Humans are strange beasts. I wonder what an alien race might think of us if they come to Earth to observe our society and psychology. Consider how we root for the winner, and then, in an abrupt change of face, fervently hope for their defeat.

So consider Apple’s plight over the years. Despite a loyal fan base, it hasn’t always been so easy to get the press to come along for the ride, except for those who depend on Mac users for all or most of their traffic. Indeed, The Mac Observer had an Apple “death knell” section for years, where they’d recount the latest efforts on the part of the media to declare the company an abject failure.

It’s not as if Apple didn’t help things along. Consider all the missteps they made over the years. Despite having what was undeniably a superior product, a knock-off, better known as Windows, ruled the operating system empire then and now.

This is not to say that the Mac could have achieved total dominance in the same fashion as Apple has today with the iPod. But it wouldn’t be so one-sided a battle if Apple’s executives in those years had a clear-eyed vision for the future and not the failed vision of salespeople whose only concern was this quarter and the next, while innovation took a back seat.

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When you run Safari, the search address bar will give you any search engine, so long as it’s Google. With the iPhone, you can select Yahoo! as an alternate. Sure, you might find it only slightly less convenient simply to visit the search engine of your choice, and add it to Safari’s toolbar.

However, as you know, most people tend to stick with the default settings, be it a browser, a search engine or loads of other options on a Mac or a PC. Certainly that works to Google’s advantage, since it holds such a huge share of the market. It doesn’t hurt that we “Google” something rather than search for it. Being a verb pretty much means that Google will own search for the foreseeable future, but that doesn’t mean that Apple shouldn’t give you some alternatives.

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In the old days of CRT displays, I never, ever, got a perfect product. Except perhaps for the original 13-inch Apple RGB color display, every one of them was defective in some fashion. Now you can call me obsessive/compulsive, or just picky, but my eyes would discern the minor irregularities in screen geometry, where the supposedly rectangular picture would perhaps bend at one corner or another. From then on, my eyes would focus on that singular defect, and it would stick in the back of my mind, ever-present.

Now the era of LCD should have dealt the death-blow to such problems. For the most part, that’s true, but newer problems replaced the geometry defects. From limited viewing angles to imperfect color uniformity, LCDs have their own brand of troubles. Even if colors are right on, there may be dead pixels, but if you have too many of those, or they are in the wrong position on the display, you will usually be able to get a replacement from the dealer or manufacturer.

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No, folks, this isn’t a conspiracy theory, nor do I actually believe Apple’s being especially secretive about the things they do to make you switch from one technology standard to another. But it sometimes takes a few years to comprehend their vision.

Take the decision to embrace USB in 1998 starting with the original iMac. Till then, Apple used several connectivity schemes, such as ADB for a keyboard and mouse, SCSI for such devices as external drives and scanners, and LocalTalk for printers. USB aimed to replace all three, while Ethernet ports continue to do the honors for networking. USB, in fact, was first introduced in 1996, developed by a group of companies that included Compaq, Digital, IBM, Intel, Northern Telecom, and Microsoft. But not Apple.

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