Despite the fact that Macs seem to get high ratings in Consumer Reports, and these results are praised to the skies in the Mac community, I have long considered the publication’s coverage of the personal computer market pathetic. In large part, based on my own sources, this is the result of the fact that some of the key people who handle their computer tests are really Windows fans. This despite the fact that the magazine is published by a non-profit corporation that does not accept retail advertising.

The biggest problem is that CR fails to draw distinctions between the Mac OS and Windows. To them, they are just two operating systems from two companies that otherwise seem to possess no meaningful differences, or at least differences that they deign to mention. So such issues as ease of use and stability are not addressed, although CR does grudgingly concede that the Mac is less susceptible to computer viruses. On the other hand, when they reported that billions of dollars were lost as the result of malware a few years ago, they failed to add that the entire loss was tallied on the Windows platform.

In the December 2009 issue, CR’s roundup of consumer electronics again addresses personal computers. This time, they recognize the fact that both Windows 7 and Snow Leopard have been released, and they actually make a modest effort to address performance considerations.

CR concludes that startup and shutdown times for Windows 7 are better, but adds that the level of improvement “was minimal.” Overall performance is regarded as “slightly faster,” without any description as to just what “minimal” and “slightly” mean, although one assumes that most of you won’t notice. This pretty much confirms what the PC publications have already concluded.

For Snow Leopard, CR makes a point of praising Apple’s latest and greatest as booting up to 15 percent faster on a 17-inch MacBook Pro. Overall performance, according to their undefined “speed benchmarks” is five percent faster, and “complex Web pages” were rendered “noticeably faster” in Safari.

The obvious question, which is how Windows 7 compares to Snow Leopard in the performance department, is never addressed, nor is there any other meaningful comparison between the two. Once again, in their efforts to distill and simplify technical information for a general audience, CR ends up doing a great disservice to their readers when covering this material.

When it commodes to technical support, once again Apple smokes all of their competitors in the desktop and note-book space. Apple’s note-books lead the pack in product  ratings, but desktop Macs, all older models, are dinged for inferior performance compared to the various and sundry PC boxes they tested. In most of the matchups, Macs are generally more expensive, but it doesn’t seem CR is capable of understanding that choosing comparable Macs versus PCs requires more than just selecting similar processor speeds and hard drive capacities. You know, for example, that Snow Leopard can only be properly compared to Windows 7 Ultimate, since that’s the only non-crippled version. But that also means the price of the PC will be at least $100 higher, perhaps more.

In any case, the more I read about Windows 7, the more it becomes apparent to me that it really is somewhat better than Vista, but not a game changer by any means. Indeed, CR is recommending that XP users avoid the upgrade, because of the need to do a clean install, meaning wiping the drive after backing up your stuff, and then reinstalling everything. One of the biggest problems Microsoft confronted during the Vista era was to convince people to upgrade, or at least stop downgrading to XP. In large part, many of those people will probably end up buying a new PC rather than performing the upgrade from hell. That assumes they can afford to buy a new computer, of course.

When it comes to the potential of Windows 7, it does look like the tens of millions of dollars in ad money and those house parties may have truly paid off, because a lot more upgrade kits have been sold compared to Vista. Whether that’ll also mean a larger number of PCs will be sold this holiday season is anyone’s guess. Right now, the major success story in PC-land remains the netbook, which is certainly not the best platform on which to display any perceived advantages for Windows 7.

True to form, the market share for the Mac OS actually increased during the early days of Windows 7’s availability. That is nothing unusual. Mac sales have also improved during the release of a number of earlier Windows upgrades. I think about that cute Mac Versus PC ad, where the PC guy is telling the Mac that Windows 7 doesn’t suffer from the problems of Windows Vista. Then he morphs into earlier, younger versions of himself, making similar claims for earlier versions of Windows compared to their predecessors.

So Windows 7 sucks less. Whether that’ll be enough to reverse Microsoft’s declining fortunes is anyone’s guess.

In introducing the original Power Mac G5 at the WWDC in 2003, Steve Jobs said the brilliant engineers at IBM would have a 3GHz version within a year’s time. As you know, that never happened, and, a mere two years later, Apple signed with Intel and dumped the PowerPC for good.

Yet it’s now six years after being presented with the promise of a 3GHz Mac, and we’ve barely exceeded that figure. The highest speed rating available for the recently introduced 27-inch iMac is a build-to-order configuration sporting a 3.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. But that’s actually NOT the most powerful chip Apple is offering. That honor goes to a custom configuration of the Mac Pro that provides a pair of 2.93GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, an upgrade that nearly doubles the price of the computer.

So just what’s going on here with all these processor clock speeds?

You see, Intel realized some years back that you could no longer simply increase a chip’s clock speed to get better performance. The late and not lamented Pentium 4 came in versions with even higher ratings, but delivered little more than heat and excessive power consumption. They really didn’t perform all that much better in the real world, and forget about squeezing them into a note-book, where they’d seem almost hot enough to boil an egg.

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All right, you don’t have to possess an inside track at Apple or be a registered developer to pretty much know that more Snow Leopard maintenance updates are on the horizon. So I will readily accept the possibility that there is surely a 10.6.2 in our future, and it may even arrive by the time you read this article.

That said, I’ve been fascinated by the online soap opera about what this update allegedly fixes and doesn’t fix. Among dozens and dozens of changes, there is supposedly one to address that insidious Guest account bug. That, in and of itself, might actually be more than sufficient to make this update extremely imortant, particularly if you’re one of the supposedly small number of people bitten by that bug.

In case you haven’t tuned on, that issue supposedly involves a Mac updated from Leopard to Snow Leopard, in which there’s already a Guest account. These accounts are designed for someone who, for example, wants to allow a friend, family member or coworker to use their Mac, but not mess with their settings or other personal information. When the guest logs out, all the stuff they created or configured is deleted. Unfortunately, this bug results in your entire Users directory being zapped by mistake. If you don’t have a backup, you’re screwed since there appears no other way to recover your data.

If anything, that problem is sufficient to call for fast action on Apple’s part, but you wouldn’t want them to repair the damage and create new problems. And that is the unfortunate side effect of rushed software development.

All well and good, but then there’s that claim that a recent 10.6.2 development build removed support for Intel’s Atom processors. Now you don’t need to remind me that there is no Mac using Intel’s low power and modestly performing chip, at least not yet. So what difference does it make?

Well, you see a fair number of those netbooks are powered by Atom. Of course, there is no Mac netback either, but a fair number of people are engaged in building Hacintoshes, slang for installing Mac OS X on a non-Apple computer. Indeed, Apple has an ongoing lawsuit with one company, Psystar, which has been selling not just computers preloaded with Mac OS X out kits to allow you to build your own Hacintosh.

Once news of the loss of Atom support in 10.6.2 was published, the expected complaints spread far and wide. But any way you look at it, none of these concerns seem at all resonable. After all, Apple is under no obligation to support components that they do not actually use in their own products. If a hobbyist wants to stretch the limits of Apple’s user license, they probably won’t face any legal consequences unless they try to make a commercial venture of it.

To make this soap opera even more fascinating, a followup story said that support for the Atom had returned in the next 10.6.2 build. So what’s at play here? Did Apple read the rumor blogs and realize they had made a dreadful mistake? Do they really want to allow hobbyists to become unofficial beta testers of Mac OS X on unapproved hardware? I mean after all this is a win-win situation for Apple. If they ultimately decide to add an Atom-based Mac, perhaps in a bid to make the ultimate cheap computer, they will have a fair indication whether customers will be satisfied with Snow Leopard’s performance.

That is, of course, whether this silly idea really makes any sense, and it doesn’t. If any of this is true, that support for an Intel processor that Apple doesn’t even use was somehow removed and then restored, it may well be that it all happened by accident, the consequence of other changes that were made during the ongoing development of 10.6.2.

It may even be that Apple never actually intended to really support Atom or an other processor they don’t use in a shipping product, but it just happened.

In the scheme of things, however, just where does any of this nonsense fit in with the real needs of Mac users who deserve a trouble-free operating system. It’s more important that, if a 10.6.2 is in our near future, Apple is addressing the most serious defects in Snow Leopard, and is not introducing too many new bugs as a consequence. That, too, is the unfortunate but expected side-effect of any software update, particularly when it involves an amazingly complex operating system, such as Mac OS X.

And in case you’re wondering, I have no interest whatever in buying one of those note-books, let alone installing Mac OS X on one. Sure I’d try one out as an experiment, but once my curiosity is satisfied, I’ll simply go on about my business.

The cult status people apply to Apple Inc., Steve Jobs, and the products bearing the company’s logo are no doubt sufficient to make you believe that they were all built to change the world. Maybe that’s true, but don’t think for a moment that’s why Apple is in business.

You see, the tech world is littered with the remains of companies that wanted to do something useful for humankind, but they never managed to earn a profit. Some of them produced decent products, some didn’t. But they are no longer in business because they couldn’t figure out how to turn greatness into a profitable business.

Despite the incredible and fast-growing popularity of Twitter, it has yet to earn a profit. More than likely, it will, but it will require a business plan that seems only partly-formed right now, although the founders may simply be keeping some of the juicy details close to the vest.

To be fair, the critics also said that Amazon would never show a profit, and for several years it seemed as if the conventional wisdom was accurate. However, Amazon kept putting money back into its infrastructure so that the business could expand as rapidly as possible. Today Amazon one of those Wall Street darlings that can do no wrong.

That takes us to Microsoft. From the earliest days, you just knew they had a handle on how to make money. Consider when Bill Gates and crew bought an operating system from one company, rebranded it MS-DOS, and then sold a non-exclusive license to IBM for a whole lot more than they paid for it. These days, they say that net profits on Windows can exceed 80%, which means, of course, that they could cut the price substantially and still earn a profit. In fact, if you buy Windows and other Microsoft licenses in volume the price drops drastically.

Microsoft, as most of you know, uses a hammer to build market share, with predatory marketing, bait and switch and just pumping more and more money into a product or service in the hope that it’ll eventually deliver great profits. For the most part, however, their greatest successes have been limited to their core software lineup, such as Windows, Office and server-based products.

Certainly Microsoft has created lots of millionaires over the years and, as you know, a few billionaires. Some might suggest that Microsoft earned those profits on the backs of customers who suffered from malware, unpredictable performance and other ills. Regardless of what you think, it’s a sure thing that, for better or worse, Microsoft is a huge money-making machine and only recently have declining sales forced them to shed staff; an estimated 5,800 have been pink slipped.

Microsoft uses the word innovation as marketing speak. They repeated to the U.S. Department of Justice in defense of their allegedly illegal behavior during that antitrust trial, and again in trying to get the upper hand against the European Union.

In contrast, Apple is really very much about innovation. Sure, it’s fair to say that most of the key components in any Mac are very much off-the-shelf, the same available to any other PC maker. But Apple assembles everything with supreme care, adding the appropriate environmentally friendly touches, and then packages it in an elegant case. The operating system, whether on a Mac, iPhone or iPod, is easy to use and extremely reliable.

No, you don’t have to remind me that Apple’s gear can be flaky at times. Sometimes it seems obvious that they rush products to market to meet an internal deadline and maximize sales, even if it’s not quite ready. That surely explains the rush of bug fixes that appear during the early days of the new gadget’s life-cycle. Of course, that’s quite true of many other companies as well.

In the end, though, Apple is also a huge profit machine. They won’t release a product unless they have a strong belief that it will deliver high profits early on. Apple will quickly discontinue even a successful product, such as a certain version of the iPod nano, if they believe that a revised version will be even more successful. Sometimes you wonder why the Apple TV is still around, but even though it hasn’t been a huge seller, it’s a sure thing Apple makes a handsome profit from each unit sold, more than sufficient to continue to invest in software updates. Maybe some day it’ll even realize its potential, whatever that might be.

When it comes to the nuts and bolts of running a business, Apple’s executives have it down pat. COO Tim Cook, for example, is regarded as the top inventory manager in the industry, and he also keeps a tight lid on production costs. As much as Steve Jobs is credited with providing Apple’s vision for success and infusing their corporate DNA, it’s Cook who keeps the wheels in motion. From the early days when he came to a company that almost always had “beleaguered” in the title, Cook worked with Jobs and the rest of Apple’s crew to slim down the product lineup, and make sure that they could wring the maximum amount of income from everything they sold.

Yes, two different corporate cultures, but both focused on one thing above all else, and that’s making lots and lots of money.