The other day, I was reading what I regard as a wrongheaded commentary suggesting that Apple’s iPhone is doomed to suffer the fate that befell the Mac back in the early 1990s. In short, other companies would take Apple’s closed ecosystem and smash it to smithereens.

Now I would be the last person to deny the problems that beset Apple way back when. When the critics said there wasn’t a lot of Mac software, they were close to the mark. Yes, a reasonable number of titles were available, but you often had to buy them via a mail order catalog — remember this was before people routinely went online to make purchases — and local outlets had just a few dusty boxes of Mac stuff in the back of the store. It was also true that there was an Apple Tax then too, which meant that you had to pay a rich premium to go Mac.

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Although it was widely expected that Apple would introduce a cheaper MacBook this year, they chose otherwise. Since there will be no new products in 2009 from Apple, based on their own statements, this issue is closed, unless they have reason to change things in 2010 or beyond.

However, you can’t ignore the fact that an awful lot of people out there consider Apple’s products overpriced or at least premium priced. This is the mantra repeated regularly by Microsoft and its sycophants, and even the mainstream media says pretty much the same thing.

Apple only has itself to blame for these perceptions, because for so many years their gear was priced considerably higher than comparable products. It surely helped enhance the bottom line, but this high profit business plan surely didn’t help Apple’s market share.

These days, Apple still gets great profits, but not from overly high price points. Instead, it comes from smart management of the acquisition of raw materials and tight inventories. In other words, they control wasteful spending in virtually every department.

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In recent weeks, loads of reviews of Windows 7 have been published. Most are based on beta or so-called “Release to Manufacturing” (RTM) versions, though some actually used the version that shipped last week. Regardless, there’s a sense that Microsoft has cured all or most of the ills that plagued Vista.

However, Microsoft chose not to call it Vista SP3. Instead they pulled their usual stunt and made some visible changes in the product so they could fool you into forgetting that it’s just a spruced up version of Vista. Instead, it’s now Windows 7, for better or worse, so Microsoft can also demand the full upgrade fee. So from a business standpoint, this certainly makes sense, even though I’m sure many of you would prefer a more honest approach.

To be fair, many reviewers have not been fooled by Microsoft’s bait and switch tactics. The know the score, and they’ve clearly attempted to treat the matter as honestly as possible.

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They say that a publication that only contains good news wouldn’t be long for this world, whether online or print. Indeed, there were newspapers of that sort over the years, but they’ve vanished in the dustbin of history. These days, it’s all about conflict and sensationalism.

Anything goes in order to get precious ad dollars. So the reason that I’m still poor in my middle years is the clear result of the fact that I won’t subscribe to making up stories just to pay the rent.

So let’s begin:

What is forgotten in the rush to credit Microsoft with good results because their sales didn’t drop as much as expected is the fact that Apple has been, by and large, seemingly immune from the effects of the worldwide recession. Or, if not, they would have actually sold far more product all things being equal.

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