On the surface, Apple has a fairly complete line of products. If you want a relatively inexpensive notebook, for example, you spring for the MacBook, although some might not consider it so cheap. The MacBook Pro covers the rest of the line, but there are some who might crave for the really thin and light notebooks that come, say, with the Sony label on them.

When it comes to a professional desktop, right now the choice is to spend a lot of money, or compromise. And, yes, today, two thousand dollars is a hefty figure to ask of a customer to pay when they see all those ads about cheap PC boxes from Dell for just $399.

Of course, there are all those comparisons that demonstrate that the Mac and the PC are similarly priced when you assemble all the appropriate options on the latter to match the former. And there’s certainly evidence that Dell wants to move you quickly up the line so its profit margins will increase. Things aren’t so go at Dell these days.

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Sometimes I put up a headline mostly for the entertainment value, but I’m fairly serious about this one. Mac OS X needs a fair amount of fixing, and a few hundred of those ahead of a few hundred bits of eye candy might be just the ticket.

Now, I can imagine that many of you are drawing up your list of hopes and expectations ahead of the introduction of Mac OS 10.5 Leopard at Apple’s WWDC on August 7. I know I plan to be in the press box at the appointed time, and if we can get a good wireless Internet connection, I have hopes we’ll be able to post updates here as the keynote progresses. But don’t depend on that; we’ll know how the connection rates at the appointed hour and not before.

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It’s not uncommon for a PC user to taunt Mac users over the relative inability to customize their computers, except in a limited fashion. After all, you can build a PC from scratch, if you have the free time, a little cash and endless amounts of patience.

So, for example, you can go online and choose the parts you need from any of a number of vendors. Buy your own case, power supply, logic board, processor, graphics card, hard drive, optical drive and the rest of the pack. In a long evening, you might even get something that works. Oh yes, don’t forget the OEM copy of Windows XP, unless you prefer to give Linux a whirl. I won’t dwell on the possibility of getting a copy of Windows through less-than-legal means.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with building your own. In fact, it can be fun. In the old days of electronics, in fact, we had such firms as the Heath Company building kits for you to assemble such gear as radios and even TV sets. Now maybe the product was no better and not much cheaper than the prebuilt variety, but the assembly process, even if the company did some of the heavy lifting for you, gave you a sense of accomplishment.

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When Bill Gates said Microsoft had spent between $8 billion and $9 billion to develop Windows Vista and Office 2007, my mind clouded briefly before I stared at the screen in disbelief. Consider how often it took Apple two years or more to accumulate that much money, and you’ll get the picture. Even now, thousands and thousands of Microsoft developers are toiling in their code mines struggling to move this wasteful venture to the starting gate.

As you recall, Gates says there’s an 80% chance Vista will be released to consumers in January 2007, as if PC box vendors could care, once the holiday season has passed. Or maybe they hope that those Zune media players will somehow compensate for the lost sales.

But the larger problem here is that Microsoft comes across as a directionless company, a firm that has been singularly unable to succeed beyond its core business of operating systems and office suites. Of course, that was enough to allow it to dominate the PC industry. Apple, despite getting so many things right, still remains an afterthought to many businesses.

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