They never learn. Media pundits have this “bigger they are, harder they fall” philosophy when it comes to one of Apple’s hot-selling gadgets. So in the days when the iPhone was growing tremendously every single year, almost every pretender to the throne was touted as the one and only inevitable iPod killer. This was particularly true of the Microsoft Zune, which remains, to this day, an unmitigated disaster.

Of course few care about iPod killers these days. The conventional wisdom has it that the standalone digital media player has seen its day and now is the era for the smartphone or a tiny network computer, which is probably the category in which you’d place the iPod touch. Oh yes, Microsoft will supposedly have a touch killer this fall, in the form of a new Zune with a touch screen. Ho hum!

The iPhone has taken the iPod’s place to many as a cultural icon. You seem them on TV. Well, you see a BlackBerry too, and so far President Obama is not giving up on his specially tweaked version. But you never know where that’ll lead. Maybe the Secret Service is even now configuring an iPhone 3GS for the chief executive.

In any case, the original T-Mobile phone using Google’s Android OS was pushed as a sure way to beat down the iPhone. Now when Apple introduced the iPhone 3G and the 3GS, both introductory weekends produced sales of over a million units. Since November, the first Android phone has sold maybe one million copies. So much for an iPhone killer.

Now there’s a new version from T-Mobile, dubbed the MyTouch 3G. Well, it’s a nice name, and having Catherine Zeta-Jones back for the TV ads is a real plus. A story about the new gadget even made a lame attempt to pit it against the iPhone, by extolling the ability to move desktop icons and change wallpaper backgrounds. The author admitted you could do the former on an iPhone, but seems to have forgotten you can do the latter as well.

This isn’t to say that T-Mobile is a bad company or that the MyTouch 3G is destined to fail. Actually it’s a good company with high ratings for customer service and network reliability, but the availability of actual 3G service is even worse than on AT&T if that’s possible. Besides, some folks hack their iPhones to work on T-Mobile regardless, and those units might be the most consistent competitors to the MyTouch 3G.

I won’t say much about the BlackBerry Storm from Verizon Wireless. Chad, the manager at the local pharmacy we frequent, is a Mac user, but opted for the Storm because he was already a Verizon customer. When I’d come to pick up a prescription, he made a point of asking me about my iPhone. Just recently, he had is own iPhone in hand, and it was clear that the Storm didn’t suit his needs.

That takes us to another would-be contender, the Palm Pre. The media delights in mentioning that Jon Rubenstein, a former Apple hardware executive, now heads up Palm. Actually, other former Apple people work at Palm, and some former Palm people work at Apple. So be it.

But Rubenstein’s presence won’t guarantee the Pre’s success, and Palm desperately needs one to survive. Its first weekend brought an estimated forty thousand to fifty thousand units sold. I suppose that’s not too bad, considering Palm made their initial deal with Sprint, regarded by many (including your cheerful editor) as the worst wireless carrier in the U.S. Sprint also needs a winner, so maybe this is the marriage made in heaven for both companies.

Whether the Pre’s initial sales will pick up is anyone’s guess. You’d think the production delays and early hype would have helped move more product, not to mention the fact that it came out just prior to the WWDC, where the iPhone 3GS was launched. More to the point, the Pre has actually gotten extremely positive reviews, for the most part, although it’s Web-based operating system is not nearly as developed as the competition.

But good reviews don’t guarantee success. What’s more, the iPhone had a two-year head start, and a recent survey from ChangeWave indicated that 44% of the people who planned to buy smartphones in the near future placed an iPhone at the top of their shopping lists. Second, at  23%, was the BlackBerry. The Palm Pre was a distant third at 8%. Well, I guess you can’t argue with that, except to attack the numbers and the methodology, but I don’t think the media people who are desperately seeking iPhone killers are all that sophisticated about statistics.

In the meantime, in case you want to know, my transition to a black 16GB iPhone 3GS has been totally uneventful. The initial activation and sync processes were appropriately speedy. The enhanced performance is immediately obvious, and all my favorite apps work just fine, thank you. As I said previously, call quality remains consistently high, and I’ve had only one or two disconnects so far.

All this, of course, doesn’t mean that some company isn’t going to come along and blow away the iPhone in terms of features, usability and performance. But none of the products on the horizon so far stand a chance.

The press is going ga-ga about Google’s latest product announcement, something known as the Chrome operating system, which they consider a potential threat to Microsoft’s dominance in the PC space.

The new operating system is evidently an outgrowth to Android, their Linux-based open source OS for mobile devices and, evidently, netbooks. But the Chrome OS is supposed to take this a step further, with the potential for working on regular desktop computers as well.

Does this mean that Microsoft and, of course, Apple, ought to be shaking in their boots over this pending competition?

For various reasons, the answer is a resounding no. You see, what the media seems to forget is that you don’t buy a computer to run an operating system. The real purpose is, of course, to run the applications you need for work or play. The operating system is basically the container for those applications, and it allows them to communicate with your computer’s peripherals, such as printers and scanners, to provide the full user experience.

If you want to just turn on your computer and restrict yourself to the operating system, you might enjoy the pretty pictures generated by the screen saver, or you can check your files in the Finder — wait the Finder is an application! So is Mail, iCal, Safari and all the rest.

Why do people buy Macs? Well, aside from great looks and excellent customer support, Mac OS X lets you run the applications you want without getting in the way. You don’t have to concern yourself about malware — at least not yet — and driver conflicts and crashes are rare. There’s no need to have an IT person hanging out with Jolt Cola in hand waiting to straighten things out when something breaks.

This is not to say that Mac OS X is perfect, but it takes you closer to a pure computing experience than anything else on the market.

Details about the Chrome OS are still sparse, but we do know a few things. One is that since it’s based on Linux, there will be a solid, robust foundation that has been tested and proven over the years. That’s a good thing, and it also means that security issues shouldn’t be serious. However, there are going to be problems. First and foremost, it will apparently be a very browser-centric platform, focusing on the Chrome browser. You’ll certainly be able to use it for Gmail and any Web-based email system (even Apple’s MobileMe no doubt), plus a decent number of services, including instant messaging, calendars and, with Google Apps, basic productivity software.

All well and good. But what about Microsoft Office? Sure, Google Apps might be able to read basic Office files, but is that going to be sufficient to fill your needs? How about Adobe Photoshop, the staple of the graphics and photographic industries, or Final Cut Pro, used worldwide for movies and TV shows?

In short, what applications, aside from Google’s browser, are going to be available on the Chrome OS? What is Google going to do to provide a robust development environment, or will they expect you to just download something that runs on Linux and manually manipulate it so it’ll be compatible? Honestly, I’m not certain what the game plan is here, so I’m just asking the questions the media has yet to ask.

With a Mac, even if you must run a Windows-only app, you can do so with Boot Camp, so long as rebooting isn’t a problem, or with virtual machines from the likes of such companies as Parallels and VMWare. And, yes, you’ll be able to run Linux too and perhaps even the Chrome OS, if that’s what you want.

The lack of apps is just one issue, and it is apt to be the deal breaker. But there’s yet another, and that’s the peripherals you need. Will Chrome OS come installed in your new netbook — or whatever device runs it — ready to support your printers, scanners, and other devices? Even Microsoft has a whale of a time keeping up with third-party products, witness all the difficulties encountered with the initial release of Windows Vista.

Apple has gotten around much of this by providing support for thousands of printers baked into Mac OS X. Most peripheral makers these days make absolutely certain Mac support is part of the package, and such devices as external hard drives and Flash cards just work without any special software or manual intervention. Can Google promise anything even close? How, for example, will you sync your iPod and iPhone? Tens of millions of Windows users join Mac users in engaging in that simple process every single day using iTunes — which surely won’t be available for the Chrome OS.

The answer is, of course, that they can’t. Putting Chrome OS into a netbook may not present a difficult problem, so long as the machine is used all by itself and makes no external connections other than Wi-Fi or perhaps an Ethernet cable to your cable or DSL modem. The very second you go beyond those limited confines, you’re going to be in deep trouble, unless Google knows something they’ve yet to reveal.

As far as I’m concerned, this is one product that, while it might have potential, is going to wear Google’s famous “Beta” label for quite some time to come.

In recent weeks, our comments section has been busy with debates about whether Apple’s gear is overpriced, and, as some claim, you have to pay the so-called Apple Tax to get a Mac. A few might use the inevitable comparison of the BMW versus the Chevrolet. Both get you from here to there, but you pay a lot more to acquire the former.

Certainly this argument fuels the Microsoft Laptop Hunters commercial, even though it focuses on invalid comparisons rather than the honest ones you can conceivably make. That’s part of the smack-them-in-the-face approach to this amateurish and endlessly boring ad campaign.

I gather, however, that it’s probably not doing much for the sale of the note-books featured in the ads, from such companies as HP and Sony, since Apple’s sales are rebounding at a pretty good clip these days. Despite Apple’s legendary controls on inventory, some configurations of the updated MacBook Pro lineup are listed as having a 7–10 business day shipping delay when you order from their online store. A similar situation holds true with the iPhone 3GS (mine was sent within the 5–7 business days quoted by Apple). That doesn’t mean that you can’t buy one of these products at a local retail outlet, but it does pose the possibility of continued high demand.

Sure, the recent price cuts helped some, but the NPD Group’s recent survey (since buttressed by other surveys) indicated that sales were on the rise before then, most likely coinciding with Apple’s annual back-to-school event. Some analysts are even now suggesting that Apple actually underestimated just how quickly these machines would move. Maybe they were unduly influenced by the dire predictions contained in some of those analyst comments, though that doesn’t seem likely.

Now in arguing against claims that Macs are overpriced, Apple has stated that a cheap PC doesn’t represent a good value if it can’t perform the tasks you require of it. Recent reviews of the new MacBook pro lineup describe not just a box with commodity parts in a fancy case, but a product that smacks of superior engineering that is designed to last far longer than the standard two-year timeframe for a note-book. As you might have noticed, they rate the new “nonremovable” battery with a five-year lifecycle under normal use. Apple expects you to keep their products for years, and as better models are released, simply pass the older gear on to other family members.

Yes, it is true that the hard drives, RAM, optical drives, processors and graphics hardware are all from industry-standard parts bins. But Apple has found a way to package them that’s not only attractive, but supremely reliable compared to competing PC note-books. They also run fast, cool and quiet and often benchmark as good or better than competing portables running Windows. That has to be embarrassing to the likes of Dell, HP and the other personal computer assemblers. Yes, I hesitate to call them manufacturers as most of their PCs all look and operate pretty much alike.

Before you ask, this doesn’t mean that are no premium PC note-books. There are, and some cherish the Lenovo ThinkPad, and others the various models built by Sony that seem to stress a higher level of style. It’s also true that a premium-priced PC can deliver superior longevity too, but the price comparisons allegedly demonstrating an Apple Tax quickly go out the window.

You can, of course, focus on the argument that you are paying for features in a Mac that are not available in a PC product, or you simply don’t need. Indeed at the end of the day, Apple might just not have the model that fits your requirements, since the product lineup is sparse and the configuration options are minimal for the most part.

But look at the value of those extra features and see whether they really do present an advantage to you. Consider the high-gamut displays on the latest MacBook Pros. Maybe it doesn’t matter for email, Web surfing and word processing. But as soon as you engage in any degree of professional multimedia work, the higher-grade display will sure come in handy.

Look at productivity. If your computer isn’t brought down regularly by malware and driver bugs, you can use your valuable time to actually get some work done, rather than sit back and waste time. I presume, of course, that your time has value and you want to use it as productively as possible. If you get your work finished sooner, you might actually have more time to spend with family and friends, and isn’t that what life is all about?

Yes, you can induce Mac OS X to install on many PCs out there. There’s plenty of information online on how to handle the process, and which hardware is most compatible with Leopard. These days it doesn’t take a whole lot of power user skills to perform one of these unsupported setups, but that goes against the benefits of having a computer that works out of the box and carries with it the best customer support in the industry. That’s worth money too isn’t it?

Oh, and the next time you compare, say, a BMW with a mid-range auto, such as a fully-outfitted Honda Accord, factor in the cost of regular maintenance, including brake jobs. BMW offers all that free for the first four years or 50,000 miles of ownership, and you can extend the service policy if you like. That has to count for at least some of the price difference, right?

As many of you readers know, I took a slightly circuitous path to getting an iPhone 3GS. In a sense, my purchase of a 3G was similarly troubled.

Just to recap: On the day the 3G was released last July, I made the 10-minute drive to the nearest AT&T factory-owned store, and discovered that they only had half the stock needed to service the waiting crowd with immediate delivery. I was too far back, so I was directed to a second not-so-nearby location. I struck out there as well, but finally achieved success at an Apple Store in Chandler, Arizona.

Typical of Apple, they pushed their inventory towards their own stores, despite denying favoritism. However, I didn’t suffer from the delayed activation disease others encountered. Mine was set up without a hitch, and that included the restoration of the software from the previous phone. Typical of an iPhone, it suffered from occasional system crashes that were not well addressed until the 3.0 software came out.

My upgrade to 3.0 was also uneventful, and I gather that holds true for most of you. Not only was performance improved, but the occurrence of crashes was reduced by a substantial order of magnitude.

With the arrival of the 3GS, and boy was I grateful you no longer have to put a space between the G and the S, I took a more laid back approach. That is, until AT&T decided to honor the customers who paid them big checks every month with a penalty-free upgrade after a mere 11 months.

I settled on a black 16GB. I haven’t come close to filling the storage space on my white iPhone 3G 16GB, so I am sure I can find other uses for the $100 I saved. But rather than visit an Apple Store directly, I decided to take the lazy way out, and order online. My initial order was placed on July 23rd, and I was quoted a 2–4 day shipping timeframe.

On July 25th, I got a strange letter that AT&T had rejected the order, which was subsequently cancelled. This was odd, because you have to undergo a preliminary approval process prior to placing an order. That way, such happenstances are supposedly avoided. A quick phone call to AT&T delivered the news that one of their servers had timed out, thus a small portion of the pre-shipping verification checks were bounced.

Apple was happy to redo the order, and just as happy to give me a free case (I chose a Belkin with an attached belt clip) for my time and trouble, but no amount of pleading would persuade them to put me in front of the line, where I surely deserved to be in light of the fact that my new iPhone would have shipped that very day. Alas, Apple’s iPhone ordering process was getting backed up, and this time the shipping timeframe was 5–7 days.

So I waited.

I received the shipping notice on July 3rd, confirming it departed an ordering center in China on that date. Delivery was promised by 10:30 AM on July 6th or 7th. It arrived Monday morning, and I went to work getting it activated, so I could submit it to a few preliminary tests.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long for a full charge. The battery arrived with the charge indicator showing it to be roughly 75% full. The process of activation and restore took only a few minutes to accomplish, and I removed it as soon as the indicator displayed a full charge.

The first few hours have been equally uneventful. As before, all the data on the old iPhone was successfully transferred to the new one. I did have to reenter passwords to my favorite Wi-Fi spots, including the one in my office, but that’s an important safety issue from a security standpoint. I then unpaired my car’s Bluetooth mating with the 3G and paired it with the 3GS.

Understand that having Bluetooth in one’s motor vehicle these days doesn’t require buying a costly luxury vehicle anymore. Even a basic Kia sedan can be outfitted with one.

While I haven’t pushed the extra power to the limits, I do notice that the mere act of trashing an email is performed in a more graceful and fluid fashion on the 3GS. Internet access proceeds more rapidly as well, and I was pleased with the quick response of the new auto-focus three megapixel camera. I was thinking, in retrospect, that my son’s first digital camera had just four megapixels, and it was capable of extremely good quality, so I’m optimistic.

I know that those people at Consumer Reports continue to single out the iPhone as having less-than-stellar audio quality, but I don’t see it. The iPhone’s audio on regular phone calls remains robust and as loud as I can stand. The other mobile handsets I’ve used, from from such makers as LG, Motorola and Samsung, don’t sound audibly better. I realize that audio quality is also highly dependent on network conditions, and it’s possible CR’s test situation in New York — and CNET’s in San Francisco for that matter — involve saturated 3G network conditions where just getting a stable connection is a miracle.

There is, as you might expect, a lot more to come.