In talking with David Biedny for an episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, I came to realize that he had twice encountered a hardware issue similar to one I’ve faced. That’s the ease with which the audio input or output jack on a Mac note-book can break.

Here’s what I mean: My 2006 17-inch MacBook Pro developed a defective input jack a little over a year after it was purchased. Evidently something was stuck inside, no doubt a broken pin, but I couldn’t see it, and the local jeweler who inspected it as a favor wasn’t able to locate the cause of the problem. Since the unit was out of warranty, I wasn’t optimistic about getting it repaired, but since I planned to sell it in a few months, I decided to, as they say, take the hit.

As I recall, the price of replacing a daughtercard plus labor came to over $200. The third-party Apple reseller’s service manager told me that some units that exhibited the same problem actually required replacement of the main logic board, which would have cost far more.

I chalked this experience up to just one of those things until I interviewed David for this week’s episode. He told me it had happened twice to him. First on an aluminum PowerBook G4 and then on a 15-inch MacBook Pro of the same vintage as mine. He decided not to pay what he regarded as an excessive amount of money for that repair, and is using an old USB audio interface to handle the input and output chores.

David is a practical fellow, although he might want to consider other options should he decide to eventually sell his note-book. However the larger issue here is whether we’re both unlucky, equally careless or whether the design is sufficiently flimsy to allow for such damage to occur.

I’m not about to make a choice there. But I am concerned why it’s so expensive to replace a part that probably costs less than $1.00. The answer is, of course, that service people these days simply are not trained nor inclined to do component level repair. Rather than remove the offending part and replacing it with the good one, it’s more convenient to simply run a diagnostic to see what’s wrong, and swap the offending printed circuit card.

Now in fairness to the techs, when you’re working with miniaturized components in very close surroundings, it’s easy to make a mistake and cause other problems that may not reveal themselves until the repaired machine is back in the hands of the owner. Granted that makes an awful lot of sense. Besides, the replacement circuit board, which is generally refurbished, has been fully tested at the factory to meet the manufacturer’s specs. When someone is replacing an individual part by hand, who does the quality control, and would you pay for a second tech to examine the work performed by the first? There may be a supervisor or quality control person on hand in a larger repair facility, but not at an Apple Store or regular third-party repair shop.

Besides, consider the profit margins when a dealer can sell you the full circuit card rather than the individual part.

Now there’s nothing to stop you from doing your own repairs if you are adept at the process, have the proper tools, and can find the parts you need. I wouldn’t presume to discourage you, just so long as you know the risks, a mistake that may take down not just the card you’re repairing but other parts on the computer.

As much as I’d like to see a bank of techs making these simple repairs, it’s just not practical anymore. The world of consumer electronics is far too complicated. Besides, when something real serious goes wrong, the manufacturer and the dealer would no doubt prefer that you just buy the newest model instead.

You almost feel that way when it comes to an iPod, where just cracking open the case might, literally, crack it. Sure there are plenty of how-to documents online to ease you through the process. There are also repair shops that can replace the broken parts for you. Apple, however, will usually just exchange the broken unit with a refurbished model and return it to you, and then rebuild the older product on their own time and simply send it to someone else. Or, if it’s badly damaged, just recycle the working parts.

Of course, the real question here is all about design efficiency and reliability. As David reminds me, he’s never seen a bad audio jack on an iPod, and I can say the same for the various models I’ve used, nor the three iPhones I’ve owned since the product was originally introduced.

This doesn’t mean that such problems don’t occur. Certainly a media player or smartphone will probably get lots more use and abuse than a note-book computer over its lifetime. The headphone plug might be pulled out and inserted far more often, thus creating the potential for failure. But our limited experience indicates it’s happening on our note-books. Maybe the modern unibody models are superior in that regard, or maybe not. Maybe we’re just unlucky, and there’s no problem at all with Apple’s audio jacks. What do you readers have to say on the subject?

I never cease to be amazed at the fact that Apple Inc. can so easily dominate the media, probably more than you and I might want, and I suspect more than even they sometimes desire. Sure, Microsoft can get headlines too, but it seems that Apple, nowadays at least, is treated with far more shock and awe.

Yes, Microsoft’s alleged new products are announced as well, but in the sense of how they plan to come out with something to match someone else’s product. When they deliver what is supposed to be a new technology, you get something akin to Surface, which is a product in search of a purpose with little evidence of being anything that would ever cater to more than a very specialized market.

You can see how it goes. Apple creates a smartphone and succeeds, so Microsoft says that they’re gonna do it too, perhaps next year. I just wonder how many times the media will repeat this mantra before they have the courage to ask Microsoft why it can’t come out with something new, rather than a warmed over imitation of a product someone else built. Instead, far too many stories out there simply reek of direct quotes from the standard corporate press releases.

Stories about Apple aren’t immune from the lazy journalism disease. How many reports do you read that are simply direct quotes from the Apple press release, without any additional reporting to provide an insight into where the new product or service fits into the marketplace and how well it might do.

Understand that such slipshod reporting isn’t new, nor is it confined to the online world. In my days as a broadcast journalist, I would often receive wire service copy that was nothing more than a regurgitated press release. Many local newspapers would often fill their pages with similar content.

Now when I was covering local news and had nothing but a a handful of reports off the police blotter and a few press releases to write about, I tried to be a little different. I would contact the organization that issued the announcement and try to get some additional comments from a spokesperson. Where necessary, I’d call a second source — often a competitor — to provide fair and balanced coverage. Sure, I’d occasionally summarize the press release on a busy day, when I was inundated with hard news. But I would never consider it normal operating procedure.

Maybe I’m wrong?

I’m also concerned about the all-too-common practice of writing an online rant, not because it’s necessary, but to get hits and raise ad revenues for a publisher. Now I have nothing against real criticism, and expressing one’s emotions honestly is certainly acceptable. But sometimes the flames are so totally off base you wonder if the writer is simply incompetent, or had a more sinister motive in mind.

So while Microsoft has always released  a steady stream of patches for its operating systems, when Apple gets a maintenance release out within a few weeks after a major system upgrade, they’re accused of poor quality control. It seems to me that some of those hack writers haven’t a clue about the software development process, and about the tradeoffs a company has to make to get a product out the door.

Yes, that means that Apple and Microsoft both ship products with known bugs. Waiting until the software is perfect means it will never be released, so they weigh the impact of the defects. At some point, the developers and marketing people will make the decision that enough is enough, release the OS and fix the rest later.

You can certainly be assured that Apple was already at work on 10.6.1 when Snow Leopard was declared Golden Master, just as Microsoft didn’t stop working on Windows 7 when the so-called Release to Manufacturing version was shipped to the DVD pressing plants. It would be irresponsible to expect otherwise.

The key question is whether marketing prevailed over programming a little too early in the process. I’ve ragged on Apple from time to time because I felt they released something prematurely. On the other hand, it’s quite possible that some of the serious shipping bugs went unnoticed, or were too random to duplicate or determine a trend. When Leopard was first released, I’m sure Apple didn’t intend for files to get mangled when moved, rather than copied, to another drive or network share. Maybe the circumstances where that defect occurred couldn’t be duplicated, or the problem was somehow overlooked.

You could probably say the same for some of the more serious shipping bugs in a Windows operating system, but I think Microsoft is far more cynical about such matters. That’s why they constantly change names to convey the illusion that the new version of the product or service is vastly different from the old.

The arguments about premature releases and buggy products will never end. There’s too much profit in emphasizing the bad over the good. Didn’t someone once say that a dog biting a man isn’t news, but a man biting a dog definitely deserves coverage. And how many reporters in our audience were told by their editors or publishers, at one time or another, “if it bleeds it leads”?

The chatter continues over just how one should classify Snow Leopard and Windows 7. The most common descriptive phrases are “service pack” or “major upgrade,” but there are actually finer distinctions that I’ll get to shortly.

Now Windows advocates like to refer to Snow Leopard as a service pack, in a sense echoing what Apple said about having very few new features. I suppose compared to the way Microsoft generally handles a service pack, they may have a point. But if they do, how does that account for the recent 10.6.1 update? If that free download was a service pack, how do you classify the original 10.6 upgrade?

The conventional wisdom has it that a major upgrade is the one that is loaded with new features, regardless of whether there are significant changes to the OS plumbing. So when Leopard was promoted with over 300 new features — even though some of those features were more in the form of “refinements” — few doubted that it was a major upgrade. It commanded the standard $129 upgrade fee, and only the ignorant would complain that the price was too high. At least, compared to what Microsoft does with its higher-end versions of Windows, it was a downright bargain.

In any case, the Windows world denigrated Apple for not piling on the features with Snow Leopard — at least the ones that you can see, although there are over 100 interface-related changes that are listed under the term refinements. In the end, though, what is more important? Do those added features actually make you more productive, or do they saddle you with more eye candy and performance-robbing special effects that have nothing to do with the apps you use and the work you generate?

Apple has clearly decided to take the latter approach, and thus the biggest improvements in Snow Leopard are the ones that will allow developers to deliver applications that are more productive. It may not do much for a word processor or browser, but as soon as you wait even a few seconds for a function to complete, such as applying a Photoshop filter, you can see the huge potential of Grand Central Dispatch, which simplifies the process of harnessing the power of multicore processors. Although it’s not exactly a cake walk, GCD will surely reduce time to market. Apple has even made the source code for this new tool open source, although app compilers will ultimately have to become compatible too. But that means that Unix developers who have ported their products to Mac OS X will also be able to take advantage of these improvements on other platforms.

Although there are supposedly tools in Windows to allow for better use of multicore processors, they are not nearly as efficient. Worse, the 32-bit versus 64-bit issue is still a complicating factor. Apple has dealt with that, too, by delivering one size that fits all.

Now when you add the improved 64-bit support in Snow Leopard, and factor in OpenCL and other new features, you can see that Apple put in an awful lot of time and effort to make 10.6 a more productive working environment. It may take time for large numbers of apps to become compatible, but as they do, the Mac’s productivity advantage over Windows will grow.

So in terms of what Snow Leopard can do for you, maybe it is a major upgrade after all.

As far as Windows 7 is concerned, some suggest it’s just a service pack for Vista with a few interface changes and a new name to make you forget the stench of Vista. This is very much part and parcel of Microsoft’s approach, which is to make a few refinements and change a product’s name when it’s not successful.

Consider such branding exercises as MSN Search, or Windows Live Search or Bing. These are all variations on a basic theme, and while Bing seems to be quite a decent search engine, the name change was done to make you forget that a previous, unsuccessful version existed. Talk about changing history.

Does that mean that, if Vista was successful, what is now Windows 7 would have actually been nothing more than  glorified service pack? That’s a good question. I suppose there was a tremendous amount of bloat to trim out of Vista, and that level of change doesn’t come cheap. However, Windows users expect their service packs to be free, and Microsoft wanted to recoup its investment. So they decided to package the product as a major upgrade, and they added some interface changes (I hesitate to call them refinements, since that’s debatable) and gave it a new name to justify the price of admission.

While it’s still cheaper than its predecessor, and there are a few fire sales here and there (such as the current academic offer), buying the top-of-the-line version of Windows 7 is still far more expensive than any Mac OS X upgrade, major or otherwise. It so happens that Microsoft is a far less efficient company. Where Apple may spend hundreds of millions of dollars to deliver an operating system upgrade, the cost to Microsoft is apt to be in the billions of dollars.

In the end, I would call both Snow Leopard and Windows 7 upgrades that deserve retail packaging. They can’t be free updates by any normal definition of the term. But I’ll let you decide whether the term major or minor applies.

The conventional wisdom has it that Microsoft is fearless, that they are capable of doing whatever it takes to be successful in the industry. The main example of this is the huge market share for Windows, but it’s also true that Apple has been busily building its market share too, and there’s been a steady erosion, however, slight, of Windows users.

You also know that Mac market share could be seriously hurt if Microsoft did just one thing — and that would be to kill Office for the Macintosh. That one decision would force a number of companies to reconsider their decision to allow Apple products into their corporate networks.

However, despite fears from time to time that Microsoft was considering that sort of maneuver, they’ve looked at the ongoing profit and loss picture of the Mac Business Unit and decided to keep it going. At the same time, the end product is always crippled compared to the Windows version, which forces some businesses to consider either a Windows option on the Mac or avoiding Macs altogether.

No, I’m not getting into the potential antitrust issues at this point in time, but the threat is ever-present.

In addition, since Microsoft surely wants to make as much profit as they can, you also wonder why they don’t just offer a higher-end version of Office for the Mac with Access and other capabilities that are presently exclusive to the Windows version. Sure, you can rightly suggest that they’d rather you buy a Windows PC, but from a practical point of view, the company actually earns a far greater revenue from selling Mac software than a standard Windows OEM license.

Besides, consider the reduced support requests. Few will argue that the Windows platform entails additional support issues.

But cowardice is also part and parcel of Microsoft’s business approach. Even though Bill Gates and company rose to the top of the PC operating system universe, paranoia struck deep. Rather than just compete fairly, and winning with a better product, they delivered something that was, well, almost good enough, and used bait and switch and outright deception to gain the upper hand.

When they are forced to compete on an equal playing field, my friends, Microsoft is one huge failure!

Consider the Zune music player. When its PlaysForSure partners failed to gain traction against the iPod, Microsoft decided to roll their own. The end result wasn’t  a bad gadget as such things go, and as I’ve said before, the Zune HD might actually be comparable in many respects to the current iPod touch lineup. But is that sufficient to guarantee success?

More to the point, Apple has had no compunctions about building products that run on a PC without crippling them in any noticeable fashion. The Mac and PC versions of iTunes are, absent operating system-specific elements, pretty much identical in functionality. Your iPod and iPhone should work the same regardless, and the same holds true for the Safari browser.

All right, it’s true that the first iteration of Safari for Windows sported a Mac-like interface, perhaps in the tradition of PC developers delivering a Windows-like user experience when porting their products to the Mac. Microsoft even tried that with severe repercussions with the release of the infamous Word 6. They sure learned their lesson, more or less, and Apple did too, since the Safari 4 definitely adheres to most Windows user interface conventions.

However, you have to wonder that, if Microsoft is so confident that the Zune is such a great piece of hardware, why is there no Mac support? Sure, you can run it with Boot Camp or a Windows virtual machine, but why exactly did Microsoft kill off the Mac version of Windows Media Player. Sure, Telestream is marketing Flip4Mac, which lets you run some Windows media content with QuickTime, but not all the features are actually support, and that includes allowing your Zune to sync on a Mac.

The real question is why? What’s Microsoft afraid of?

If Microsoft truly believes that the Zune media player can hold its own against the iPod, why are they afraid to give it a chance to succeed on both platforms? Certainly if it is equal or superior to the iPod, and Microsoft gives it a proper marketing push, Mac users would lust after one as well.

Indeed, this might be a great time for an iPod alternative to flourish. Apple’s market is saturated. Most of the people who have iPods have already made their purchases. Many of the sales are simply replacements or additional units, and the iPhone is siphoning off the rest.

The Zune HD demonstrates that, at the very least, Microsoft is experimenting with newer technologies to deliver a superior user experience. Although OLED display technology may have its teething pains, the consumer electronics industry has spent billions to develop what they believe may be the eventual successor to LCD. HD radio may not have truly caught on, but the right environment might allow it to soar. It’s not as if everyone’s going into satellite radio, which has grown largely because of receivers built into new cars. There hasn’t been much of a market for standalone players.

Certainly Microsoft could sell a load of Zunes to Windows users, if people truly desire the product. But why not go after Mac users as well? It would surely be a win-win situation for Microsoft even if only a few hundred thousand units were sold to the Mac community. It would also prove they could compete on a platform that they didn’t dominate.