Some of the folks who bash Apple, unfortunately, do it based on erroneous assumptions. Take the claim that Macs are overpriced, or that there’s an Apple Tax of some sort that you pay for the privilege of buying a computer that just works. In fact, if you actually configure a Mac and a PC as closely as possible — from hardware to the bundled software, including the equivalent Vista version, which is Ultimate — the prices are really quite close.

But it’s also true that Apple does make its share of mistakes. Sometimes it learns from them, sometimes it doesn’t. One example might perhaps be the transition to glossy screens, which has made some of you absolutely scream! Now maybe they’re cheaper, maybe they are more environmentally friendly. But what about just using some sort of anti-reflective coating? Wouldn’t that answer at least some of the complaints?

I don’t pretend to know the manufacturing obstacles involved. I’m just asking

But I also think there have been ongoing decisions that, while they may have certain side benefits to Apple in terms of a smooth form factor, do not make sense from the point of practicality. I’m sure there are logical design considerations as to why these things were done, and that some of you will explain them to me. In the meantime, let me tell you what personally upsets me.

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

You have to appreciate Apple’s point of view with Snow Leopard. After releasing reference upgrades for Mac OS X with two or three hundred new features — some of which you may not have even wanted — it was time to fix the plumbing to pave the way for the future.

Or at least that’s what Apple expects you to believe.

The question, of course, is whether a feature-bare operating system release will be worth the same $129 that Apple charges for the one that’s usually filled to the gills with fancy new stuff. Over the years, customers have been trained to expect something new and different with new software upgrades — particularly paid ones — even if some of the new stuff weighs the system down as far as performance is concerned, or creates problems where none existed before.

Indeed, with Leopard, Apple boasted over 300 new features. But not everyone appreciates the changes. Macworld’s Rob Griffiths, for example, has his personal top ten rant list, things where Apple clearly fell down on the job. This is not to say that he’s reverted to Tiger. On the whole he prefers Leopard, even though some of its better ideas are, to him, actually worse.

This is not to say that Apple necessarily is out of good ideas either. Certainly there are things that Mac OS X still doesn’t handle properly, and features that were actually present under the Classic Mac OS but were never carried through in the migration to Mac OS X.

Now I’m not necessarily a believer in the conspiracy theory once voiced that the original Mac programmers were at war with the NeXT developers that arrived along with Steve Jobs when Apple acquired his company. It may be true, or it may be that, together, they conceived a different list of priorities.

However, you have to wonder why some things just never quite made the cut. The configurable Apple menu, for example, which was so easy to manage in the days of Mac System 7.0. Yes, there are third party alternatives, but today the Apple menu is a rigid structure where you can only change the number of items displayed in the Recent Items submenu. Is that really an improvement?

What about managing locations? Mac OS X’s Location feature is pretty much restricted to wired and wireless network setups. In the old days, with the Classic Mac OS, you could configure such things as specific printer and application setups as well. Sure, you can easily select another printer from the Print dialog, but you’d still have to figure out whether that particular device is actually a part of the network to which you’re connected. Are you expected to store this information in your cluttered brain? Isn’t the computer powerful enough to figure this out for you?

Do you remember the original PrintMonitor? Well, maybe you want to forget that relic of the old days. But I remember an extremely important feature that no longer exists in the current printer status display — and that’s the ability to schedule and prioritize jobs. Say, for example, you have a 200-page document, with lots of graphics, one that would keep the office printer purring for half an hour before it’s done. Now you don’t want to have this particular job run while other employees are cluttering up the print queue with smaller documents of more immediate concern. So you schedule the larger document at a time when everyone’s off to lunch, or even at night, after the staff is gone and only the admins are around doing their network management tasks.

Maybe Apple believes that today’s output devices are so fast, that a job of that size wouldn’t clog the print queue, or that it’s just as easy for you to remember to manually add it to the queue at the appropriate time. But why?

I’m sure you can come up with your own list of lost features that ought to return. You might even be able to recommend third-party alternatives that will provide the capabilities you want, and I’m certainly in favor of giving shareware developers an opportunity to make a living.

There are, however, certain features that ought to be a part of the core operating system. You shouldn’t have to depend on independent developer to produce them, or find some hidden Mac OS X feature that delivers just what you want but, for some reason, hasn’t been activated.

Now with Snow Leopard, I’m quite certain that the ability to handle multiprocessors more efficiently is extremely important, particularly with tasks that can overwhelm a single processor. Being able to offload chores to the graphics chip is another plus. Why have all that capability underutilized, except for 3D rendering and games?

Indeed, cleaning up Mac OS X and eliminating dead wood and potential sources for system slowdowns or crashes is a good thing, and Apple is to be commended for its foresight.

On the other hand, maybe Snow Leopard will give Apple a time to catch up and add just a few additional features, ones that have fallen by the wayside, but deserve to be returned. I’m not even going to bother with the official wish list, beyond what I’ve discussed so far. If you were using Macs in the old days, I think you know just what I’m talking about, and if you weren’t, you’re really missing some neat stuff.

There’s a key figure that’s touted at every recent quarterly meeting with financial analysts, and it may give a clue why Apple’s sales are soaring. You see, some 50% of the people buying Macs at an Apple Store are new to the platform.

Some, no doubt, are buying their first personal computer. Others are evidently migrating from Windows. Regardless, it signals a rapidly growing user base; that is, if the figures are to be believed. You see, those analysts usually tend to ask arcane accounting-related or softball questions. They seldom try to probe or even follow up a particularly intriguing response, so we can only guess at Apple’s survey methodology.

Now, it may just be their registration database. Are the new owners already there? Then again, if that’s a component of these surveys, what about customers who have simply moved? What about the newly-married, where one spouse assumes the other’s last name?

For the sake of argument, however, and lacking evidence to the contrary, I’m going to assume those statistics are fundamentally correct. It goes to show that, if Macs are displayed and demonstrated in a properly-controlled sales environment, people will buy them.

Indeed, one of the factors that hurt Macs in the 1990s was the fact that, despite efforts by Apple to push their products into as many dealers as possible, they were treated badly. I recall visiting a Circuit City store around 1995 or thereabouts, where several Performas were left catching dust in the corner. When I asked a nearby sales person about them, he told me that very few people bought Macs anymore, but they kept them on hand in case anyone asked. In that setting, I doubt they had many inquiries, and surely their efforts to push a customer to a PC box resulted in lots of unsold Apple product.

There was one notable meeting with dealers where Steve Jobs used very blunt, and sometimes vulgar, language to attack the resellers who gave Macs short shrift. That explained, also, why he pulled Macs from lots of stores in those early years while he struggled to remake the company he co-founded into something the employees and shareholders could be proud of.

Not to mention the customers, of course.

That’s a lesson the PC makers have yet to learn. If you visit a Best Buy with an Apple section, just examine how the other products are presented. The PC boxes are generally all lumped together, row after row, with little to designate one manufacturer from another. Of course, it’s fair to say that, except for a few niche companies, such as the Alienware division of Dell, you can buy a Windows PC based on price and specs alone — regardless of the brand name on the box — and get essentially the same product built in the same factories, and using the very same parts.

In contrast, even the Macs at a Best Buy store get their own small dedicated sales area, which to some degree resembles the environment at an Apple Store. From a cursory examination of the setup, it also appears that Best Buy has trained their staff to understand the distinctions between the Mac and the Windows PC, and they are showcasing the former to their best advantage. That may be why Apple continues to expand its presence at Best Buy, assuming the sales picture is also highly favorable, and I expect it must be for this grand experiment to continue.

Dedicated Apple resellers also seem to be taking the hint. Just recently, a long-time local dealer, Re-Mac, which has two stores in Arizona, renamed them to “iStore.” They have also remodeled the interiors to more closely resemble an Apple Store, and the sales and support area somewhat conforms to the Genius Bar motif. No, it’s not a 100% matchup, but store traffic appears to be decent, and they appear to be doing a fair amount of business.

Of course, their future success, particularly in the Scottsdale area, may be impacted by the fact that a Best Buy with an Apple section is only a two-minute drive from them, and a new Apple Store will debut in the spring only a few miles distant.

Then again, having three authorized Mac outlets from which to select might actually attract more people to check them out. Of course, they won’t be able to price shop, since that won’t change, but at least they can feel secure in the feeling that if one dealer doesn’t provide satisfactory service, they can go to another.

I also wonder whether the ongoing expansion of Apple’s own retail chain is eventually going to put third-party resellers — other than major chains — out of business. Its pretty well known, for example, that Apple’s own stores get new stocks first. Even with the iPhone 3G. When it first came out here in the states, if you wanted a specific model, you would be well served to go to an Apple Store. AT&T got far less stock, though it does seem as if things have settled down lately.

In any case, if Apple can continue to record half of its Mac sales to brand new customers, the skies may indeed be the limit.

Appearing only a few months after Apple claimed it wouldn’t enter the low-cost PC segment, the Mac mini has been an unheralded hero to many of you. It is used for everything from serving up Web pages to point-of-sale and front office applications, but Apple continues to pretend it doesn’t exist.

The visual appeal is striking. Some call it half a cube, since its square shape is reminiscent of the failed, overpriced Mac that appeared with great flourish some years back. Debuting at $499 for the entry-level model (it’s now $599), it was a perfectly afforddable way for Windows switchers to move to the Mac and keep their existing monitors and input devices.

All right, a Mac mini isn’t terribly powerful at computing tasks. Today’s version features an older-generation Intel Core 2 Duo processor rated at either 1.83 or 2GHz. Graphics are provided by the pokey Intel GMA 950 graphics processor, which shares 64MB of system RAM. To be fair, that’s enough for display of the high definition movies you download from iTunes, but when it comes to games, don’t even think about it.

Then again, it’s no worse than the cheap PC boxes that are still available at discount stores, such as Wal-Mart, and it’s fine for routine computing tasks, such as email, Internet browsing and word processing. Indeed, if you’re upgrading from an older Power Mac G4, you might see a significant performance boost. That happens to be true for a long-time client who bought a Mac mini a while back. He uses it for the simple stuff, and he was simply delighted.

It’s not certain just how many minis are sold nowadays. Apple conceals the numbers in its overall desktop sales figures. I would guess that revenue is high enough to keep the product in production, but not enough to warrant any special promotional campaign. And that’s unfortunate.

Now I don’t think Apple is necessarily insensitive to economic concerns, and the fact that lots of potential customers simply don’t have the spare cash to buy an iMac or new MacBook, even the white version of the latter at $999. It also makes perfect sense to me that many of you don’t want to pay for a display, keyboard and mouse when the ones you have at hand are perfectly serviceable.

Besides, I don’t think it would cost a whole lot to upgrade the internal workings on the Mac mini, particularly since it uses mostly note-book parts similar to those in the MacBook. So I wouldn’t think it would present a difficult problem to incorporate the new NVIDIA-based parts, which includes the sparkling NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics chip.

At the same time, maybe it would be a good opportunity for Apple to address a significant design shortcoming of the Mac mini. You see, you need a putty knife or similar implement to open the case when you want to upgrade RAM or replace the hard drive. The people who devised that absurd scheme ought to be tarred and feathered, and go down in infamy in the same fashion as the folks who conceived the RAM upgrade technique for the Quadra 800 and similar models back in the 1990s.

While I realize Apple has a penchant for closed designs on the iPod and iPhone, such a strategy makes no sense whatever on a personal computer. More to the point, putting, say, four tiny screws at the bottom of the Mac mini’s case, the better to remove the cover for internal expansion, shouldn’t seriously hamper its elegant looks. Apple has already considered easy upgrade possibilities for the new MacBooks, so why not the mini?

It might also make sense to see just how far they can take this product, and spend a few dollars to let people know that it really exists. Yes, you might see them at an Apple Store, or online, but how many third-party dealers get much mini traffic?

Just recently, for example, I had a client’s computer under repair at a nearby shop. The dealer has refashioned his operation to more closely resemble an Apple Store, and he had a fairly decent stock of the current models. Except for the mini.

When the repair estimate turned out to be somewhat prohibitive, I suggest the client get a mini, since he was on the budget. The dealer, however, had none in stock, and the expected shipment of new stock from Apple had been unfortunately delayed, and delayed yet again.

Now if published reports are correct, Apple may be running out of supplies of the mini in anticipation of a forthcoming upgrade. Maybe it’ll come by the time you read this article, along with the expected refresh for the iMac.

If, however, Apple chooses to bury the Mac mini, I would hope that they would, at the same time, release a suitable successor. It would be a huge mistake to just give up on the concept of an super-affordable Mac. At least that’s my not-so-humble opinion.