It’s very easy to sell a Mac to the skeptic when things function normally, and to be frank, they usually do. Indeed, I’ve also done pretty well in making that occasional deal to sell my old hardware to a local buyer.

However, on a rare occasion things don’t always work predictably. Some years back, for example, I was in the midst of ridding myself of a Power Mac G4. The prospective purchaser was just about ready to take the cash out of his wallet when I began a final backup of some remaining files.

Unfortunately the deal was almost aborted, as it appeared that the external drive failed at that very moment. It turned out to be the result of an early-release Mac OS X bug that would cause directory damage on some FireWire drives. In the end the problem was resolved with a fast Apple update and a corresponding update to the drive firmware, but I had to make some fast excuses to preserve the sale.

Rather than go into details about a possible Mac OS bug, I said the drive had been flaky for a while, and don’t worry. The Power Mac, I said, was perfect, and after a long period of silence during which time he considered the matter, he finally completed the transaction.

But it was embarrassing nonetheless, and I vowed to be far more cautious in the future when engaging in an in-person sales process.

It’s also true that even some of the features in the latest Macs don’t always function, even when everything is working properly.

A major offender is Leopard’s screen sharing feature, dubbed Back to My Mac in one of its variants. Now in theory, it’s a tremendous tool, because it allows you to take over the screen of another Mac on a local network or across the Internet. For the latter, all you need is a MobileMe account to handle the interconnectivity at both ends. Of course, MobileMe, one hopes, isn’t suffering from one of its periodic outages when you attempt to share another Mac’s desktop.

When it works properly, the hookup process happens nearly as fast as standard file sharing. This can be a tremendous advantage if you want to help a friend or relative solve a problem, or just teach them how to do something interactively. It’s also a more advantageous file sharing technique, since you have virtually full control over the networked Mac. All this comes at no extra cost, beyond your MobileMe membership, without having to buy any special desktop sharing software, such as Apple’s Remote Desktop, which can get rather costly.

At least that’s the theory. But in practice it doesn’t always work so well. To be assured a reasonable chance of success, you should have a recent Apple AirPort Extreme router or a Time Capsule at both ends of the connection. That will ensure maximum compatibility. Now it’s also true that third-party routers are, to some degree, also supported, but don’t bet on certain success.

According to Apple, those other routers need to support something called UPnP (also known as Universal Plug and Play) technology. They even maintain an online list of routers that are supposedly compatible with Back to My Mac when properly configured. However, the setup may not be so simple, because some of those products require accessing Web-based configuration panels that are often poorly designed and badly explained in their documentation. You may be coping with lots of trial and error, or find yourself calling an outsourced support center that can barely understand English, let alone deal with the technical fineries of this sort of setup.

And that even assumes that the router maker has any interest in supporting Mac users.

To make matters worse, some ISPs provide proprietary DSL or cable modems with built-in routers, which are preconfigured by their technical people. They may not be willing — or able — to set things up so they support Back to My Mac.

Now there is also a screen sharing capability in iChat that allows you and your online contact to take control of each other’s Macs. This substitute may actually succeed where Back to My Mac fails, but it does, of course, require that there be someone at the other end of the connection to manage their part of the process.

So we have two variations of a wonderful feature that, in the real word, often fails to perform as promised. It almost makes you think of Windows, where some things aren’t as reliable as they could or should be.

Now perhaps Apple is guilty because of over-promising and under-delivering, although Back to My Mac isn’t something they advertise too heavily. They may also be the victims here, simply because so many routers are badly designed. Indeed, consumer electronics outlets used to complain they had more returns on routers than almost any other gadget.

But maybe — just maybe — Apple will find a better way to implement this and other broken features in Snow Leopard. It shouldn’t just be about more efficient plumbing.

Those of us who embraced the Mac as the ideal personal computer solution early on might have been thought of as elitists at one time. That’s because we all paid substantially extra for the privilege, and that’s where the concept of the “Apple Tax” began.

More to the point, for so many years, the Mac user existed in a tiny niche where artists and other content creators resided. If you wanted software, local stores would rarely be able to accommodate you. If they had any Mac products for you at all, they largely consisted of a few dusty boxes consigned to a rear, seldom-visited shelf. So you ordered mail order catalogs to find the titles you wanted. That was, of course, before the Internet and convenient online ordering spread to the masses.

Certainly the success of Microsoft’s Windows 95 made it awfully hard for some to remain faithful to the poor, beleaguered Mac platform. This isn’t to say that Apple didn’t do its share to make you feel abandoned. Sure there were regular model updates; in fact, so many sometimes that you didn’t know the differences.

Of course, part of that failed model proliferation scheme was an attempt to make Macs cater to the masses, in the same fashion as the generic PC. So the consumers were expected to buy a Performa, whereas the traditional Mac user would go for the Quadra and later the Power Mac. And don’t ask me how the name Centris came to be, although our David Biedny tells me that he was responsible for the name “Power Mac.”

In any case, Apple’s renewal began a decade ago with the introduction of the original pear-shaped iMac. Indeed, they sold millions of them. The strangely-shaped successor, with the articulated arm, didn’t do quite so well, although it was a fascinating bit of engineering.

More to the point, though, by making Macs more mainstream in terms of pricing and user appeal, the potential audience crew incredibly. While I haven’t polled my readers recently about this, except for the special listener surveys we do on the radio show sites, I bet a large number of you never heard of a Performa or a Quadra, and perhaps regard both as alien terms.

Well, perhaps, but as millions of you buy new Macs, I am willing to suggest that the conventional wisdom that we’re all part of an elite class has certainly gone out the window. Indeed, Apple has to be pleased over this state of affairs, and you can well believe that some of their design decisions have followed this marketing initiative.

Let’s look, for example, at the new MacBook with that terrific aluminum unibody. I know some of you are disappointed that it no longer has a FireWire port. But consider that most of the people who used FireWire on a consumer-grade note-book probably required it for an external hard drive or a camcorder.

Well, as Steve Jobs has said, most of the camcorders you buy today, except for professional-grade products, have USB 2.0 ports. What’s more, there is a plentiful selection of USB drives. Sure there are undeniable advantages to FireWire from a technological point of view, but for most of you, I bet USB is good enough. Even the iPod no longer requires FireWire. Indeed, it probably saves Apple a few dollars on each unit, the better to pay for that glass trackpad with the embedded button.

I would also think that the move to glossy screens on new Macs, however controversial, has a larger purpose in mind. We ran a tiny survey, and found that roughly 56% of you like glossy (this figure will change slightly from day to day), although many of you still object and prefer matte. Certainly my friend Rob Griffiths, a Macworld Senior Editor, abhors glossy because he cannot tolerate the reflections under many lighting conditions.

There is also the larger question of how well a glossy screen fares when you try to calibrate for more accurate color reproduction. Certainly Macs are still preeminent in the graphic arts industry where accurate color is a prerequisite, So does that present a potential obstacle? Does Apple expect content creators to just use external displays when they cannot, for whatever reason, tolerate glossy?

In a practical sense, glossy does have its undeniable advantages. Pictures seem brighter, blacks richer, and from a mass-marketing point of view, I can see where they might be preferred. While Apple doesn’t break out the actual figures, it’s also possible that, when both glossy and matte displays were offered on the MacBook Pro, the vast majority of users preferred the former. So Apple made an appropriate decision.

Then again, Apple quite often finds itself ahead of the curve when adding and removing features. They got plenty of flack with those first iMacs, because they didn’t have floppy drives, nor the traditional peripheral ports, such as LocalTalk and SCSI. Instead, it was all Ethernet and USB, but the rest of the PC industry finally caught up.

Today, being a Mac user no longer puts you into an elite class, unless you feel that people who prefer elegant design, relative ease-of-use and reliability ought to feel special. Apple happens to think that most everybody would prefer their solutions if they gave them gave half a chance, and I happen to agree.

You know, it’s a rare thing for Apple to tell you they aren’t going to release a new product. Usually it’s the standard “we don’t comment about unreleased products” phrase that doesn’t discourage journalists from asking anyway, in the forlorn hope that they’ll get a different response. But this time, Apple has a larger purpose in mind when they tell you that you shouldn’t expect any changes in the desktop Mac lineup for the remainder of 2008, or in any of their products for that matter.

Whenever there are widespread expectations of a product refresh, sales of existing hardware are apt to begin to dry up, particularly among the Mac faithful who follow such matters carefully. In this particular case, there have been ongoing rumors of an updated iMac and perhaps the long-awaited revision to the Mac mini.

Originally, the updates were expected in late October, and those predictions were since updated to reflect the reality, because they simply didn’t happen. In any case, we’re getting rather late in the quarter to expect an Apple upgrade. In recent years, they simply haven’t happened after October.

More to the point, Apple has it rougher than usual this year, and that’s true for all computer makers, because of the shaky state of the world’s economy. Already you can see bad tidings in the U.S., what with the decision of Circuit City to shutter 155 stores, including those in the fairly-prosperous Phoenix metropolitan area. For that to happen so close to the holidays clearly indicates the company is desperate for cash, and needs to cut its losses pronto so it’ll be able to fund sufficient inventory to take it through the holidays. In the end, though, many are expected that we’ve seen the last of this chain, which simply couldn’t sustain the competition against the likes of Best Buy.

As far as Best Buy is concerned, I had an unofficial discussion the other day with someone in management at a local branch. They report blowout sales of new Macs, particularly the MacBook, so at least some people have the money to acquire them. That doesn’t, of course, mean that all Best Buys outfitted with an Apple section are faring as well, but it’s nonetheless promising.

Then again, do you really need a revised iMac right now? It’s not that the current version, which was released last spring, is long in the tooth. All right, maybe the graphics chips aren’t quite as proficient as the ones from NVIDIA that Apple introduced in the MacBook and MacBook Pro, but they are certainly capable of handling most chores other than serious gaming. As far as CPU horsepower is concerned, the new Apple note-books are only slightly faster than the ones they replace, aside from the enhanced graphics capabilities. By and large, only dedicated gamers will really have much to worry about, and games on the Mac platform aren’t doing all that well anyway.

It might also be that a larger refresh is in the offing for Macworld 2009, one that will result in more than the usual number of changes to the iMac. Or it may simply reflect the fact that nearly two-thirds of Mac sales these days are in the note-book category, and there’s little indication that the iMac would suffer all that much absent a change right now.

As far as the Mac mini is concerned, well there was that story a while back about orders no longer being accepted when placed by a European dealer. If true, that news might indicate a model revision or simply the end of the line for the under-appreciated mini. The story was never confirmed, however, the existing model remains in stock, and you can order either standard configuration from Apple’s online store and have it ship within 24 hours. That would seem to indicate there are ample supplies present.

I would also quickly dismiss any suggestion that Apple plans to phase out desktop computers any time soon. Despite the greater emphasis on note-books, today’s Mac desktop sales are actually higher, by themselves, than the entire Macintosh lineup — both desktops and note-books — just a couple of years ago. So there’s just no incentive for them to gut desktops, even though they might spend more development dollars on portables.

On the other hand, where’s the incentive for Apple to change anything else this year? If they are doing well, or at least coping, despite the economic downturn, maybe it would be a better idea for them to coast along and market the hell out of their existing products, and worry about other changes later on. And, by the way, those claims by one analyst about a 40% cutback in iPhone 3G production runs are not only unconfirmed, but are widely disbelieved.

In any case, there’s always hope things will begin to improve come 2009. And Apple isn’t the only company in search or a more prosperous new year.

Microsoft clearly believes it essentially killed the Mac years ago, since it holds an incredible dominance of the PC operating system market. Forget for the moment that Apple has made great strides in market share growth recently, and Microsoft has stumbled badly with Vista. The opposition has other irons in the fire.

First came the attack of the rampaging iPod killers. What happened to them? Good question. Unless you follow the tech industry closely, you would probably have difficulty identifying any of those alleged products, other than Microsoft’s failed Zune of course.

In fact, the tech pundits who fawned over any product designed to compete with Apple seem to have given up on the prospects that the iPod will ever be replaced by anything other than Apple’s successor — which may already be here in the form of the iPod touch.

That takes us to the nascent smartphone category, where the dust has yet to settle.

The skeptics dismissed the iPhone early on, because how could Apple possibly compete with handset makers that had years of experience in the marketplace? And let’s not forget the fact that they had sold hundreds of millions of units already? Besides, the wireless carriers run the show, because they dictate the form and shape of user interfaces, and how features are implemented. Apple, in contrast, wants to run the show from top to bottom.

Well, never underestimate the world-famous consumer electronics company named after a fruit. While the fine details of the actual sales pitches may never be fully known, nor the names of all the companies who were contacted, we do know that AT&T decided to let Apple in to its closed ecosystem, with a few concessions.

With the iPhone, Apple was either being very conservative in its hopes and dreams of sales and market share, or they were absolutely amazed by what actually occurred! That probably explains why Steve Jobs made an unannounced appearance at the recent conference call with financial analysts. No, it wasn’t to talk about the state of his health, which wasn’t even mentioned. In fact, few dispute the fact that Jobs is now apparently in good health, despite some problems earlier this year.

Now that the iPhone has exceeded expectations both in total sales and market share — and even beat the venerable BlackBerry at its own game — the tech analysts have changed their focus in search of killer products. There are ongoing stories about this, that, and the other company working by themselves with Google or even with Microsoft to devise a product that’ll blow away the competition, particularly the iPhone.

It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that the path to continued success with the iPhone is certainly more difficult. There are already unconfirmed reports that Apple may have reduced its production runs for this quarter because of the ongoing economic difficulties around the world. But that would probably reflect on all other wireless handset makers, so if Apple’s sales don’t meet expectations, they won’t be alone.

But all this may pass in a few months, and it’s possible economic growth will resume. In the meantime, Apple certainly has the cash on hand to whether even a serious downturn and prosper. So much for the urgings from some financial analysts that Apple ought to simply use all that money to buy back its stock and enrich its employees and stockholders.

There is, of course, one other area where an Apple killer may be in the wings. That’s Microsoft Windows 7, the successor to the failed Vista.

Did I say failed? Well, yes, hundreds of millions of copies have been sold, but largely because they were already preloaded on PCs, not necessarily because lots of eager customers visited their local computer or consumer electronic outlets to buy a copy.

With Windows 7, Microsoft has already taken off the wraps, although the pre-betas some are using do not appear to have the promised interface changes. The most revealing is a taskbar that, for all intents and purposes, closely resembles Mac OS X’s Dock.

Is that what Microsoft considers “innovation”? I remember the original U.S. Department of Justice antitrust action against the company, when Bill Gates complained that the company only wanted to be left free to imitate — I mean innovate. Well, I suppose making Windows 7 look more like Mac OS X might have the end result of changing the minds of some potential switchers who mistakenly assume it’s something new and different.

Then again, maybe Microsoft can take some of that $300 million it is investing in meaningless ad campaigns and try to come up with a genuine game-changer for their upcoming Windows upgrade, but I am skeptical that they have the management in place that’s capable of such a thing however much much money they throw at the problem.

More to the point, because a feature is demonstrated is no guarantee that it’ll ever actually appear in a Microsoft product. That’s an important part of their history they cannot escape, even while they continue to search for Apple-killer products that end up self-destructing.