Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of welcoming Alykhan Jetha, CEO of Marketcircle, Inc., on a recent episode of the tech show. As someone who develops software for small businesses, AJ said that Apple shouldn’t really waste time and money trying to grab enterprise customers.

This goes against the conventional wisdom, that Apple is making a huge mistake not going after big business, except, of course, for school systems, where they’ve traditionally done pretty well.

If you believe what some tech writers have claimed, IT people around the world are all set to be wined and dined by Apple, so they can ditch the dreaded Windows albatross forever. But it’s really not that simple, and getting involved in pushing hard to build a large business portfolio may be a bad thing for Apple, although some third-party dealers are definitely trying.

Now I want Apple to succeed big time as much as anyone, but at what cost?

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The other day I heard from a long-time friend, a former member of a forum I managed on AOL way back when. He has an engineering degree, and worked for many years as the chief sound engineer for a famous singer (now deceased), so he definitely knows his hardware.

He’s also a Mac loyalist, and has earned his stripes by working with Apple’s hardware and software from the earliest days. In all fairness, some of his experiences are stellar, which is why he continues to use Macs. But he’s had his share of problems too, and lately he’s been keeping tags on Leopard’s rough edges.

Rough edges?

Didn’t I say in an earlier column that my experiences with Leopard have been terrific? Indeed I have. And, despite the fact that Apple’s own discussion forums and those Mac troubleshooting sites are littered with hundreds of reports of anomalous behavior, system crashes, and performance issues covering a host of setups, little has been nailed down so far.

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The other day, after my son returned from his semester of college studies in Spain, I watched as he set up his well-worn 17-inch PowerBook G4 on his desk. That particular form factor actually debuted in 2003, and Grayson’s notebook, the 1.33GHz model, appeared in the spring of 2004. My 17-inch MacBook Pro was acquired in May 2006.

Why do I mention this? Well, unless you put the two side by side and look carefully, you will be hard-pressed to see any difference, and the latest MacBook Pros are pretty much the same. No, you don’t have to remind me of the tiny dimensional differences and all that. That’s not important. It’s the overall form factor, which remains unaltered.

Some tech pundits speculated that, in switching to Intel processors, Apple would take the opportunity to revitalize the case designs for all or most of their computers. That didn’t happen. While the internal layouts may have been altered to accommodate the new processor family — and this is particularly true with the Mac Pro where internal hard drive bays were doubled — they are otherwise hard to identify from their predecessors.

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Do you remember how it was back in those quieter times? You could have any telephone you wanted, so long as it came from Ma Bell, and, aside from some local carriers in smaller communities, they also provided your telephone connection.

You also paid an arm and a leg in terms of the percentage of your income that was devoted to phone service. If you wanted to call someone long distance, the price could be in the dollars-per-minute range. Yes, having one source for your service may have delivered great reliability, but at what cost?

When they finally allowed you to buy your phone from another company, rather than rent it at some insanely-high price, you still had to provide the carrier appropriate information from the handset so they knew what you had and how it would impact their network.

Today, of course, you have loads of options for basic phone service, and some of them use the Internet for most or all of their connections. A decent wired handset can be had for less than $10 and you can save money if you choose the same provider for telephone, Internet and TV. Such a deal!

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