When the Cube first came out in 2000, I got one to evaluate for a major online tech site. As I took it out of the box and hooked it up, my wife waxed enthusiastic over the sexy industrial design. When I wrote up my review, I remarked, quoting a line from an Indiana Jones movie, that it “belongs in a museum.”

While I realize some of you still have a Cube running at your home or office, my opinion at the time was that it was best used for a museum piece, since it wasn’t a terribly practical product. Nowadays, I even wonder if it wasn’t designed largely to satisfy the personal indulgences of Steve Jobs, since it echoed the original NeXT Cube in some respects.

Certainly it wasn’t a very practical design. If you moved your hands too close to the touch-sensitive switches, you might accidentally put the thing to sleep, as my wife did often during routine cleaning of my office. The expansion slot was a little too small for some peripheral cards, and performance was decidedly lackluster for the price of admission.

Even after a fairly substantial price cut, Apple realized that they couldn’t sell enough Cubes, so they discontinued that model in 2001, just weeks after Jobs denied any such intention.

However, such products as the Mac mini, AirPort Extreme, Time Capsule and even the Apple TV are clearly influenced by the Cube, and the form factors are certainly more practical. Well, that is unless you really need to open up your Mac mini and add memory or replace the hard drive.

The larger question is how much does Apple consider the public when creating a new product. Did they, for example, respond to your demands when they created the iPod? Probably not, but they surely saw a need to build a digital media player that would better fulfill the potential of such a device than anything competitors offered. They were right.

On the other hand, some of you really wanted Apple to enter the mobile phone business, and it is clear that they resisted for years until they could create the iPhone, a product that most agree set a new standard for style and usability.

When it comes to Macs, six distinct product lines, half in the desktop and the other half in the note-book category, are far fewer than anything most other PC makers offer. Yes, there are ways to customize individual models with extra RAM, larger drives, and, sometimes, different graphics hardware. But the choices Apple offers are again quite minimalist for anything but a Mac Pro, where there are far more ways to build the computer you want.

Apple gets criticized for the lack of choice. In large part, I think Steve Jobs is responding to the problems that afflicted the Mac lineup in the mid-1990s, when there were so many models even company executives couldn’t readily distinguish one from the other. That situation, in fact, probably holds true for most PC box makes to this very day. I challenge any Dell executive, of any position within the company, to fully explain the confusing, overlapping and useless variations they offer customers. You almost wonder if they would seriously consider letting customers select the color of the screws used on their desktops if they thought a few customers would want such a choice.

However, Apple’s overly threadbare product choices can engender its own brand of customer confusion. I mean, when someone tells you they have an iMac, that provides only the barest amount of information as to which model they actually have. After all, iMacs have been around for over 11 years, and they’ve undergone several deep design upgrades that bear no resemblance whatever to their predecessors, except for being all-in-one computers. Compare, for example, a 27-inch iMac with the original Bondi Blue edition and you’ll see what I mean. If you didn’t recognize these machines, would you be able to identify both of them as iMacs.

My desktop computer is a Mac Pro, and you certainly have a picture of what it looks like. But unless I also identify it as an Early 2008 model, you wouldn’t know which one I was talking about. The same holds true for my Early 2008 17-inch MacBook Pro.

The car makers have this down pat. Even when the models change only slightly from year to year, certainly you’d understand what I mean when I tell you my son has a 2007 VW Jetta, as opposed to, say, a 2010 model.

In any case, distinguishing one model variation from another is not a serious issue unless your Mac requires repair or you need technical support. The real issue is whether Apple’s approach can deliver the computer you need. If, for example, you don’t like glossy computer displays, you are obviously not a potential iMac customer. Apple doesn’t give you a non-glossy choice, except on some versions of the MacBook Pro. Even then you have to pay $50 for what I expect you’d interpret as something that offers less and not more.

Apple’s logic is that they aren’t going to build a product unless they can sell enough copies to make it profitable. That means that you won’t get a non-glossy iMac unless demand is extremely high. There will probably never be a mid-priced expandable desktop without an integrated display simply because the market is moving towards note-books.

So, yes, Apple will build what you want, but only if the “you” can be counted in tens or hundreds of thousands.

These days, companies will frequently file patents about each and every thing they can as a defensive measure. That’s because there are loads of sharks (or patent trolls) in the waters just waiting to file infringement lawsuits, particularly in certain districts in Texas that seem to attract such actions and provide a high degree of success to the plaintiffs.

However, once a patent is filed, the specifics of the proposed invention become public, so everyone knows about it, even one’s competitors. Those patents are also fodder for the Mac rumor sites, who will seize upon Apple’s filings as evidence of their next great product innovation.

Sometimes those files do portend a possible shipping product, witness the Magic Mouse. It was all out there in the days before the fancy new input device’s arrival. Without going into chapter and verse and bore you to death, many of those filings, however, represent features, products or services that will actually never see the light of day. But how do you really know?

On the other hand, a juicy patent application can be summarized in a lengthy piece that is almost guaranteed to attract a fairly large number of hits. This is particularly true if the innovation seems revolutionary enough to be meaningful. When it comes to the world of Mac rumors, one site will quote another, each passing the story up the line with a few embellishments.

It sort of reminds me of that little parlor trick they used to do on late night TV. One person whispered a joke to someone. The one who received the story transferred it to another party, and on it went. After ten generations of this word of mouth information transfer, the story finally recited usually had nothing more than a passing resemblance to the original. Such are the limitations of verbal communication, although humans have never tired of the technique.

When it comes to the written word, you’d think there would be little room to distort, but even a casual attempt at interpretation may be sufficient to totally distort the basis of the report. After a while, the original rumor site that published the story may find that the tale simply takes a life of its own.

At the end of the day, it comes back to whether these rumor sites are actually providing reliable information, just made up stories, or some vague combination of both. To be fair, AppleInsider, one of the larger rumor sites, also publishes regular news reports about Apple and pretty detailed product reviews. In other words, they’ve moved to the mainstream and their repertoire of rumors isn’t much more extensive that what you sometimes find in the mainstream media.

However, you have to wonder where they get all those stories. I am not inclined to think they just invented the juicy details, although I suppose that’s possible for some sites. It may well be there are people out there who claim, accurately or otherwise, that they are closely associated to Apple or one of its suppliers and are thus capable of delivering accurate information. Certainly I would hope they are properly vetted and if they fail to demonstrate they are capable of delivering consistently truthful reports, they’d be dropped like hot potatoes.

When it comes to one of Apple’s favored publications, such as The New York Times and Wall Street Journal, yes it’s true they publish supposed Apple rumors as well. The difference is that I’ve long held the suspicion that they are being given these stories on deep background by Apple directly. They cannot, of course, identify the source, but when the story turns out to be true, as it often does, you know there had to be some official participation.

In the end, rumors are actually good for Apple. The company’s penchant for secrecy and tight control of the information they choose to release only encourages rumors and speculation. If the media can’t get the facts they seek, they are more apt to make a guess, educated or otherwise. People who come forth claiming to be in the know might be taken far more seriously than they might otherwise be if Apple were more forthcoming about public information.

That, and the possibility that Apple is responsible for some of the more fascinating rumors, only demonstrates how well they can manage the flow of information. Of course, being secretive doesn’t always help. When problems arise with a product or service, taking too long to acknowledge the issue, while customer complaints simmer, doesn’t help people feel warm and fuzzy about Apple. Maybe it hasn’t yet forced many people to go to the Dark Side, where the situation is apt to be worse, but that’s still not the way to treat loyal customers.

I’d like to think that the fact that Steve Jobs was a tiny bit more forthcoming about his serious illness and liver transplant may also portend a slight change in Apple’s public information strategy. Meantime, there are still all those patent filings to chew over.

I have to tell you that I’ve long held a love/hate relationship with Apple’s input devices. Although my very first Mac used the standard Apple mouse, I continued to flirt with replacements. Indeed, this is a quest that continues to this very day.

First there was the legendary Kensington TurboMouse, now known as the ExpertMouse. In theory, it should have freed me from the discomfort of the traditional mouse, but in practice, it proved awkward and ultimately uncomfortable. I also experimented with smaller trackballs without success.

Apple’s Ergonomic Mouse was actually fairly decent, but the ready availability of multibutton mice encouraged me to switch to products from Logitech and even Microsoft. In both cases, I found something that came closer to the ideal.

In recent years, I have used Logitech’s MX Revolution, which seems to fit my right hand perfectly. A newly-refined version, the Performance Mouse MX, is still undergoing testing, but if you’re a southpaw, as I am in other respects, you’re out of luck with either alternative.

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The other day, I was reading what I regard as a wrongheaded commentary suggesting that Apple’s iPhone is doomed to suffer the fate that befell the Mac back in the early 1990s. In short, other companies would take Apple’s closed ecosystem and smash it to smithereens.

Now I would be the last person to deny the problems that beset Apple way back when. When the critics said there wasn’t a lot of Mac software, they were close to the mark. Yes, a reasonable number of titles were available, but you often had to buy them via a mail order catalog — remember this was before people routinely went online to make purchases — and local outlets had just a few dusty boxes of Mac stuff in the back of the store. It was also true that there was an Apple Tax then too, which meant that you had to pay a rich premium to go Mac.

Indeed, when Microsoft introduced Windows 95 towards the end of that year, accompanied by a promotional campaign featuring The Rolling Stones, people actually did line up to buy upgrades. For most customers, Microsoft finally got Windows right, and maybe it was an 80% solution compared to the Mac, but with cheaper hardware and a greater variety of software, it’s sad to say Apple had trouble keeping up, and the Mac’s market share rapidly eroded.

Now that’s a very cursory summary of the situation. There’s a lot more detail I could mention, most of which you’ve heard before. In the end, Apple nearly bought the farm before Steve Jobs returned as a result of the NeXT acquisition and the rest, as they say, is history.

However, it took years for the word “beleaguered” to be removed from most mentions of Apple by the media, and it’s fair to say far too many tech writers and financial analysts still labor under the belief that it’s 1995 and not 2009. They look at Apple not for what the company does right now, but on what the company did wrong then.

Accordingly, Macs are still labeled as overpriced, and you are allegedly forced to pay an Apple Tax to gain admittance. There still isn’t a lot of Mac software, although thousands and thousands of apps, some exclusive to the platform, prove them dead wrong. Sure there are products that still require Windows, but that doesn’t stop you from running Windows on your Mac courtesy of Boot Camp, or courtesy of a virtual machine app such as VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop.

When it comes to the iPod, introduced in 2001, the critics claimed that Apple’s initial spurt of growth would be stunted by the arrival of loads of third-party products that matched or exceeded the feature set. Many had FM radios, and Apple didn’t, except as an add-on accessory, until the arrival of the latest iPod nano. Despite this, Apple soared to the top of the heap and remained there, buttressed by the Apple Store, which beat back all online and brick and mortar retailers to become the number one music store on the planet.

Although Steve Jobs is often credited, sometimes with justification, as immersing people in his own reality distortion field, it’s clear to me that some of Apple’s critics are the ones unable to face reality.

Although dedicated music players are a dying breed, and Apple’s total sales have eroded as a result, they’re still number one, and half of the sales rung up for iPods cover new users. Many existing iPod customers, however, have simply switched to the iPhone.

The story is the same. Apple couldn’t possibly succeed in a heavily saturated marketplace. But after a little over two years, the iPhone is running a close second to the BlackBerry in the U.S. smartphone segment. This is particularly fascinating, since every wireless carrier carries RIM’s products, whereas the iPhone is still only available via AT&T.

Whereas just about every smartphone used a physical keyboard, Apple got ragged on because they opted for a touch screen instead. Now that other smartphone makers are coming up with their own touch interfaces, the products are inevitably dubbed iPhone killers, and Apple’s closed ecosystem supposedly will cause the market for the product to come crashing down one of these days.

This mantra is repeated so often, you wonder if some of the critics are sharing playbooks or talking points memos. The logic is the same. An open market will always supplant the company that locks you in to its own apps. On the other hand, with mobile phones, you’re locked in via many routes. To get an affordable price, you opt for a service contract of up to two years with a wireless carrier. If you want music or apps, you have to buy them from the carrier or the smartphone maker. It’s a very different world from the one you encounter in the personal computer universe where you can buy from tens of thousands of independent retailers and not just factory stores.

In a sense, the problem with most of Apple’s competitors is the same. Instead of delivering a superior product with more innovation, they either imitate what Apple has already done with a few changes, or add features from a PowerPoint presentation without paying much attention as to whether any of those capabilities are useful or can be used by anyone other than a power user.

Yes, there are surely ways to compete and defeat Apple at its own game. But it can’t be done with inferior imitations, nor will it happen because some media pundits simply wish for it.