There, I’ve said it! The ultimate blasphemy, and indeed the millions of people who are busy saving their pennies for a new iPhone will probably think I’m crazy even to suggest such a thing. Indeed, I plead guilty, but I also think there’s a lot to be said for this point of view, without denigrating the quality of Apple’s cultural icon in-the-making.

First, of course, there’s the huge investment. No, not the initial $499 or $599 purchase price. That’s easily gobbled up by your credit card. Rather, I’m talking about the two-year commitment to AT&T for a calling and data plan. All told, it adds up to an average investment of $2,000. It could be less if you buy the basic plan, or a lot more if you buy several iPhones or just need huge buckets of minutes.

Yes, AT&T has a monthly Go Phone plan, where you pay for each month’s service in advance. It costs a little more, of course, and there is no long-term contract or early termination fee to worry about. But if you want to continue to use your iPhone, you’ll still continue to pay, so this alternative is best left to the credit-challenged.

But even if the initial purchase price and monthly bill for your iPhone is not wearing you down, you really want to consider just what you expect to accomplish with your phone. As you’ve no doubt heard, even though it lacks a few features, the iPhone does a little bit of everything, and is more of a tiny computer than just a wireless phone. It’s also an iPod, a handheld organizer and a tiny Internet appliance.

I bet you could even write a book on it, though I can see where typing speeds on that touch screen will quickly bog you down if you’re used to doing it the old fashioned way.

So let’s start with the iPod. Do you have one now, and do you often take it with you when you travel? Having that gadget and a wireless phone in one handy device surely makes sense, except, of course, for the iPhone’s 8GB storage limit and the possible need to reduce the size of your on-the-go playlist.

Don’t have an iPod or a music player of any sort? Well, what about the other features that are contained in an iPhone? Do you really need to take a gadget that helps you organize your life with you? Can you survive without having Internet access at your beck and call wherever you are?

Indeed, can you wait until you get to your home or office to check your stuff?

I just wonder how we all survived before the personal computer was invented. It must have been a pretty shallow lifestyle to have to use a pen, pencil or typewriter to write letters, and a postage stamp to send them. How did you ever avoid the instant gratification of having messages delivered to their recipients within minutes, rather than days or weeks? And don’t get me started about instant messaging.

All right, I’m not here to change your lifestyle. I just want to put things in perspective before you order your new iPhone. Yes, it may be worth every penny Apple charges for it, but do you need what it offers?

Now this is something I’ve been wrestling with for months. My mobile phone, a simple LG VX8600, derived from the LG Chocolate, does have various contact management tools, though they’re buried in a barrage of arcane menus with awkward operational steps. But the only contacts I store are the ones for friends and family; in other words, the phone numbers that I am apt to use frequently. It’s certainly not worth storing a contact that I’ll seldom use.

My son, Grayson, however, has close to 100 contacts in his wireless phone, but that’s also his one and only phone. As with lots of young people these days, he doesn’t have a landline and probably will never get one.

But there is another factor at work for me. You see, I’m constantly calling my wife, Barbara, about email when I’m on the road. If I travel for any extended period of time, I pop my 17-inch MacBook Pro in its case and store it in the trunk. I have a Verizon Wireless Internet card, so I can connect in most locales even when a Wi-Fi hotspot isn’t handy.

Now, if I had an iPhone, I wouldn’t stop and check my email every few minutes, though I can see the possibility of casually glancing at the email menu at a traffic light, or writing a response while waiting for lunch or dinner to be served at a restaurant. Oh yes, that’s a little rude isn’t it?

In perusing the iPhone’s electronic manual, I see that it also mates well with a car’s Bluetooth feature. That makes it a little more tempting. All right, I don’t take my iPod with me very often, but being able to get online and stay in touch has its attractions. Maybe I should start saving my pennies after all.

There are troubling signals in the wind about the possible fates of the 17-inch iMac and the Mac mini. None of this has been confirmed, of course, but when it seems that a product is not getting much promotion, you have to wonder whether it’s destined for the closeout rack.

When it comes to the mini, I suppose its obituary has been written and rewritten for a while now. You don’t hear much about it, and it’s been a while since the product line was updated. Even the recent speed bump for the MacBook, with which it shares many internals, didn’t migrate to the Mac mini.

Now it may just be that Apple has lost interest in building products below the magic thousand dollar plateau, simply because sales are tepid. More profits are to be made with more expensive gear, and it’s certainly true that Apple’s sales growth is exceeding that of the PC market as a whole. Here in the U.S., for example, Apple’s note-book share is now over 14% in the retail chain, even though the cheapest MacBook is $1,099.

So in that respect, Apple isn’t being hurt by lower-cost products. Or maybe they are, but not sufficient to warrant price cuts or new entry-level models.

Now in retrospect, I wonder if Apple didn’t grudgingly enter the cheap PC arena. They had been urged to do so for so long, particularly by tech pundits who claimed that Apple couldn’t succeed if it didn’t have something in its product lineup that had a price close to that of a basic Dell or E-Machines.

However, the Mac mini is not something you’d casually dismiss. True, it has some serious design shortcomings, such as the convoluted process of opening the case and adding memory, which was made even more complicated on the Intel-based model. But that’s not something that couldn’t be addressed in a more carefully considered redesign.

Besides, the average Mac mini user is probably not going to upgrade memory after the initial purchase, so that annoying task can be left to the dealer.

In fact, I know several people who swear by their Mac minis. They upgraded from much older Macs, so the mini’s apparent performance shortcomings do not exist for them. What they have is a simple, reliable personal computer that just gets out of the way and allows them to concentrate on getting their work done. Sure, it has integrated graphics, but folks who aren’t into gaming may not care, because the mini is perfectly capable of handling digital video with aplomb, particularly if you max out the memory and didn’t buy the original single-core Intel model.

I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but some mini owners have even set up their computers to serve duty as Web servers. They may seem highly underpowered for such chores, but if you don’t saddle the sites with high-bandwidth multimedia content, they are probably powerful enough to serve up less-demanding content.

But if sales haven’t otherwise taken off, I can see the wisdom of discontinuing the Mac mini. That is, unless Apple really does have an upgrade in mind, and no, I’m not talking about the Apple TV. It does seem interesting, though, that Apple TV and the new AirPort Extreme base station both have case designs based on the mini. So Apple isn’t abandoning that form factor. Maybe they’ll surprise us yet!

Then there’s the claim that the 17-inch iMac will be gone when that model gets its next upgrade. When will that happen? Well, I can see where Apple isn’t inclined to want to upstage the iPhone, so you probably won’t see anything for another week or two, though I could be wrong. However, such an upgrade would not come later than the middle of August, the better to guarantee sales to students before classes begin, although we’re well into the school year here in Arizona by then.

Now if the upgraded 20-inch iMac’s price were reduced from its present $1,499 to $1,099, you might not miss the 17-inch version all that much, even though its starting price was $100 cheaper. Also, the slim, all-in-one style doesn’t seem to come into its own until you migrate to the 20 inches. The 17-inch model’s screen seems overpowered by the vast white space beneath it.

As I said, I have no special insights into Apple’s product plans, nor do I pretend to be a marketing expert. But I do believe that folks who don’t have a lot to spend on a new computer should be able to buy a Mac without stretching their bank accounts or credit cards beyond their limits.

The best way to begin this commentary is to refer to a recent report that Microsoft may be spending up to $1.15 billion to fix defective Xbox 360s. Now this particular tale of woe came and went with nary a question from the so-called tech-savvy pundits.

When you look at the story just a little more carefully, though, you’ll find that this is one huge issue, and if Apple’s name was in the story rather than Microsoft, it would spark front-page stories about a beleaguered company really fast.

Consider what this actually means. If you take Microsoft at face value, that it has shipped close to 11.6 million units since the Xbox 360 was first released, they’re talking of taking a nearly $100 charge against each and every one. Since the prices of the 360 range from $299 to $479, this amounts to one huge write-down. This is a story that ought to be making headlines, and yet it seems to be relegated largely to a middle- or back-page presentation.

Now think, for a moment, if Apple had allocated up to $100 for repairs on every iPod it had sold since the product was first introduced. But wait! It doesn’t have to be an iPod. What about AirPort base stations, or iBooks? The list goes on and on, and you can bet that any story covering any of these models would garner major coverage all over the world!

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

I have to tell you that I’ve purchased quite a few Macs for myself over the years. No, I didn’t own the original compact models, although I used them at various workplaces in those days. I actually waited several years before bringing one home with me, and that was a IIcx in 1989, along with the famous LaserWriter IINT and the 12-inch Apple color display.

Indeed, I thought I was in computing heaven in those days; that is, until I encountered my first genuine Mac virus a short time later, and had to erase and reinstall everything to set things right. So anyone who believes that Macs are immune to viruses is living in an alternate universe. We’ve just been lucky with Mac OS X; that’s all.

I might have had otherwise fond memories of that computer had I not discovered the IIci a few months later. Well, no sense lusting after something I couldn’t acquire. I made a deal with my employer to have one sent my way the next time they ordered new equipment, at the same time selling my IIcx to some lucky soul who never owned a personal computer before.

Over the years, I did own some Macs that were notable in terms of performance or being the first of their kind. I was particularly pleased with the Quadra 800. No, not upgrading memory, which was an utterly painful process owing to some incredibly foolish design decisions. But it was fast and stable and, in that respect, had an advantage over the flaky if innovative Quadra 840AV, which incorporated technology that Apple never, ever, used again. Thank heavens!

The next Mac I purchased was one of the first PowerPC models, the 8100/80. It used the same case as the Quadra 800, but I was otherwise disappointed. Performance actually seemed worse, partly because Apple had not completely moved its operating system to the PowerPC platform, so a great deal ran sluggishly under emulation. That, and the lack of native software, left me with an expensive box that was no faster than the IIci. It took a couple of years for things to sort themselves out.

If you think dealing with Rosetta emulation on an Intel-based Mac seemed agonizing, let me tell you that this particular processor migration was done with a lot more finesse, not to mention months ahead of schedule, of course. And, over time, Rosetta has gotten better and better in the various Tiger updates, as the MacIntels have gotten faster. There will be a magical point of convergence before long where emulation will ultimately exceed the performance of the real thing.

Today, my favorite Mac is probably my 17-inch MacBook Pro. I always thought Mac note-books were notoriously underpowered, compared to desktop computers. Application launches were almost always terribly slow, and the simple things that seemed to take seconds on a G4 or G5 desktop cause a PowerBook to protest, even if it was maxed out with memory.

Not so with the MacBook Pro, and you can well understand why two-thirds of all new Macs sold are note-books and Apple garners over 14% of the U.S. retail market in this category.

As you may realize once you spend a long amount of face time with these babies, an Intel-based Mac note-book will match and often exceed the performance of almost any G5 you can name. Why? Well, it does seem that Tiger was meant to run on the Intel processor all along. Take the oft-criticized Finder, for example. It isn’t perfect, but seems less prone to hangups on the Intel platform.

The most important thing to me, however, is that I no longer feel I’m giving up a substantial amount of performance on a Mac note-book. No, I’m not about to give up on desktop computers, as so many of you have done. Although I’ve finally become accustomed to a note-book keyboard and trackpad, it’s still far from perfect. I much prefer that Microsoft Comfort Keyboard that graces my desktop and the accompanying wireless mouse that seems to fit my right hand like a glove.

Sure, I can use those input devices on a note-book too, but that would present an awkward situation, having to sit in bed with added appendages. That works against the purpose of having a slim, trim computer at my beck and call, don’t you think?

Some day, though, I imagine there will be no such thing as a desktop computer. You’ll have one that’s probably no larger than today’s iPhone, and it’ll probably respond seemlessly to voice commands. But that’s then and this is now.