I really find it humorous to read some of the chatter about Apple Inc. that suggests they were forced kicking and screaming to slash prices on their uber-expensive notebooks at the WWDC. The theory goes that Apple looked at the sales reports and concluded that potential customers were rebelling at paying an Apple Tax, particularly in a down economy. So they went back to their number crunches, pulled out their calculators or whatever, and decreed that they must make their products cheaper to keep sales moving along at a good clip.

Now maybe some of this is true. Certainly one reason why Mac sales have flattened is the price of admission. However, as I've long contended, this alleged Apple Tax is a largely a fiction created by Microsoft and its PC box building partners. In saying that, though, Apple isn't the sort of company that looks at the current financial quarter and regards it as the beginning and end of their business, as some of the other PC makers seem to do.

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The conventional wisdom -- which is seldom conventional -- has it that Apple and Microsoft must tout loads of flashy new features to justify asking their customers to pay for their ongoing operating system upgrades. That may be true, all right, but it only presents part of the picture.

Now as some of you recall, Mac OS X Tiger was sold with the promise of over 200 new features. Most of them were merely enhancements to existing products, but this was the sort of bullet point game that Apple played, and play it well they did. For Leopard, they had to go farther, to justify its prolonged development time, so the promise was inflated to 300 and counting. Again, I'll leave it to the reader to consider the significance of many of those features.

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So put yourself in this position: You purchased an iPhone, an iPod, or a new Mac. The specific product doesn't really matter, but the important thing is that it doesn't perform to your expectations. Far from it, in fact. You bought the gadget on the promise that Apple's gear "just works," and found that, as far as you're concerned, the claim is false.

What can you do to gain satisfaction?

The usual first step would be to call customer service, and that's usually sufficient to resolve your issues. Or you may bring the malfunctioning product to an Apple Store, and consult someone at the Genius Bar. That form of two-way communication is best, and it also gives Apple a chance to observethe situation at first hand, and that can do wonders.

Before I go on, I'm not dismissing the possibility of getting satisfaction from a third-party Apple reseller. Many are fully dedicated to the Mac platform and will definitely provide skilled assistance.

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In recent days, there have been reports of new Mac Trojan Horse threats, and you have to wonder whether Apple's continued growth will come at the expense of making the platform a serious target for Internet criminals. Or at least that's what the tech media has been saying for several years now, although it hasn't quite come to pass.

The most recent outbreaks reportedly involve iLife '09 and Adobe Photoshop CS4. But wait! It has nothing to do with the legal versions you buy of these applications. Instead, the Trojan Horse strictly impacts pirated copies.

In the case of Photoshop CS4, Adobe uses a sophisticated license activation method, and the malware comes into play with a program used to crack the license.

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