With all the pretenders to the iPod throne clearly failing, and the Zune may join the list unless sales pick up big time real soon, you wonder if Apple can continue to float along as it has, resting on its laurels.

To be sure, the latest updates to the iPod line were mostly cosmetic and incremental. The shuffle is tiny and cute, the nano echoes the iPod mini with the aluminum case and color choices, but none of that is revolutionary. No major new features to shout about, at least for now.

It’s not that Apple has lost its mojo, and is unable to deliver any creative enhancements in the way the iPod works or the features it contains. But if you compare the original model with the current 5G version, not a whole lot has changed. Sure, there are refinements to the scrolling, much more storage space, a larger screen and the ability to play videos, but those are changes that are incremental and not revolutionary. The fundamental form factor isn’t all that different, despite the smaller size.

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It’s easy to be lazy in the news business, and hard to be fair. Consider how tech writers treated Apple over the years; well, most of them at any rate. Apple was “beleaguered,”  only had a tiny percentage of the PC market, and couldn’t possibly survive. When the name Microsoft came up, you were told repeatedly how over 90% of the world’s desktops used Windows. You couldn’t forget any of these facts, because the same words and phrases would be trotted out time and time again.

Even when Apple managed to overcome the negativism and build market share again, you were constantly reminded how temporary it might be, how another company would surely come up with an iPod killer, how Apple made a fatal mistake with its FairPlay iTunes DRM, which isn’t shared with any other company.

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Over the many years I’ve used Macs, I’ve often wondered how many people really choose a PC because the prefer the product, find it easier to setup and use. While some power users might be able to make that claim, if only for the built-it-yourself concept, where you have full control over configuring the parts you want and making them perform to your personal specs.

Clearly the Mac isn’t designed that way. It’s meant to be a complete, functional product that’s ready to turn on and use, with minimal options to expand the hardware. Yes, I know how there are lots of ways to customize the Mac Pro. But you still can’t build one from scratch, although I suppose you can assemble something that would function from a bunch of parts from old Macs.

Now businesses don’t necessarily buy personal computers because they like them, but because they need them as tools to get work done. This is hardly different from choosing one screwdriver over another, although I’m certain some hobbyists will tell me that certain parts are the only ones they’ll use to build a cabinet or fix a car.

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The other day I read that there are over 4,300 Universal applications available, which means lots of choices for your Intel-based Mac. But many of these applications aren’t high-power productivity programs you might need for your work. In fact, some of the most important entrants, such as Adobe Photoshop, and Microsoft Office for the Mac, are months away from joining them.

The real mark of the power user, however, is supposedly the number of tweaks and enhancements you install on your system. It’s not enough, for example, to just feel the surface of your Power Mac, Mac Pro, or Intel-based Mac notebook to see if they’re running hot. Instead, you may want to check out a number of handy utilities that monitor such things as CPU temperature, subdivided by core, and speed of the cooling fans.

My particular preference is iStat Pro, a Dashboard widget, which provides more information about system status than anyone could possibly need.

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