Every press release that emerges from Apple Inc. these days includes the following tag line: “Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh.”

At no time do they claim that they actually invented the first personal computer, although the Apple II made the PC affordable and accessible to a large number of people. I gather Microsoft’s Bill Gates would rather have you believe that his company was responsible for certain inventions in the industry, such as the mouse. But that is strictly an unsupported claim.

So how and where did Apple actually innovate? Well, certainly there were attempts to develop a graphical user interface before the first Lisa and then Macintosh appeared. The computer mouse was actually invented in the 1960s, and the first iteration was encased in wood.

There is an urban legend that Apple executives when to Xerox’s famous Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s, saw what they were doing with user interfaces, and judiciously “borrowed” what they wanted to use for their own products. In fact, they paid Xerox for the rights to use certain technology.

Where Apple innovated here was to meld the previous work of different developers into a cohesive whole, and make it far more user friendly than most any personal computer up till that time. That is the main focal point of Apple’s magic.

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

Every time you install an application with a traditional installer under Mac OS X, you have to enter your user password first, unless, of course, the installer has no provision for that. And most do.

When you first run an application that you download from the Internet, Leopard delivers another warning, explaining it is a downloaded file, by which browser and when. You can click Open right now, or Cancel, and try again later. Once you accept the launch request, the prompts go away forever.

Now both warning messages are supposed to be good things. The first allows only someone with administrator privileges to install applications. The theory being that unwanted or unauthorized software will not be allowed to pollute your Mac’s hard drive. The second affects the actual application, which usually comes in a disk image file, and again you can rethink your decision whether its something you want to use or not.

With Windows Vista, you may find yourself inundated with “Cancel” or “Allow” prompts when you perform various tasks on your PC. Many of you who have worked with Vista consider the warnings excessive, and it formed the basis of a cute Mac Versus PC TV spot from Apple.

However, on the Windows side of the fence, you can, at least, turn off the prompts if you tire of them. From the standpoint of your equanimity, I suppose Microsoft has the edge here for those of you who feel you’d simply rather not be annoyed so often.

On the other hand, both Apple and Microsoft are trying to save you from yourselves, and it’s hard to criticize their good intentions. With Vista, Microsoft touts superior immunity to malware, and added those prompts so you have an opportunity to reconsider what you’re doing in case it will only deliver more system grief for you. The problem here, though, is that those Windows prompts often mention arcane files and processes, and I challenge anyone but a devoted power user to figure out what they all really mean.

The real danger, though, is that you simply get so accustomed to the warnings that you’ll just ignore their meaning, and run the installer or application without thinking of the potential consequences of your almost subconscious behavior. Sure, you can say that, for now at least, most or all of the potential viral infections come from the Windows platform, but Apple doesn’t supply security patches on a regular basis for no reason. They are designed to plug security leaks as quickly as possible, so Internet criminals won’t find ways to exploit them on a massive scale.

Indeed, I don’t want to be alarmist, but it is inevitable that more and more of those security issues will be exploited on a wide scale, and they might erupt before malware protection software publishers or Apple can react.

I suppose Apple could find a way to turn off its warning notices, at least for opening an application you downloaded from the Internet. This can’t be done when you run that installer, unless you engage root access, which is something that only a very careful power user ought to consider. It may even be possible to fiddle with something in the Terminal to disengage such warnings, but that, also, is a bad idea.

So is there a better way for Apple to protect you against yourself? Maybe, maybe not, but I think a little better user education is called for here. The worst possible thing is for you to grow so accustomed to accepting a process, that you inadvertently place yourself in trouble as a result.

This is particularly true with files you download from the Internet. Now I don’t know about you, but I often download stuff I want to try out later, and then promptly forget about the files. Maybe a few weeks later, as I’m combing my hard drive in search of stuff to trash, I come across something I want to check out further, so I double click the icon.

However, when the prompt appears, I stop and take the time to read what it says, just so I can take stock of what I’m about to do. I suggest you do the same. Don’t just react. Count to ten and read the message before you put a process into motion you didn’t really want. And just clicking “Cancel” to give you more time to reconsider your actions isn’t a bad thing.

Year after year, I’ve been battling the eternal falsehood that Macs cost more than similarly-priced Windows hardware. This ongoing war rages long and and hard, but at the end of the day, I believe I win the argument on the basis of a simple and supremely logical method of comparison: You have to match the features of the competing computers as closely as possible.

That, of course, raises the hackles of many of you, because you still feel Macs are somehow overpriced. Why? Well, because you would like to be able to buy a stripped version without some of the frills that you may not need, such as the Web cam on the iMac and note-books, plus bundled AirPort and Bluetooth.

I suppose that makes a whole lot of sense for a business that buys thousands of boxes at a clip, and needs to keep the prices as low as possible. Therefore, they don’t want to equip those boxes with extra stuff they don’t need. But that’s not the sandbox Apple plays in, and they have indicated time and time again they aren’t going to change.

You see, bundling all the extra goodies as standard equipment simplifies production, since there are fewer possible variations in a build-to-order configuration. That allows Apple to buy larger quantities of the parts they need, so they can offer good prices and still make a boatload of money on them.

Besides, I think that most of you appreciate having a computer that has much of what you need preinstalled, so you just have to turn it on and get to work, other than to add the third-party software you need. And the Migration Assistant that’s part of the standard setup routine makes moving your old stuff to your new Mac pretty simple — although it’s rather more complicated when you switch from a PC.

Now with the release of a new Mac Pro, the question of price comparisons rears its ugly head again. You see, the standard configuration, with a pair of 2.8GHz quad-core Intel Xeons, costs $2,799, $300 more than model it replaces. On the surface, that means a price increase. Sure, you can custom order a version with a single quad-core processor at $2,299, but that’s $100 more than the former entry-level option.

However, as I explained in yesterday’s commentary, Apple really hasn’t increased its prices if you look at the sometimes ephemeral value equation. You see, standard RAM is now 2GB, compared to 1GB previously, and that, at Apple’s inflated pricing structure, already represents a fair savings. The hard drive is now 320GB, compared to 250GB previously, but I’d expect that prices on such components are down sufficiently to make it a wash. And lets not overlook the fact that Bluetooth is now standard.

What’s more, the updated Mac Pros, with the Harpertown or “Penryn” chips, are up to twice as fast as the previous models, partly the result of supporting a faster system bus, and having larger onboard caches. But benchmarks can be misleading and, in fact, are so dependent on the application and the functions that this difference might not be significant to you in real world use. Both computers are plenty fast.

So here we have a situation where there’s a modest increase in prices, but when you compare the hardware, it’s actually the equivalent of a price reduction. That can be mighty confusing, and I’ve already read some reports from Mac sites where they succumb to the illusion of a costlier product. I think I’ve made my case pretty clear, however.

However, whether or not the Mac Pro is a better value still raises the question of how many Mac users need one, and how many of you can get by with an iMac. More to the point, there’s still a huge product gap in Apple’s desktop Mac lineup.

I can surely see where Apple is coming from here. Two thirds of all Macs sold are note-books, so there’s not a whole lot of incentive to develop additional desktops. Maybe they feel that the Mac mini fulfills the need for an affordable version, but it’s so bare bones that I can see where a lot of you prefer something that is more powerful, and then you may have to buy hardware more than you need.

My own preference for such a situation would be something I’ve long advocated, and that’s the headless iMac. Call it a minitower, with the note-book-based guts of the iMac, but without the display. Add to that two high-performance PCI slots, four RAM slots, but it would be otherwise identical to the all-in-one model to which it’s related.

The price for such a box would probably come in at $899 or $999 for a basic configuration. It may cannibalize some iMac sales, but it would more likely give the faltering Mac mini a long-deserved burial. Or perhaps Apple could knock $100 or more from the Mac mini’s price and keep it in the lineup, or would a revised Apple TV foot the bill?

That, my friends, also raises the possibility for another product announcement at the Macworld Expo next week, but can you really call this a prediction?

I’m sure many of you were blindsided when Apple quietly upgraded the Mac Pro and the Xserve to use the new Intel “Harpertown” Xeon chips, code-named Penryn. Now it’s perfectly clear that this is a worthwhile upgrade. The new chips are not only faster, but cooler running, consuming less power.

So those of you with environmental concerns are apt to appreciate the change, and content creators will lust after the promise of greatly improved performance. There’s also hope that more applications will be able to benefit from double quad-cores, partly as the result of the enhanced multithreading support under Leopard. In addition, the new Intel Penryn chips, as they are also known, incorporate extra high-powered hooks for developers to tap into and enhance performance even further.

However, you’d expect a product promising twice the performance of the previous model would get something more than a press release, some front-page emphasis on Apple’s site and a few briefings from Apple’s PR and product management crew. After all, at one time, professional desktops were Apple’s top sellers, and it if wasn’t for content creators, the company would probably have never survived the hard times of the last decade.

Now to be perfectly fair, not introducing a Mac Pro and an Xserve at a Macworld Expo might make a lot of sense. After all, that’s largely a consumer-oriented event, even though professional-grade applications and peripherals will be on display.

Apple has used a WWDC event to reveal new professional hardware, but that means six or seven months delay, which makes even less sense, since the product is available right now.

In large part, you can expect Steve Jobs to talk strictly to consumers at his Macworld Expo keynote next week. I’ve already weighed in on what I expect to see — no doubt most of it is way off-base — and it’s all largely consumer-oriented, except, perhaps for faster MacBook Pros and that highly-anticipated thin and light note-book.

Sure, the iPhone is often used by businesses. But, again, it was designed for regular consumers, not business owners, although a large number of the latter have bought them and are telling the IT people in their companies to figure a way to make the iPhone work with the corporate email systems. That is, of course, Apple’s back door approach to penetrating the often-inscrutable enterprise.

But where does that leave such products as the Mac Pro and the Xserve? Is there any possibility that they will gain less and less emphasis over time and eventually disappear? I suppose you could speculate that way, suggesting that higher-end iMacs and MacBook Pros will fill the gap, but they won’t. Not now, not ever.

In fact, I very much object to any suggestion that Apple would ever desert its core user base of content creators. After all, professional Mac desktops are involved more and more in editing films and creating special effects. Scientific institutions of all sorts use them to perform the intense calculations required for cutting-edge medications, quantum physics and other research purposes.

Even graphic artists who exist in the Adobe Photoshop, InDesign or QuarkXPress environments prefer to run those applications on Macs. That’s true even though there are Windows versions of all three and many of the other creative software they use.

So why are the new professional models getting such low-key introductions? Well, for one thing, the people who buy these products are not apt to depend on cute TV spots and clever print ads to make their purchase decisions. If they are already Mac users, they will simply upgrade at the appropriate time, when their current hardware is no longer suitable for the tasks at hand.

When it comes to Windows switchers, believe it or not, Apple continues to price its professional computers aggressively. You saw that when the Mac Pro first came out, when it was over $1,000 cheaper than a comparably-equipped Dell workstation. Sure, Apple overprices its RAM, but nobody forces you to buy the Apple brand, which is probably sourced from the very same companies, such as Crucial, that sell direct to dealers or the end-user.

Also, take a look at the bottom line. Every single Mac Pro or Xserve delivers big profits to Apple. When a customer custom configures a special version with a different set of processors, hard drives and high-end graphic cards, profits soar into the stratosphere. In the end, for multinational corporations, it’s still all about the money. And so long as Apple can make a bundle on high-end Macs, they will never go away.