As you might expect, the critics are coming out of the woodwork struggling to find things wrong about Apple's third-generation iPad. Certainly, the attempt by Consumer Reports to paint the best-selling tablet as somehow defective because of an alleged heat problem failed miserably. In the end, CR gave it a top rating, but just barely ahead of someone's Android OS tablet. Most troubling, though, was the fact that CR's tests results evidently didn't match anyone else's in terms of heat generation. They got 113 degrees (116 degrees when the unit was hooked up to a charger), whereas Macworld and others managed a mere 100 degrees. Worse, it doesn't seem as if CR has bothered to run temperature tests of tablets from other companies.

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Apple tends to release little more than bare-bones specs for most of their mobile products. Beyond basic dimensions, battery life, and supported multimedia formats, there's not a lot to find. That requires some heavy lifting by others to determine, and sometimes you wonder if they're looking at the wrong things.

First there's the inevitable teardown. You get a "bill of materials" (or BOM), a summary of the parts used and the estimated prices. Now knowing that Apple buys this part from Samsung, that part from Qualcomm, might appeal to you in an abstract sense, if you care about such things. That roughly half the parts in the iPad 3, in terms of estimated price, come from Samsung, is especially curious. After all, Apple has been suing Samsung for alleged patent violations to the ends of the planet.

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As you've no doubt heard, the PC industry is in the doldrums these days, mostly with the exception of Apple of course. Sales are flat or declining, and more and more people have decided that they don't need to replace that old computer after all. A smartphone, a tablet, or both, are perfectly suited to their needs.

Certainly Apple knows this, continuing to refer to the iPad as a "Post PC" product, telling one and all that the PC era is yesterday's news, although it'll be years before you can say the PC era is over and done with. Even then, there will be many power users and business customers who will insist on a traditional PC, be it Mac or Windows.

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It stands to reason that Microsoft has spent years trying to emulate what Apple does. Sometimes they accomplish the move with great success, with Windows being a notable example. Although many of the ideas for Windows came from the Mac OS, Microsoft did a better marketing job for a mostly inferior product, and hence earned over 95% of the global market. These days, Windows market share has eroded somewhat, basically at the expense of migration to Macs, but few would suggest that Apple will ever gain dominance.

In keeping with that tradition, when Apple introduced the iPod, it didn't take very long before Microsoft introduced the Zune. Typical of a Microsoft product, the Zune was a couple of years behind the iPod. Typical of Microsoft, they promised the next version would be better, but so was the iPod, so the Zune kept playing catch up. But it never did, and Microsoft couldn't fool the public into accepting an inferior product. So Apple won the digital music player wars, such as they were.

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