own delivery promise from five to seven days back to seven to 10 days.

The next morning, I just happened to check the order status out of habit and found out that the computer had already been shipped and was due for delivery by 3:00 PM that afternoon. It actually arrived closer to 11:30 AM. You can say that I was pleasantly surprised.

My purchase decision was a long time coming. For many years, I spent a whole lot of money buying the latest, greatest and usually the largest Mac on the planet. I began to wonder, though, whether having a fully equipped Mac Pro, with 16GB RAM, hooked up to a 30-inch display, was more computer than I needed.

In these troubling economic times, a lot of people are downsizing in one way or another, and it my case, I had to first evaluate my workflow. Would I suffer from selling my existing gear and depending on an all-in-one Mac to handle my work without suffering from any perceived performance disadvantage?

One matter that pretty much firmed up my decision was the fact that few of the audio apps that I use regularly benefit from more than a single processor core. Sure, I know some of them will ultimately be updated to support Snow Leopard’s Grand Central Dispatch feature, which will surely accelerate some tasks. But would a single quad-core Intel processor, which, according to Apple, has the capability to “Turbo Boost dynamic performance up to 3.46GHz” and supports “Hyper-Threading for up to eight virtual cores” be sufficient to compensate?

Well, certainly Macworld’s Speedmark 6 benchmarks told a promising tale, that this new configuration was actually faster in their tests than the best of this year’s Mac Pros, and I had last year’s model.

While the situation would likely change next year, when Intel is expected to release a gussied up processor with six cores that is expected to end up in the next Mac Pro, it sure appeared that I wouldn’t be suffering from much in terms of performance.

There is the issue of expandability. Yes, the iMac has four memory slots, and can carry four 4GB RAM modules, but since they are of the smaller mobile form factor, the price of admission can be hugely expensive, with current prices from third party retailers coming in at over $900. So I opted to pay Apple an extra $200 for the 8GB setup, containing four 2GB RAM sticks. Maybe as the 4GB variety becomes more prevalent, and higher density chips come online, the price will become sensible.

However, it doesn’t look as if I’m suffering for any lack of RAM at least so far. An external 1TB FireWire 800 drive, from LaCie, will replace the additional internal drive I had on the Mac Pro.

But after reading a few troubling reports about the iMacs with Intel i7s arriving with cracked screens, you have to know that I unpacked mine very carefully and slowly. With fingers crossed, I lifted the hefty iMac from its foam housing, discovering to my endless relief that it had evidently survived the trip from the factory in Asia to MacMall’s shipping facility in Memphis and finally to my Arizona home.

The setup and migration process was pretty typical and uneventful. Earlier that morning, I had run a full clone backup of the Mac Pro’s 330GB contents to that FireWire 800 drive, so I was ready for an easy file transfer. I had expected the process to consume much of the afternoon, but it was over and done with in just shy of 90 minutes.

The rest of the setup process was also essentially normal. I had to serialize a few of my professional apps again, but my printer drivers were transferred and everything seemed intact, except for iTunes. The first time I launched it, I got a prompt that it was damaged and I had to reinstall. Go figure.

Yes, it was strange that what is probably Apple’s most important application was the only one that exhibited a problem. Otherwise, the first 24 hours proved enlightening, but no further problems occurred.

Moving from a 30-inch display to the iMac’s 27-incher turned out to be easier than I anticipated since I am really giving up only a small amount of vertical screen real estate. I was also pleasantly surprised at the gorgeous picture and outstanding clarity delivered by the LED display. And no, my friends, the presence of a glossy screen was barely noticeable in my office.

It was also incredibly bright and I turned it down roughly halfway before I used the Display preference pane to calibrate the screen. I also noticed that the few reflections I did detect were noticeably diminished once brightness was set at a level more suited to my needs.

Performance? The Core i7 iMac actually seems to handle those large audio files in a noticeably snappier fashion than with my Mac Pro. Actually saving a streamed file in MP3 format, though, took roughly the same amount of time.

Just one more thing: I set the standard Magic Mouse aside, and I am currently using my trusty Logitech MX Revolution instead. For now, I’m sticking with Apple’s keyboard — I ordered the standard aluminum model with the numeric keypad. Some things are just too hard to give up.

On this week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, Ted Landau reminds us how he once wrote a book entitled “Mac OS X Disaster Relief.” Unfortunately, Apple chose, in its infinite wisdom, not to offer this book to their customers because someone “higher up” in the Apple food chain decided that the words “disaster” and “Mac OS X” didn’t convey the correct image for the company.

After all, Apple doesn’t want you to think that you could ever confront a potential disaster with one of their products.

Then there was the time that Steve Jobs reportedly ordered all books from a certain publisher removed from the Apple retail stores when that publisher released a title about him. How dare they do that?

Of course, it’s also true that Apple is a private business and they can sell what they want, and if a particular product from a third party company doesn’t suit their requirements, even if those requirements are arbitrary, so be it. Unfortunately Apple gets lots of severe criticism whenever they make decisions of this sort, and highly publicized rejection of certain apps from the iPhone App Store has added more fuel to the fire.

On the other hand, how often do you hear complaints because Target and Wal-Mart chose not to carry a specific product? Well, in all fairness, the App Store is the only official means to acquire software for your iPhone or iPod touch. If you don’t like what Apple is offering, your only choice is to go without or jailbreak your iPhone so you can have other options.

When it comes to a regular Mac, you aren’t locked in to any single outlet for your apps. Indeed, you aren’t even restricted to using Mac OS X if you have other needs. So many Mac users run Windows under Boot Camp or just reformat their drives and use another flavor of Unix — even Linux — instead. The Apple Tax police won’t come to your door and tell you that you are buying the wrong products from the wrong suppliers. But if something goes wrong, well, that’s the risk you take, and it’s your responsibility to fix the damage. Usually, however, a reformat and reinstallation of your stuff will set things right.

When it comes to a mobile platform, you’re dealing with a much more restricted environment not just because Apple forces you to accept that situation. There are serious hardware and storage limits to consider, plus the matter of security. If your iPhone — or any mobile phone — is lost or stolen, you can face all sorts of complications, and just having someone use and abuse your wireless account is a small part of the dangers you face.

Recently, it was reported that jailbroken iPhones on which SSH is configured for secure networking are vulnerable to actual viruses if you don’t change the standard password. Now I would presume anyone clever enough to jailbreak an iPhone successfully and get these things to work would realize that choosing a new and secure password is a necessity. For those who fail to realize that basic truth, that’s just too bad.

The meta issue of Apple’s obsessive control of its platform also includes the Mac lineup. Based on what you readers have told me in recent days, it’s clear that Apple doesn’t always build the product you want, so you have to make compromises. I can see Apple’s reasoning in wanting to keep the lineup as simple as possible, with a small number of stark choices for customization. That helps reduce production costs, simplify the ordering process and it sure makes your decisions simpler. But you have to take it or leave it.

On the public information issue, we all know how hard Apple works to control its message. The problem occurs when things go wrong, and the reasons why aren’t readily forthcoming. It often seems as there was just too much of a delay before you knew, for example, that Apple was looking into reports about User accounts being deleted when switching back from a Guest account under Snow Leopard.

Yes, that particular problem was apparently fixed successfully in the 10.6.2 upgrade, but people who were impacted by that bug, if they haven’t actually contacted Apple, may miss the press announcements about the fix, or the tiny release notes. Apple could have delivered a press release, but chose not to. They only deal with good news, and have to be dragged kicking and screaming into releasing information that might not always reflect favorably on the company.

Of course, that sort of corporate spin control is normal. Apple just happens to do it better than anyone else. But when it comes to the way they exercise absolute and resolute control over all their product lines, you wonder if customers aren’t being forced to accept things they just don’t like.

I suppose the response would be that you could always go elsewhere, but when it comes to personal computers, the other side of the tracks is usually not a suitable alternative.

I first started using desktop Macs in the 1980s, not long after Apple first released the Macintosh, but it took several years before I could afford to bring one into my home. Well, actually it was a matter of necessity, to earn a living, but low-cost equipment leases were readily available to finance the $15,000 purchase price that included a IIcx, a color display, laser printer and a selection of the key software I needed for my work, which included FileMaker, Microsoft Word and, of course, QuarkXPress.

On the other hand, I didn’t adapt to the note-book revolution right off the bat. That came out of necessity. My wife was getting surgery in another state, and taking my Mac with all the accessories seemed a daunting task for a hotel-based existence. However, I worked out a deal with a relative to borrow their PowerBook and inkjet printer during the week I was away from the home office. I also brought a modem with which to stay online. Remember these were the days before broadband was readily available at such establishments.

In those days, in the 1990s, an Apple note-book used a trackball, not a trackpad, and that was the sort of input device to which I was never successful at fully adapting. But I managed to actually get some work done, with time left to take my son, Grayson, on a few sightseeing tours. Fortunately this trip occurred during the summer, so Grayson didn’t miss any classes.

I only acquired a portable Mac a few years later, after Apple had migrated to trackpads, but it took what seemed almost forever for me to become sufficiently comfortable with its unique style of cursor movement, and the short-travel keyboards were an acquired taste. These days, of course, all Apple keyboards are note-book inspired, perhaps to lessen the difficulties of adapting from desktops and back again. It’s not my cup of tea, but I’ve become reasonably flexible with this alternative.

If anyone cares, my desktop keyboard right now is the Logitech diNovo Edge, Mac Edition, which remains one of the most comfortable keyboards I’ve ever used. I never for a moment considered using a note-book computer for all my work, even though it’s a trivial matter to hook up a separate display.

On the other hand, the Mac market is moving in a different direction. With three quarters of Apple’s sales going to its portable lineup, you can certainly feel that desktops might be an endangered species. But that 25% or so percent is still a sizable figure, and with Apple’s increased sales, comes extremely close to the total number of units in all categories that Apple managed to sell just a few years ago. It’s not a trivial figure.

However, you can’t ignore the public’s changing tastes, although Apple certainly made a credible attempt to beef up desktops in October. The Mac mini received a decent speed bump, and the server version is going to be surprisingly popular to many small businesses and educational institutions.

The iMac appears to be a home run. As I write this article, it remains the top seller at Apple’s online store, and the quad-core versions remain backordered, with waits increasing to seven to ten business days. Then again, there may be some production problems at the core of this delay, considering that there are reports online of some people receiving their units with cracked screens. I wouldn’t assume that’s because Apple is using thinner and thinner boxes these days. It may be just one of those things, and one hopes the issue will be resolved soon and build quantities will reach a normal level.

Or maybe Apple just underestimated demand for the top-end product, particularly from customers who might have considered a Mac Pro instead under normal circumstances.

Long term trends, though, indicate that desktop computers will continue to be abandoned by customers in favor of note-books. As more powerful chips come on line from Intel, there may be a time when a MacBook Pro, with a quad-core mobile chip, would be quite as powerful as a top-of-the-line iMac. That, and a perhaps new lineup of big screen displays from Apple, may encourage this wholesale move to the portable segment.

Although I’m sure many of you are quite ready to write the epitaph for the Mac Pro and give it a decent burial, I rather think it may a few more years for that to actually happen. There are still tens of thousands of potential customers each quarter who require state-of-the-art performance and easy expandability. One day, in the not too distant future, we may all acquire small personal computers, perhaps not much larger than an iPhone with the option to hook up to a larger display and a regular keyboard for the appropriate tasks. If you need more computing power, incredibly fast wireless networks will lot you connect to a computer network “in the cloud” to perform the complicated rendering tasks that are reserved for a regular desktop workstation. When that happens — and I think it will — the Mac Pro will truly become a part of PC history.