It’s easy to attack the manufacturer of a product when features you expect are lacking. In the case of the iPhone, now that the 3G version has taken off like a rocket, you have to wonder why Apple didn’t have time to roll in some critical capabilities.

First and foremost are the classic Cut, Copy and Paste features, part and parcel of the Mac OS since the first release back in 1984. Understand that those original Macs were nowhere near as powerful as the tiny iPhone, either the first version or the second. Your iPhone also has a whole lot more storage space, more RAM, and so forth and so on. As a result, it can’t be a lack of system resources.

So how do such basic capabilities fail to make the cut? Well, Apple VP Greg Joswiak, known as “Joz” to his friends, is quoted as saying that they’re all on the “to do” list, but others got greater priority. Now Joz has always impressed me as a pleasant fellow, so I’ll cut him some slack. I realize that it’s not always possible for a company to build and test all the features they want and still get a product out on schedule. In Microsoft’s case, of course, they either change the schedule or remove the features they promised, and, alas, few tech pundits put their feet to the fire.

Apple, of course, never promised those basic text editing features, so there’s nothing to fulfill. While I can understand why things might have been missing from the original iPhone, what about the second version, or the 2.0 software that works on both?

Why indeed!

Maybe Apple is trying to find an innovative method to make it work? Since I’m not an interface designer myself — nor do I play one on radio or TV — I wouldn’t presume to be able to present an ideal solution. Yes, that’s the ticket.

But what about voice dialing? Is that so difficult? I mean, the free LG Bluetooth phone I got my wife when we signed up with AT&T has it. Despite a perfectly awful user interface, that feature seems to function well enough to make it usable. My son’s Motorola RAZR has it as well — wish he’d use it. But there Motorola has at least made it function in a decent fashion when the handset is mated to your Bluetooth headset. Considering the advanced speech technology in Leopard, why has Apple missed the boat here?

Certainly the fact that hands-free capabilities are now required, by law in Apple’s home state of California should be sufficient reason for them to act fast to resolve this lapse. Sure, there will be stuff at the App Store that will provide such a feature, after a fashion. But this is really Apple’s job.

On another front, what about the ability to edit documents? Sure, you can read Office and iWork documents, but what good is that if they can’t get a few final edits as part of the process? Does Apple expect you to write down the required changes and attach the document with an email to a collaborator, or to yourself for final touch-ups when you return to your Mac? I wonder.

In Mail, the famous accelerometer is non-functional. Why? Certainly it would make a whole lot of sense to be able to rotate your iPhone and take advantage of a wider keyboard when your messages have to extend beyond a few sentences. Yes, I can peck away with the best of them on that touch keypad, even without the desired tactile response. But it can get awkward when a message requires greater length.

And don’t get me started about the technologies that do provide such tactile responses on touch screens.

While I’m not a fan of navigation systems — I still use maps even if they are printed from an online resource — I realize a lot of you would love to have turn-by-turn directions on your iPhone. Joz says they are hoping for it to appear soon, but refers to unmentioned “complications” to explain why it hasn’t happened yet. While I realize Apple’s marketing position is tightly controlled, I can’t see where the company would suffer greatly if he could just provide a few fine details of the obstacles they face.

I mean, they weren’t shy about talking about the need to provide a push notification feature, to deliver better performance and compatibility with such applications as AOL’s AIM, the popular instant messaging client. Certainly the setup is awkward now, as switching to another application basically quits the previous one, and you are, for all practical purposes, offline if you find the need to perform another task while exchanging messages with someone. Aside from being downright rude, it’s inconvenient.

In this case, though, Apple admits there’s a problem. They can’t have multiple applications remain open and maximize battery life, which already suffers big time because of the 3G network support. They have posited a solution, one that is expected to show up this fall.

With that fit of honesty as a guide, I think Apple should follow through with some much needed explanations as to why these and other features remain missing in action on the iPhone.

As the fallout from the failed MobileMe launch continues to spread, I was a little surprised, Wednesday morning, when I got an email at my mac.com email Inbox from Apple on the subject. Yes, folks, I will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to use me.com instead.

After providing a brief summary about the litany of difficulties MobileMe users encountered, Apple admitted its fault, and offered an incentive to keep me on as a member: “We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge. Your extension will be reflected in your account settings within the next few weeks.”

Of course there are a few of the usual terms and conditions governing such offers, but the gesture is nonetheless encouraging and certainly reasonable given the situation.

At the same time, Apple “clarified” its claims about push support in MobileMe. Turns out that feature remains only partly functional. Says Apple in that letter: “changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices. So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word “push” until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too.”

So should we call it half a push? Or a third of a push? Or did Apple’s marketing people simply push things a little too far?

Of course, a 15-minute delay isn’t really serious in the real world, but a claim is a claim, and I’m glad Apple is finally fine-tuning its message. Would they have done the same with the iPhone activation issues from last week. However, since your mobile phone bill is typically based on a bucket of minutes, a delay in being able to use those minutes is not, I suppose, as serious an issue. Besides, after the few hours of grief early iPhone 3G adopters suffered on the morning of its release, things have gotten reasonably efficient. I don’t think Apple is going to be forced to expect another one million sales on a single weekend until the launch of the iPhone 3G’s successor.

This isn’t to say that the iPhone 3G or the version 2.0 software are perfect. In fact, Apple has already done a “silent” upgrade of the firmware, from build 5A345 to 5A347, and there are unconfirmed reports that a version 2.0.1 is already making the rounds among beta testers.

If your iPhone has the 5A345 software, which you can determine by checking its General preference panel, under the About category, I recommend you do a Restore right away to install the update. While I don’t know if the alleged yellow-tinted screen issue is necessarily resolved, I have experienced more stable performance since the upgrade. Among the most notable examples: AIM is not as apt to quit, and that slow text entry issue I encountered in Mail is now history.

On another front, I’m sure I’m only a small part of the chorus in hoping for some more new features when Apple gets around to it. Take cut, copy and paste, the basic Mac OS editing features we’ve all enjoyed for 24 years. Apple VP Greg Joswiak is now quoted as admitting that these critical capabilities is on their “to do” list, but they haven’t gotten around to it yet. Other matters carried a higher priority.

Maybe so, but I tend to think this is something that’s so basic to the text manipulation experience that I can’t imagine why it’s not extremely high on that list. Or maybe there are serious issues involved in implementing such a feature with a touch-screen interface, and Apple’s software engineers are even now searching for a viable solution.

Then there are a few more fundaments, such as why horizontal rotation is yet to be supported in Mail. Certainly writing a message is one of the essential functions of a smartphone, and I should think that, having mastered this capability with browsing, the Calculator app and games, certainly the fact that it’s needed with email isn’t lost on Apple.

Or maybe it’s another one of those things on Apple’s list that they haven’t had time to complete. But I’m still happy not to cut them any slack on these things. Surely they realize that tons of iPhone users have been clamoring for these and other features on their personal wish lists. So what’s the real timetable, Greg?

Maybe I should get him on the tech radio show and ask him. He was, after all, one of our first guests back in 2002, and has always been a great interview. Then again, he isn’t going to reveal anything that strays outside of their carefully-crafted playbook, so maybe it’s an exercise in futility.

In the larger scheme of things, the tech pundits will carp for a while longer, gleefully denigrating Apple’s huge failures in getting its MobileMe and iPhone 3G launches right. What about the long-term damage to the company’s reputation for superior reliability, they’ll claim? Well, I have no idea if this launch could have been handled better or not. Whatever you think, server resources are finite. Apple may simply have miscalculated the demand, or encountered issues that they couldn’t predict in advance.

Or maybe Steve Jobs has already shown a few server administrators to the door because of their major screw-ups. We might never know, although there just might be a few resumes around that list Apple’s IT department as a recent gig.

Since Psystar, a tiny Florida-based company, began to sell Mac clones this past spring, I’m sure many of you wondered just when Apple would respond. For weeks, the silence seemed deafening, or maybe the early teething problems Psystar encountered before they got their venture up and running gave Apple hope that they’d be able to save the legal fees and let the upstart die of its own accord.

That, however, didn’t happen, and just recently, Psystar supplemented its Open Computer line with an Xserve clone, known as OpenServ. That was evidently the straw that broke the camel’s back, as Apple gave the company a fourth of July “gift” by filing a multi-count intellectual property lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on July 3rd.

Why it took more than a week for that information to reach the media is anyone’s guess, or perhaps everyone was just too focused on the mad rush to launch the iPhone 3G, MobileMe, and all the rest of the trials and tribulations Apple confronted last weekend.

In any case, Psystar’s site was offline briefly when I wrote this article. However, they were soon back online after dealing with an apparent MySQL database issue. For a few moments, I actually thought that the company was done for the count — or preparing to reemerge under a different name in order to continue to do business as usual.

Or perhaps they are hoping against hope that they can somehow postpone the inevitable and hold Apple at bay for a few months with countersuits, appeals and what-not, so they can sell as many boxes as they can before they need to finally pull the plug and get on with their lives. I just hope they can afford the legal fees, or have friends or relatives willing to assist pro bono.

However, it just goes to show how fundamentally simple it really is to launch such a venture. Certainly, anyone who is reasonably adept at assembling their home-built PC can become a Mac cloner if they choose. Macworld Senior Editor Rob Griffiths discovered this first-hand with his “FrankenMac” project, where he assembled a PC from off-the-shelf components and then consulted information online from the OSX86Project on how to induce Mac OS X Leopard to install itself on the finished product.

But Rob isn’t alone in this pursuit. I dare say there are thousands of people around the world who have done the very same thing. But so long as they keep it to themselves, and don’t try to market their creations, I don’t expect Apple is going to pay very much attention. In Rob’s case, it was strictly a journalistic exercise, and the computer is being reverted to its generic PC status, now that the article has been published.

More to the point, it’s quite likely that, having done this sort of thing, a lot of those power users might come to realize that their hobbies might be enjoyable, but if they want to get a powerful, reliable work computer, a real Mac is a better choice. No doubt, Apple realizes this too, since they haven’t done an awful lot to halt the process — until it was attempted on a retail basis of course.

Now I realize there might be some innate advantages to rolling your own Mac. First and foremost, you save money right away simply because you don’t have to pay a manufacturer’s retail markup. While Apple surely benefits from economies of scale, buying tens of millions of components with which to assemble their products, you can customize your own faux Mac precisely as you wish, given the limits of what’s available on the open market.

Basically, the assembly process is hardly more difficult than building a standard Windows PC, although you want to check the online information about which parts provide the highest level of compatibility. Once you are past that hurdle, there is the larger one, in which you use software hacks to install Mac OS X.

In the end, you’ll probably end up with something that’s essentially a real Mac in most respects; that is, until it’s time to install an Apple software update. Then you might have to engage in a few additional feats of basic magic to make it happen, and there’s no guarantee that Apple’s development team won’t add a few time bombs of their own to sabotage your upgrade efforts.

This isn’t to say Apple is deliberately attempting to brick those clones, in the same fashion as they allegedly did things to render unlocked iPhones inoperable some months back. It may just be the nature of the hack that makes it sensitive even to otherwise benign programming changes.

As far as I’m concerned, I really have no interest in reviewing any of Psytar’s products or, in fact, assembling my own Mac clone. It’s not that I’m unskilled at such things. I was assembling tube radios when I was 12, and I became reasonably flexible with screwdrivers, pliers, and, of course, my ever-present soldering gun. Yes, the radios usually worked when I plugged them in for the first time.

However, these days I find it far more convenient to just buy the product I want and let someone else do the assembly and testing. That way, if something goes wrong, it’s usually their fault and they are obligated to make the repairs.

In the larger scheme of things, you can bet that the way Apple is going, the prospect of a legal line of Mac clones is definitely not in the cards. Apple’s been there, and done that. There is no turning back, so long as they can continue to milk the Mac for all it’s worth.

So I asked my son, Grayson, to guess how many iPhones Apple sold this past weekend. He started out at 100,000, not recalling that Apple sold over 300,000 units of the original version during its first gala weekend last year. It took him four guesses to arrive at the correct one million figure.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. This time Apple introduced the product around the world, in a total of 21 countries, with more locations to be added in the coming weeks. It does explain, of course, why the activation system nearly stopped dead in its tracks for several hours Friday morning. However, that particular problem has evidently not been repeated, although Apple got a good drubbing from frustrated customers and the press as a result.

In fact, even the service formerly known as .Mac is now operating at a fairly good clip, after suffering endless delays and a chronic display of “maintenance” screens for several days.

As things settle down this week, it’s a sure thing that no product as revolutionary as the iPhone, or its successor, the 3G version, can be perfect. In fact, Apple has already made a silent upgrade to its firmware, and it took one of the Mac rumor sites to figure out what’s going on. And, yes, I did confirm the accuracy of the upgrade’s existence.

You see, the original version of the 2.0 software that shipped with the iPhone 3G — and made available to owners of the previous model — had a build number of 5A345. You can confirm this simply by going to your iPhone, touching Settings, choosing General and then checking About for the specifics. After I restored my phone today, the build number had changed to 5A347. Both, however, still bear the 2.0 version designation, so it’s not something that is apt to be flagged by iTunes when you check for a new version. Instead, you’ll have to undergo a full Restore process instead.

So does the updated software bring any changes with it? I’m not at all sure. Early reports indicate that the notorious yellow cast in the LCD display, said to be a move towards delivering warmer color reproduction, is gone, and the original cool white setting has been restored. Honestly, I failed to see much, if any, difference. Apple was quoted as saying the change was deliberate — so did they change it back after a single weekend?

My feeling is that the new build simply has a few bug fixes, designed to deal with issues that weren’t caught in the mad rush to meet the July 11 deadline, and that you’ll probably even see a 2.0.1 update before long to address additional issues.

One oddity I noticed — and I welcome confirmation from our long-suffering readers — is that text entry speed in Mail would sometimes slow to a crawl after a few hours. It would require a restart to set things right. But it’s too early in the game to isolate such issues and I can’t say if 5A347 changes anything, although the slow-as-molasses text anomaly has yet to return.

However, I do echo the early reports of crashing woes with AOL’s AIM instant messaging client, and also the free New York Times application. It’s been worse with the former. Sometimes just returning to my list of online buddies was sufficient to have it quit and deposit me on the Home screen.

Then again, maybe that silent firmware upgrade helped, since AIM does seem more stable in my brief tests as I was writing this article.

I also wonder whether Apple can simply push a quick update to the iPhone without having to force you to endure a full firmware upgrade. That would certainly cure small bugs without having to tether iPhone users to their computers to get the whole shebang.

On the whole, my extended face-time with the new iPhone, and particularly the 2.0 software, has been quite good — well mostly. The App Store in its early incarnation is rife with possibilities of additional features, but I’m concerned over the fact that the single application I purchased, Recorder, a dictation application, didn’t survive the Restore process, even though all my data had been backed up before it began. While I didn’t mind spending another 99 cents plus tax, this could get tiring, particularly if I had bought some of the more expensive products.

Fortunately, after purchasing Recorder for the second time, the App Store was smart enough to know that I had previously paid for a license, and offered to reinstall it free. Let’s hope that it doesn’t lose its memory.

Looking at the aftermath to the troubled iPhone and MobileMe debuts, some of the tech pundits are already complaining that Apple harmed its reputation for superior products big time as a result of this alleged catastrophe. However, all online enterprises have server issues of one sort or another from time to time. The bad memories of a slow or erratic activation process, and MobileMe’s extended downtime, will soon fade into the dark recesses of one’s memory.

If the iPhone user experience remains enjoyable and relatively trouble-free, early adopters won’t fret all that much over the Day One misadventures. Of course, I’m saying that because I had no problems updating my original iPhone with the 2.0 software and activating the 3G unit I bought from an Apple Store. On the other hand, had I been “lucky” enough to get one from the AT&T store Friday morning I, too, might have suffered from the same indignities as thousands and thousands of others. So taking three trips to make a single purchase wasn’t as crazy as I originally thought.

As you might expect, there is much more to come.