When I recently read the results of the reliability survey from readers of Consumer Reports, I had to wonder why Apple was dead last on the list among note-books, with a rating of 23. While this was not statistically significant compared to the 20 rating granted Lenovo, it seems to portend a potential trouble spot for Apple.

I’m sure most of you know that Apple’s note-book computers are built in the same factories as those of other makers, in Asia, and that they all share many core components, from Intel processors to hard drives and other off-the-shelf parts. So you’d think that construction quality ought to be similar, and you can expect comparable levels of longevity.

But there is more than meets the eye here. You see, Consumer Reports doesn’t distinguish among price categories. You expect that a company who primarily plays in the medium or higher-priced sandbox ought to build better products. It wouldn’t come as much of a surprise if a $750 note-book or $399 desktop failed prematurely, but when the price gets above $1,000 and then some, you have a right to expect more.

Why isn’t Apple delivering and are its products somehow going downhill in the rush to increase production to meet growing demands?

Well, not so fast. First, a Consumer Reports survey indicates an historical trend, not necessarily recent changes in overall reliability of a specific model. RIght now, for example, there are ongoing battery-related recalls for various models of the iBook, MacBook and MacBook Pro. A far greater number of repair programs impact the PowerBook G4, which, in addition to the usual spate of battery-related issues, include fixes for the display and memory slots.

I can see where all this can add up to a significant downgrading for Apple’s entire note-book line, and that’s understandable. But don’t forget that the PowerBook G4 has been out of production for nearly 30 months now, so it’s not as if its problems should impact any of today’s products.

Indeed, if you go through the entire history of Mac reliability, you’ll find significant trouble spots. Consider failing power supplies on the first all-in-one compact Macs beginning in the 1980s. The IIcx and IIci were notorious for floppy drive failures, and the fact that it seemed to draw dust into the mechanism, rather than have the exhaust fan blow it out, only exacerbated the issue. I recall one employment environment where the chief repair person (we didn’t call him an IT administrator) used a vacuum cleaner to suck out the dust on the affected Macs from time to time, and that seemed to reduce those floppy drive breakdowns.

Of course, I remember the infamous PowerBook 5300ce, for which I spent a small fortune. As with other models of the same product line with and without Power PC processors, it made several visits to Apple’s repair depot for various and sundry ills, such as sealant chronically leaking from the bottom of the screen bezel. The last repair addressed that problem, but I finally got disgusted and sold it off to someone else, who, in turn, sent it off to Apple for one more visit before he disposed of it also.

Let’s not forget the well-known video hardware problems with a number of those original pear-shaped iMacs. Or even the famous Cube, which looked like a museum piece, but had middling reliability, according to owners I’ve heard from over the years.

In short, most every generation of Macs that I know about can be singled out for a hardware defect of one sort or another. Apple isn’t perfect by any means, although you like to think otherwise.

In the end, though, persistent defects inevitably prompt some sort of recall or extended repair program. But things are never quite so simple, because such matters take time to resolve. First, Apple engineers have to be certain that there is a widespread reliability issue and not just a few failed samples. Then, they have to diagnose the cause and devise a fix, and suddenly six months or a year have passed by. In the meantime, ongoing production enhancements over a product’s lifetime might actually resolve such troubles for all but the earliest adopters.

I do, however, feel that Apple will eventually do the right thing, even though there may be long periods of frustration for affected users in the meantime. What’s worse is that Apple is so terribly secretive about reliability concerns that it may take weeks or months to get any definitive information. Some repair programs are evidently only available on a “need to know” basis, meaning you have to complain long and loud about a problem to learn of the existence of a solution.

When repair programs are publicized, the news about how to get your unit fixed may be terribly general, and you’ll never know what really went wrong. But Apple might just be paranoid about having too much proprietary information available in the wild, although power users will usually figure out the specifics in short order.

Maybe, as with new autos, you shouldn’t be so quick to buy a new Mac, particularly if the internals and/or form factor differ drastically from a previous model. It may take a fair amount of time to shake down production irregularities and get things smoothly into motion.

However, Apple is not in the same category as the standard PC maker, where you expect mass-produced products that are raft with defects. Even though Macs are priced comparably to PCs with similar configurations. Apple’s luster conveys the impression that you are getting something that’s much better, not just because of the operating system and the attractive case designs, but when it comes to the fundamentals of product reliability.

Flakiness is supposedly the province of the Windows world, and even though Macs are assembled in the very same production facilities, you have a right to expect better. That’s what Apple wants you to believe, not that it’s just another mass produced commercial product with all the expected ills that come from maxing out assembly lines.

It would be helpful if Apple got that message real soon. I can see where a few too many trips to the repair shop are going to turn off some Windows switchers real fast, even if the Mac OS is far superior.

Although Apple has the reputation of delivering cutting-edge designs, particularly when it comes to the iPod and iPhone, they’ve been extremely conservative with their personal computers.

The most radical styling exercise was probably the first flat-panel iMac, with its flower-pot base and articulated swinging arm. In retrospect, it wasn’t a barn burner when it came to sales, particularly when you compare it to the original pear-shaped iMacs.

Today’s iMac, though elegant in its aluminum clad fittings, is actually pretty conservative. It’s basically a stylish computer display with the guts carefully inserted in a way that doesn’t add significantly to its bulk. Aside from moving from plastic to aluminum, however, recent styling exercises for the iMac have been minimal.

The always-forgotten Mac mini was a neat variant on the PC theme, using basic note-book parts in a case that struck some as half a Cube. I suppose Steve Jobs can’t get away from that design, since it’s been duplicated in large part with the Apple TV, AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule.

In fact, a recent suggestion for a mid-range expandable Mac desktop calls for a thicker version of the Mac mini. But doesn’t that simply get you a Cube all over again?

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

When I first started writing computer books in 1994, I remember being asked whether I had a copy of Word installed on my Mac? You see, as with most publishers then and now, they rely heavily on Word’s Track Changes feature to monitor the editorial production process from the original manuscript to the final version that is used to generate the printed pages.

Now Word actually originated on the Mac, but it had its share of ups and downs over the years, and some of you might suggest the latter is the most common result. Word’s near-downfall occurred with the infamous version 6, which was a bad PC port, using their notorious “P code” to employ the same code base for both Mac and Windows.

Aside from the fact that it was slow to launch, the interface was dark, dreary, and lacked the proper Mac-like fit and finish that we demand for our favored platform. Yes, there were subsequent updates that addressed performance shortcomings, but you could almost get the feeling that Office for the Mac was dead, as far as Microsoft was concerned.

Of course, we have the Mac Business Unit now, and the ongoing pledge that Office:Mac development will continue for the indefinite future. In fact, Microsoft has already confirmed that a new version is under development, and that it will arrive two or three years from now. That schedule might depend on the successor for Office 2007 for Windows, since the Mac version has to be mostly compatible.

Yes, it also appears that Microsoft is moving lots of copies of Office 2008, and this week’s SP1 update appears to have mostly addressed the worst bugs and performance issues. However, we all know it has one show-stopping limitation, which is the lack of support for Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications feature, which is key to creating cross-platform macros.

In fact, certain Excel document are so customized with VBA they almost seem to be presenting themselves as a different application environment. While it’s not something I’ve used much, I once worked for a publisher that employed Word macros to maximum benefit to heavily format manuscripts so they’d be easy to translate to their chosen desktop publishing environment for final production.

With Office 2008, none of that is possible. The documents will indeed open, of course, but the functions provided by the macros will not be available. Working with MacTech magazine, Microsoft did provide some guidance on using AppleScript for Office 2008, but with no direct VBA to AppleScript translation mechanism, that was a poor solution.

True, VBA will be back in the next Mac version of Office, but where does that leave you now?

Today, if you must use macros on your Mac, you have to stick with Office 2004, or set up Windows with Boot Camp or a virtualization application and install Office for Windows instead. In fact, the latter solution is so effective, you probably won’t suffer any significant performance limitation, so long as your Intel-based Mac has plenty of RAM installed.

However that doesn’t help sell copies of Office 2008, right? Does that mean that the sales hike is only temporary, and that a large number of potential customers will simply sit out this version? If so, that could result in a self-fulfilling prophecy, assuming Microsoft actually would love to kill Office for the Mac eventually.

But I don’t believe that they want to dump Mac support. Aside from potential antitrust threats, Microsoft makes a nice amount of change from their Mac Business Unit, more than enough to keep a staff of over 200 (the largest ever) happily developing Office and a handful of other apps.

Microsoft’s excuse in losing VBA for Office 2008 was time. Moving everything to Apple’s Xcode environment so they could build a Universal application suite, took well over a year, they say. Bringing VBA along for the ride would have involved another delay of at least that much or even two years. Not good for the Mac division’s bottom line.

However, the biggest problem Microsoft may be facing now is that, without macro support, maybe Mac users really don’t need Office, even if they exchange documents with the Windows version. That can be accomplished with decent fidelity using Apple’s iWork ’08. Even Track Changes comments are supported in both directions, so it may well be that your editor or publisher will never know you didn’t use Word.

Add that to the arrival of a new beta of OpenOffice for the Mac, ongoing development of Mariner Write, Nisus Writer Pro and Mellel, and the reasons for Office’s existence have been severely reduced over time. In fact, despite the false and persistent claim that the Mac platform doesn’t have a lot of software, when it comes to word processes, you have a rich selection.

If you want to ditch all things Microsoft from your Mac, you can probably do quite well, thank you. That’s something Microsoft should fear, because the loss of VBA and the loss of potential sales may only be the beginning.

When the iTunes Music Store (that’s before they added movies and TV shows) first appeared, the pricing structure was absolutely rigid. Steve Jobs, they said, was obsessive about simplicity, witness the fairly limited Mac lineup since he took over Apple. So it would be now and forever 99 cents per song. When TV shows were added, it was $1.99 per episode.

Sure, there was some flexibility in album pricing, but you get the picture.

However, the entertainment industry, probably caught offguard by the tremendous success of iTunes, wanted more control on their product would be priced. When it came to singles, hits should be more expensive, and older catalog, songs that were no longer in demand, would be cheaper. Certainly one of the key reasons for Apple’s squabble with NBC/Universal was, at least in part, over multi-tier pricing.

However, even Steve Jobs, despite his great charisma and famously sharp negotiating skills, couldn’t hold sway over the entertainment bigwigs forever, and something had to give. The first crack in the dam was the iTunes movie rental program, where you had 30 days to begin viewing a flick, and 24 hours to finish, with a single exception. If you began watching the movie and the self-destruct clock struck, you’d OK a prompt to continue watching to the very end. But you wouldn’t be able to pause the movie without having to rent it all over again.

In general, essentially the same rental policy is prevalent throughout the industry, so Apple really isn’t inconveniencing you any more than any other movie download service. Indeed, I suppose you can call that flexibility, after a fashion. I call it stupid, but that’s just me.

For a brief period of time, DRM-free music was $1.29 per track, but that price was reduced, so everything is the very same 99 cents regardless. When it comes to buying a movie, you pay one price for new releases, usually $14.99 (I don’t know of any exceptions, but I’m being cautious here) and $9.99 for older product.

Then came HBO and its compelling catalog of original programming, which includes “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City.” Again, we have a variable price policy when you buy a single episode. The former is $2.99, and the latter is $1.99. I won’t comment on the relative worth of these two shows, except to suggest that the former is probably more of a cult show, and hence more in demand. But with a movie version of the latter coming to a theater near you this month, I’d think the latter perhaps deserves a similar pricing policy, but then what do I know?

Now that some NBC shows are showing up on iTunes UK in two price categories, you can bet that Apple has begun to face the music and will be following suit in the U.S. very shortly. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised to read a press release about the return of “Heroes” and other popular shows in the very near future.

Of course, it is also true that iTunes recently became the number one music retailer in this country. Their movie and TV catalog is sadly deficient, though, and if Apple has to make a few concessions with entertainment industry executives along the way so that you and I spend a little more money for the titles we want, so be it. Besides, I don’t think most people will mind having to pay different prices for different content. When was the last time you saw flat-rate DVD pricing at your local electronics store? See what I mean?

However, unlike Microsoft, you aren’t seeing more stringent DRM on iTunes, nor do I expect that to happen in our lifetime. In fact, aI fully expect that there will be more DRM-free music available in the very new future; it’s way overdue. That will not, however, happen with movies and TV shows, despite widespread piracy. The industry executives are far too paranoid and do not understand that the public will embrace legitimate media downloads if the restrictions do not seriously inhibit their ability to enjoy their favorites.

I can well believe that Steve Jobs was telling the truth when he said last year that Apple only instituted its FairPlay DRM system as a concession to get the music industry to release their catalogs to iTunes. An industry that is busy suing its customers for alleged copyright infringement isn’t going to relish giving away stuff without restrictions.

In a sense, the entertainment industry created its own monster, and needed Steve Jobs to rescue them from their folly. They have never been able to understand that most people are basically honest, and they do not spend the largest portion of their leisure time trolling for pirated product on peer-to-peer download sites. Sure, a lot of people will, just as you can visit many Third World countries on this planet and find a rich selection of pirated DVDs months before the official versions are released. That situation isn’t going to change, although I can see where taking action against large criminal organizations would help somewhat.

In the end, the industry has to you want to buy their stuff, and that means doing so in a friendly, relaxed atmosphere that gives you a fairly decent amount of freedom to copy to a variety of media and make backups in case the original goes bad.

But right now, they’re probably figuring how to soak you once again when digital versions of The Beatles catalog is released. I mean how many times do they expect you to buy the same stuff, even if the product is terrific? The more the merrier, it seems. They need to finance their fancy cars, yachts and the other accoutrements of an extravagant life style, right?