To be sure, Macs have the reputation of offering pretty decent reliability, particularly when compared to a Windows PC. This isn’t to say they don’t fail, but it doesn’t happen very often, except, perhaps, early in the production process and usually due to some unexpected issue rather than a persistent defect.

Where problems are discovered later on in the production cycle, Apple will often set up an extended repair program that extends the warranty on the affected part or parts for an extra two or three years. That means that you shouldn’t have to pay for repairs if one of those parts fails.

Apple also sells AppleCare policies — basically a form of anti-breakdown insurance — that extends the warranty of a Mac from one to three years, and from one to two years on an iPod or iPhone.

After that, you’re on your own, unless you have a third-party extended repair contract that may last four or even five years. Worse, the cost of even a minor repair will usually exceed the cash value of your hardware, and it may not cost a whole lot more to just buy a brand new replacement.

Of course, Apple survives by selling hardware. Their prospective customers aren’t just Windows switchers, but existing users who want to upgrade. No upgrades and Apple’s sales would be gutted. So they have a vested interest in convincing you to replace your hardware after a few years, even if it’s still working just fine.

One way to entice you to get the latest and greatest Mac is to deliver an operating system upgrade that won’t function on older hardware. When it comes to an iPod or iPhone, well they’re supposedly disposable anyway. Two or three years, and they’re history. Thank heavens for recycling centers.

When I look at this planned obsolescence, though, I quickly remember that I have a 27-inch Sony CRT TV in my son’s bedroom that we bought 15 years ago. It still works perfectly, and since we have a cable box attached to it, the end of analog TV transmission is a non-issue. The picture even looks reasonably impressive when you play a DVD on it, and, when my son comes to visit, he never complains, although we have a large flat panel TV in the master bedroom.

That Sony TV has virtually no cash value, so if I tried to sell it, I’d be lucky to get $25 for my efforts, and most of the people who might still be interested in taking it off my hands would prefer I’d just let them cart it away without any cash changing hands. Certainly Sony can’t be too happy that I have no incentive to buy a new TV from them right now.

Now I’m not suggesting that a Mac suddenly becomes useless when support ends. So long as everything functions properly, there’s no reason why it can’t do the very same chores for which it was purchased in the first place, though you’d certainly have problems upgrading some of your software.

I remember a client, a semi-retired interior decorator, who still used her Mac IIci, circa 1990, in 2001. Even when I sold her one of my older computers, an iMac, she kept the IIci at hand as a second computer. Indeed, she still preferred to use it, even though the System 7-based operating system installed on it couldn’t get her online to see the latest sites that required recent browsers to render properly. No matter. She could still use her aging version of ClarisWorks to put her business data in a spreadsheet, or print out mailing labels from the database module.

Lest you forget, today’s iWork, the direct descendant to ClarisWorks and AppleWorks, still doesn’t sport a database feature.

My point? Today’s personal computers really aren’t built to last, not even as long as the ones you bought 10 or 20 years ago. But just try to use the vintage Mac with current applications. Apple has gone through processor and operating system transitions that make it impossible.

With an old TV set, you can still watch the latest episode of “24” without a problem. Even if your local TV stations are all-digital, the cable or satellite box — or even one of those analog to digital converters — will keep it working. That’s even true for the black and white TV you may have bought back in the 1950s or 1960s, assuming it still functions.

Now I am not about to suggest that Apple and the rest of the PC industry abandon their upgrade cycles so that you won’t have to buy new hardware so often. Even in today’s shaky economic climate, it’s not going to be easy to change the direction of an entire industry to accommodate people who would prefer to keep something around a few years longer.

However, you have to wonder just how long the tech industry expects their customers to accept this accelerated planned upgrade cycle before they are told there has to be a better way.

Sure, you may not be able to take advantage of all the sexy new features and eye candy of current products. But do you really think that, for example, Word 2008 runs any faster on a fully-outfitted Mac Pro than Word 5.1 did on a IIci? Or am I missing something?

When releasing a new operating system, Apple will almost always tout a huge number of new features. With Leopard, that list exceeded 300, although some of the changes were, at best, exceedingly inconsequential in the scheme of things. But they look great as bullet points in Keynote presentations.

The exception will apparently be Snow Leopard, which is supposed to be a catch up release to fix underlying system performance. The actual list of new features will evidently be rather small, although the rumor sites are claiming that there are going to be at least some unannounced user interface refinements.

With the release of its Safari 4.0 public beta, Apple is once again playing the numbers game. This time, they’re boasting 150 features, but you have to look closely to see the true picture. You see most of those features are the ones you’ve already come to know and love — or whatever you feel about some of them.

Regardless, there are actually a handful of significant new features that further set Apple’s browser ahead of Microsoft’s entry — and perhaps Firefox for that matter this time. That’s particularly significant since Safari has previously been light on spiffy features, but heavy on display speeds.

In terms of the latter, Apple is touting its new Nitro Engine as capable of “blazingly fast performance thanks to the industry’s most advanced rendering technologies.”

After reading a report from someone who claimed Safari 4 was crashing their Mac every time it was launched, and a comment from a colleague that he didn’t want “to screw with my work machine,” I decided to take the chance anyway and download the application installer.

I did find that Apple provides an uninstaller, which evidently restores the latest release version of Safari 3, just in case you found the beta unsatisfactory for your purposes. Or that it does somehow screw with your work machine. Regardless, I always urge caution with betas. While the ones Apple provides tend to be more stable than most, that’s only an incremental difference. There are no doubt unexpected surprises in store for you, and they won’t necessarily be ones that you’d find terribly pleasing.

Now since this is beta, I didn’t go through the bother of testing the claims that “Safari executives JavaScript up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and more than 3 times faster than Firefox 3 based on performance in leading industry benchmark tests: iBench and SurfSpider.” I’m sure that the tech pundits will give it a go. I will say, however, that it sure seems snappy enough with all the tasks I tossed at it.

It did, however, seem to have difficulties bring up my bank’s account update page. I had to basically navigate back from two blank pages for it to display properly. I also had difficulties bringing up the administration or setup screens for our vBulletin forums, where the pages were blank until I clicked the back and forward buttons. Go figure. But that’s what betas are for, and I suppose Apple’s Safari developers will figure out most of this stuff by the final release — I hope!

One new capability of note bring Safari closer to the Finder and iTunes interfaces, by adding a Cover Flow feature to examine your browser history and bookmarks. The only real limitation so far with the latter is that it doesn’t seem to present an actual image of a site until it’s actually visited with the new version at least once. There doesn’t seem to be any background updating going on, but maybe I should just give it time. Even then, I couldn’t get Cover Flow to render anything more than a generic image of the front page of cPanel, our Web site’s management application. Curious.

Another high power feature is Top Sites, which delivers a virtual panorama of the sites you visit most often. If a site has changed, you’ll see a star at the upper right corner. The number of sites listed depends on your settings when you click the Edit button at the bottom left. You can choose Small, Medium or Large and Safari will adjust the number of thumbnails based on your selection.

One more cosmetic enhancement of note is placing tabs at the top rather than below the toolbar and bookmarks bar. I suppose that’s designed to make it a more significant function — or at least more noticeable for Mac novices. My gut feeling at first glance is that it’s just more window dressing. I don’t see that it it truly enhances Safari’s usability, at least not for me.

Windows users will likely be pleased to discover that the new Safari now faithfully adheres to Windows XP and Vista window and menu design conventions, such as they are, and that Microsoft’s fonts and rendering schemes are used by default. You can still select Mac fonts if you like, but this also signifies that Safari will no longer strike you as some sort of invader to your operating system. Clearly Apple expects to gain a decent share of the Window’s browser market now that Internet Explorer’s dominance is eroding more rapidly than ever.

Other than that one rendering oddity with my bank, I haven’t found any strange symptoms in my brief testing. No doubt I will over time, but, for now, Safari 4 strikes me as a significant upgrade. Certainly Safari has always been the best looking browser on the planet and, with its significant new features, it may finally eclipse the competition in almost every respect. But time will tell how it shakes out in the real world.

Accompanying reports of the upcoming Apple shareholders meeting is the fact that Steve Jobs won’t attend. This is supposedly a big deal, considering all the concerns about his health and all.

However, the tech pundits who have turned this development into a major story seem to be ignoring the critical fact of Jobs’ decision to take a medical leave from the company for six months. Logically speaking, that also means that he is not going to show up at public events. How could it be otherwise?

Sure, it’s right to talk about Apple’s future, possible new product directions and how they’d manage the succession process should Jobs decide, for whatever reason, not to return. I can well understand that there are concerns — valid ones — as to how well Apple will do without Jobs at the helm.

While lots have companies have CEOs moving in and out of the executive suite in a musical chairs fashion, a founder of the company is the person who shapes its direction, particularly if that person is a charismatic visionary.

Look, if you will, how Apple fared when Steve Jobs left the company in the mid-1980s. Yes, Apple hung around for over a decade without him around, but they didn’t do so well did they? Sure, there were some great products along the way, and also far too many duds. By the time Jobs returned as part of the acquisition of NeXT, Apple was an absolute, hemorrhaging lots of red ink.

They say that the company was never closer to folding, and I can well understand that those of you who — like me — stayed with the company for many years through thick and thin don’t want to see a repetition of the bad old days.

But the Steve Jobs who took over as iCEO (and then as CEO “for life”) was not quite the same person who co-founded Apple along with Steve Wozniak in the mid-1970s. He had matured as a business person, and understood the need to hire executives with vision and talent to manage the day to day affairs.

The people who are there today have been immersed in Steve Jobs’ vision, following his wishes for years. For example, COO Tim Cook, who is keeping the engine running in Jobs’ absence, is widely regarded as one of the best operating officers on the planet. He has tamed Apple’s runaway inventory issues, and runs a lean and mean ship.

Sure Apple is late with products from time to time, usually by no more than a few weeks or so. But I rather suspect that’s largely the result of unexpected production issues, which are understandable, rather than some deep-seated management problem. Sometimes critical product defects don’t actually appear until the production ramp up begins. Besides, critical components may ship late, and Apple doesn’t have a whole lot of control over that.

I suppose there are also concerns because Apple hasn’t done very much in terms of innovating through the economic downturn, at least so far. This year’s product revisions have been really routine, at least so far. The 17-inch MacBook Pro, for example, was just a natural development that accompanied last fall’s introduction of the unibody Macs. Giving it a special battery, while no doubt useful for on-location work, is not revolutionary by any means, even though it’s a clever idea.

Certainly the upgrades to iLife and iWork were also part of the natural development process, even though I expect most of you who have tried these application suites will agree that the upgrades are well worth the money.

But what about the iMac and the Mac mini? Certainly the latter was long in the tooth a year ago, and I expect it’s natural to think that the product may eventually be supplanted by something altogether different. Or it may get a simple refresh to accompany the iMac.

Adding to that are concerns about Apple’s future direction with NVIDIA, now that the latter is embroiled in a legal dispute with Intel. It seems that NVIDIA thinks they have the right to build chipsets for the next-generation Core i7 processor family. Intel disagrees, and so the lawyers wrangle, and Apple remains in the middle.

If Intel prevails or at least fails to sign a new licensing pact with NVIDIA, Apple may have to abruptly change the designs of some of its future products. While I expect Apple has different prototypes at hand to accommodate the outcome, that also means product delays.

This isn’t to say the existing iMac, despite lower sales of Apple desktops, is a bad product. But time maybe passing it by, at least as far as those thinking about buying a new Mac are concerned.

Whatever the issues, little of this has anything to do with whether or not Steve Jobs returns to Apple in June, continues his sabbatical or just quits. Indeed, I expect that, whatever his actual condition, he remains in touch with Apple’s executives about future products and marketing plans. Indeed, I expect Apple’s new gadget roadmap for the next few years has already been hatched and everything is moving naturally through the development process even now.

It would be nice to have Jobs back. But if that’s not in the cards, so be it. Let’s move on.

Let’s take a fascinating journey through time, before many of you readers were using Macs or any personal computer for that matter. Back in the 1980s, when most user interfaces were text-based, Apple burst on the scene with the Macintosh.

Even then, though, they only had a minority share of the marketplace (although larger than it is now), and Microsoft soon decided to build a competitive operating system known as Windows. At first, Windows was just a graphical shell atop DOS, but the intent was similar, and that was to bring personal computing to the masses. And, of course. make lots and lots of money.

Even before then, Microsoft’s approach to the tech business was well-established. Over the years, they have asked government regulators for the right to innovate. But, historically, they have merely attempted to play catch up with existing technology and exploit it to beat out the competition by any means possible. Very seldom — if ever — do they actually advance the state of the art, except when it comes to generating record profits from their products.

That is, except for most anything that strays beyond their original business model, which encompassed software and not hardware.

Story continued in this week’s Tech Night Owl Newsletter.