You’ve got to feel great. Apple is on a roll, and Wall Street is predicting a doubling of market share in the next year and then some. It’s been a long time since Macs held more than 5% of the market, but the erosion ended for the most part last year, but the pace is quickening.

For most of you who have used Macs for a while, being recognized as being on the right side of the argument for once may seem a relief. No more excuses. Everyone loves the Mac mini, and Apple is still finding it difficult to keep the things in stock. On average, you can expect to wait a week to get one into your sweaty hands, although some dealers might actually have a few ready to go. You only hope that prospective buyers won’t give up in frustration because they have to get on the waiting list, although a waiting list is, itself, a reason to jump aboard. Why let others have all the fun?

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It’s a known fact that new computers from Apple are often riddled with irritating defects of one sort or another that require trips to the repair shop. You can’t forget the noisy fans found on some of the Mirror Drive Doors or “Wind Tunnel” Power Macs or the iBook logic board repair “extension program,” which addresses problems with models sold between 2001 and 2003.

Understand that Apple still has the best product reliability rating in that Consumer Reports reader survey, which means Dell, Gateway, HP and all the rest are worse; sometimes much worse. Are we immersed in a sea of product defects?

No, I won’t go there. I’m encouraged, though, by the fact that there haven’t been too many reports of issues with the Mac mini. This is the computer that Apple can’t afford to get wrong, because it will serve as the initial introduction to the Mac for many people. First impressions mean a lot. Fortunately, issues reported with the Mac mini, except for an occasional problem involving clicking hard drives, have been relatively few. Of course it’s only two months since the first products hit the store shelves. It’s always possible that some unexpected defects will rear their ugly heads in the near future, but I prefer to take an optimistic approach.

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To some extent, it appears to be business as usual at your favorite Mac rumor sites, despite the legal skirmishing over Apple’s lawsuits. But is the information becoming less reliable? It’s not as if you could always depend on what you read about future Apple products. Some of the stories have been shown to be downright wrong. But you have to wonder why those alleged anonymous sources would continue to feed information knowing Apple was breathing down their backs.

If you read the articles at AppleInsider and Think Secret on a fairly regular basis, you’d think nothing has changed. For example, it correctly reported that Apple would acquire a small Canadian software publisher, Schema Software, several days before the transaction was officially announced. There are also stories about possible updates to Apple’s professional audio and video applications and the state of development of Tiger.

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Those of us who reside in the Mac universe have had a relative freedom from computer viruses and other malware. Sure, we had a few dozen viruses back in the days of the Classic Mac OS, but since Mac OS X came about, the worst we’ve seen were proofs of concept. In other words, the potential vulnerability can be duplicated in the laboratory, but real infections have yet to occur.

So why do they have tens of thousands of viruses on the Windows platform, plus an unknown number of spyware outbreaks? Why isn’t the Mac OS subject to similar invasions to our serenity? Well, the common theory, voiced unfortunately by some makers of virus protection software in a recent ZDNet article, can best be summarized as safety due to obscurity. Since the Mac has less than a three percent share of the current PC market, virus authors simply aren’t attracted to the platform. As the Mac becomes more popular, due to the Mac mini, the iPod halo effect or whatever, you can bet we’ll have to arm ourselves with software to protect us all from the same ills that plague Windows users.

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