The other day I was watching the talking heads on a certain cable TV news network, when I noticed that their note-books all had Apple logos on them. Funny thing, the lids seemed to be dark-colored, almost black, which doesn’t mean they were using ancient Macs. Maybe they only rated MacBooks rather than MacBook Pros, or the set designers dictated the selection.

In any case, what this brings to light again and again is that, when you see a distinctive-looking computer on a TV show or a movie, it’s most likely a Mac. Sure, Dell has some presence in this area, but would you even give their PCs a second glance, or would they just fade into the scenery? Maybe Dell should be giving greater emphasis to their Alienware brand.

Now maybe the producers don’t want their computers to stand out, and I can’t say that the heroes always get Macs and the villains all get PCs, but Apple has always done far better in product placement. In fact, I sometimes wonder if long-suffering tech journalists sometimes get second-class status as a result when they want products to review, except for a few high-profile tech writers you and I both know about.

All of this reminds me of those famous Avis car rental ads, where they tell you they try harder because they are number two. It doesn’t matter where they are situated in the marketplace these days, the concept remains all so true.

Basically the PC market, although fractured with lots of players,  generally presents itself as a somewhat cohesive if mediocre whole. You traverse the shelves at, say, a Best Buy and attempt to find the PC you want and you have to admit they all look pretty much the same. I suppose that’s true with all so-called commodity products these days. I mean, I really can’t separate a Samsung from a Sony high definition TV unless I look real close. You could probably buy either, depending on your particular needs, and get something that performs well and lasts a long time.

In the PC market, however, the products aren’t really commodities, even if so many look and work the same. They remain complicated and temperamental beasts, apt to fail in unexpected ways at the most inopportune times. This isn’t to say that Macs can’t be flaky too, but usually in more predictable ways and certainly not as often.

However, for the PC market as a whole, the Microsoft hegemony has, for the most part, erased much of the distinctive character that once typified the industry.

Now, to some extent, that may be a good thing for a business. A large firm, for example, will buy hundreds or thousands of PCs as part of a single order. They will likely make their selections on specs alone from one of several competing vendors, and they are going to want their IT staff to be able to integrate those PCs seamlessly into the corporate environment. So if one office has a Dell and the next an HP, it won’t make a difference because both have Intel Core 2 Duo processors with the same speed, RAM allotment and hard drive configurations.

That, of course, is at loggerheads with Apple’s approach, which is to empower the individual to “Think Different.” That’s why most Macs go into the hands of consumers, or content creators. It also means, of course, that a company’s management might also buy Macs to stand apart from the regular, ordinary worker bees.

Certainly a Mac is more than just a pretty face, however, although having a feeling of pride when you work on one is a good thing. The fact that they are, in large part, more predictable and productive tools than a Windows PC means that a company’s production expenses may actually go down, which certainly doesn’t hurt in a shaky economic climate.

Now maybe this doesn’t count for a lot if you spend your workday compiling medical records or preparing legal briefs. Even then, however, you don’t want to have to stop work in the rush of a deadline because your computer is crashing, and you can’t finish the final two paragraphs that are needed to make that court filing in the next hour.

Well, it may keep the IT people busy trying to figure out what went wrong remotely or in a hands-on session, and maybe it will give you a little time to rest and reflect before your tasks resume. On the other hand, why put up with that nonsense in the first place?

Apple’s distinctiveness in style and function shows you don’t have to. I’m sure this isn’t lost on Microsoft, who clearly didn’t cut the price of Windows Vista because it was the success they claimed it was.

Every time I read an article about how Apple is doing at any particular point in time, finding a consensus is near to impossible.

One so-called analyst will tell you how Apple’s sales are exceeding expectations and they are poised for a blow-out quarter, while the next will take what appears to be the same set of data and present precisely the reverse conclusion.

The stock market, of course, walks the proverbial tightrope. Even the merest suggestion of bad news is sufficient to send a stock tumbling, although Apple seems to garner a higher level of extreme reactions than most companies.

Even the suggestion that far too many iPhones had not been activated was sufficient to create the unfounded impression that boxes and boxes were left unsold in warehouses and in dealer storerooms. None of this was ever confirmed with any verifiable information, but it was sufficient to cause panic.

Then came the contrary point of view that the numbers were accurate, except that they had been unlocked and resold overseas in regions where there was no official iPhone support. And certainly a fair number are being used here with T-Mobile, the “other” GSM wireless service.

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

Consider that, relatively speaking, Apple’s stock has been down in the dumps of late. A lot of that isn’t due to any particularly bad news, just the illusion that bad news is on its way.

Take the iPhone. Now, although this continues to be misquoted and misrepresented over and over again, Apple has said that it hopes to reach the 10 million unit sales milestone by the end of 2008. That’s not saying there will be 10 million sales this year; that’s the total sales since the product was first introduced in the summer of 2007. I just want to get that distinction out of the way before the wrong version is repeated all over again.

Well, Apple’s chief operating officer, Tim Cook, took the bull by the horns at the Goldman Sachs Investment Symposium this week and reiterated Apple’s promise to reach the 10 million sales goal by the end of this year. Now this is no different from what Cook and other Apple executives have said all along. Unfortunately, Apple, though it usually meets its promises or comes pretty close these days, is still regarded with supreme suspicion, while Microsoft’s fanciful claims about products that are late, crippled or never reach the light of day, are usually accepted as gospel.

What a strange world we live in.

On the other hand, with the stock price dipping, Cook had to say something, and simply reiterating the promise was sufficient to drive that price point upward all over again. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’ll reach $200 per share anytime soon, but if you’ve invested a ton of money in the company, you have to be pleased that things are finally improving at a decent clip.

What Apple discovered here is that, when the naysayers get out of control, they have to act fast to control the fallout before pundits decide to make up their own fantasies about what’s really going on.

A recent example is the case of the missing iPhones, where between one million and one-point-four million were somehow not accounted for by known activations. It doesn’t matter that the higher figure originated in the imaginative mind of one analyst. It was repeated over and over again, took a life of its own, and people started wondering if there were tons of boxes of unsold iPhones catching dust at warehouses and in dealer stock rooms.

I wasn’t surprised to learn they were just plain wrong, although it’s definitely true that a fairly large number of iPhones were unlocked and used around the world with wireless companies that had no agreements with Apple and thus didn’t officially support the product.

If you go on eBay at any time of the day, you’ll still find lots of these phones available, often at prices above list, simply because they remain in such high demand. Then again, if you want to save some money and just buy a refurbished model through authorized channels, good luck. Apple rarely has them in stock, and when they do, it seems they disappear from the price lists real quickly. No, I’m not just guessing. When I was considering whether to buy an iPhone, I checked those lists several times a day for a couple of weeks, and finally simply decided to bite the bullet and get a new one at the nearest AT&T company store.

In case you haven’t heard, next week Apple will take the wraps off its long-awaited iPhone SDK. It’s widely believed that they were dragged kicking and screaming into creating a method for third-party developers to deliver officially-sanctioned products that supported all of most of the product’s features.

Now maybe that was true. But Steve Jobs said even before the iPhone came out that they were looking into ways to deliver an SDK while still providing acceptable levels of security. When he announced a Web-based solution at WWDC, the skeptics pronounced it a bad solution, forgetting the original promise entirely.

So did the proliferation of jailbreaking utilities finally force Apple to do another round of damage control and change its ways? I don’t think so. These authorized iPhone applications will most likely be distributed and installed by iTunes. Apple will get their cut off the top, so it’s going to be a cash cow for them. It strains logic to think they don’t want to mine every possible iPhone revenue stream. That’s definitely NOT their DNA.

However, Apple’s penchant for event marketing and keeping things close to its vest otherwise can sometimes be a bad thing. When journalists and personal bloggers don’t get the answers they seek, they speculate, and sometimes that speculation is passed off as fact and repeated around the globe as if it’s gospel.

So, from time to time, Apple needs to pick up the accumulated garbage and show what’s true and what isn’t. That usually settles things down for a while.

At least until the next unconfirmed rumor is upon us.

There are some people who have Mac hardware collections that almost remind you of mini museums. I recall visiting a client some years back, a plumbing contractor, who was utterly immersed in vintage Macs. When I checked out his storage garage, it’s perfectly true that most of the storage shelves contained the expected pipes, washers and other accouterments of that business.

However, one wide storage cabinet, several rows deep, contained nothing but Macs, all carefully preserved in a clear plastic wrap. As I traversed the collection, I saw a selection of early models, the compact versions that included the original Macintosh 128K that debuted in 1984.

More to the point, their owner said each had been delicately cleaned and restored to full operation, almost as if they were essentially brand new. Certainly getting spare parts was no great chore, as you can generally acquire them online fairly easily and inexpensively, but it’s not as if I felt the need to put those claims to the test. I was willing to take him at his word.

Now it’s also true that not all those ancient Macs are consigned to permanent shelf duty. Some actually continue to run in homes and businesses. During the time when all my Macs had long-since migrated to Mac OS X in 2002, I visited one client, a semi-retired interior decorator, who still depended on her IIci, bought new in 1990, to run her business. No she didn’t go online, nor see the need to do so. Her phone and her fax machine were sufficient for her particular workflow.

Finally, she bought an old iMac from me, a 1999 pear-shaped model, but only used it as the second computer. To her the IIci remained a trusted friend. With careful maintenance, it seemed as good as new.

She might seem an anomaly in an era where you will pass off an electronics device after a couple of years to a child, a religious institution or perhaps the recycling plant. But certainly keeping aging gear on hand is common for car enthusiasts. Some of you have exquisitely-maintained Studebakers and even Ford Edsels in your garage, and I see them purring along the highways from time to time.

But maintaining an old car and keeping it driveable is not always a simple or affordable task, and if you’re not mechanically inclined, you have to have an up close and personal relationship with a reliable repair shop to keep the engine, transmission and other components efficiently purring away after the warranty is ancient history.

When it comes to a personal computer, keeping the internals dust free, and perhaps replacing  a hard drive or an errant power supply every few years ought to be sufficient as far as the hardware goes. Drives can always be wiped and software reinstalled, to convey a like-new veneer.

However, the typical Windows PC, unless situated in a carefully maintained business environment, is pretty much ready for the trash heap in two or three years. Besides, the new one you buy looks pretty much like the old model, only with speedier electronics and perhaps Windows Vista. Even then, an extraordinary number of PC users are simply downgrading to XP, which was first released in late 2001. Talk about new not being better.

With Macs, Apple’s product lines have historically undergone major design changes at least every few years, and each design iteration is distinctive and readily identified from its predecessor. Yes, there may be updates within a model family with only minor color and/or exterior changes — such as the endless array of G4 desktops — but you surely know what a Power Mac 9500 looks like; no question about it.

More to the point, a Mac isn’t so easy to retire. My son, for example, will likely see a replacement for his four-year-old PowerBook G4 when he graduates in May. Well, maybe I shouldn’t mention that in public, but he has the general idea. However, despite getting rough use over the years, and having a couple of surface dents to show for it, it runs like a fine-tuned watch.

So he will be left to consider whether he wants to just keep it as a spare, sell it, or just have it join the family network for occasional server duty. On the other hand, I’m not really married to my older Macs. Yes, I’m a pack rat in some ways, but I don’t have the space to store outdated (never obsolete) gear, nor the time to set them up for auxiliary duty of one sort or another.

When I buy a new Mac, however, I do look with some regret upon retiring the older model. I can understand how so many of you become attached to them and are loathe to cast them out. That’s something Microsoft and its PC partners — with a precious few high-end exceptions such as Alienware — have never figured out.