Sometimes I think that certain entertainment and tech journalists are simply lazy. I mean, they just repeat what a movie or music industry flack says without bothering to question the fundamental logic, or at least providing an opposing point of view.

If you believe the stuff they tell you, and I’ll avoid the more graphic description of their spiel, there are a number of reasons why the movie box office figures have stalled, and CD sales are down. I’m going to evaluate the fundamental claims, and try to test them against simple logic to see if they hold water.

People aren’t buying CDs because they are stealing their music from the Internet: I suppose that’s a convenient excuse, that teens are busy downloading their songs from their favorite peer-to-peer network software of the week, that they share their bogus merchandise among their friends, and so don’t buy the genuine versions in the stores. In fact, I think it’s partly true, but it’s not the entire picture.

As you know, the iTunes Music Store has become one of the largest music retailers in the world, and those figures for CD sales don’t include digital music. Sure, it’s fair to say that you don’t get the same sonic fidelity when you play a relatively low bit-rate file instead of the “lossless” version. But for most of you, I bet that’s not terribly important. Apple’s AAC codec sounds good enough, and it actually sounds decent even on a classy car radio. Yes, there are some instruments, such as acoustic piano, which might reveal deficiencies, but it probably won’t make that much of a difference on a pair of $20 earbuds.

So when you factor in the legitimate online sales, well maybe music sales are down, but not quite as much as the music industry’s ax bearer, the RIAA, would have you believe. They still hope that harassing innocent senior citizens will somehow reveal a treasure trove of pirated goods.

In the end, though, how much of today’s music is even worth buying? There’s always a lot of junk, but it seems that the corporations have somehow managed to squeeze creativity out of even the most ambitious recordings. This happened before, of course, but in those days, the Beatles arrived to set the music world afire again. Is there a 21st century alternative? Inquiring minds want to know, because when those artists arrive, assuming the industry allows their creativity to flow freely, they won’t be complaining about falling sales.

Movie box office receipts are stagnant because people would rather stay home and watch the DVD or the cable and satellite alternative: That’s also partly true. But it doesn’t cover the whole picture, which is that going to the neighborhood multiplex with your family in tow can get mighty expensive.

If you don’t go to the matinee or are not eligible for a child’s, student’s or senior citizen’s discount, you can pay upwards of $10.00 per ticket. A bowl of popcorn is $5.00, and your favored soft drink is another $4.00 a cup. The average American family of two adults and two children can spend more than $60 plus $3.00-a-gallon gas and lunch on an outing to see a movie.

As far as the exhorbitant prices for snacks are concerned, it’s not just a matter of price gouging. The multiplex has to return 55% of its first week’s gross from a flick to the movie studios, so it has to make a profit somehow, and some of these theater chains are finding those profits hard to come by. Well, maybe if they cut the prices of those extras, maybe more families would attend.

Moreover, just compare those figures to the $15 you pay for the DVD, or the comparable amount you might pay every month to rent a bunch of them via Netflix. With the proliferation of flat-screen TV sets, which are slowly becoming affordable, and a decent sound system, the home movie experience is looking almost comparable.

In the end, though, it’s still a matter of product. Even though the critics weren’t too impressed, the sequel to “Pirates of the Caribbean” was a huge crowd-pleaser. It has earned hundreds of millions of dollars, and the final box office figures are yet to be tallied.

As with music, it all goes to show that if you deliver a truly entertaining motion picture, and give it a decent level of promotion, it will often find an audience. When that happens, the entertainment industry will, once again, run out of excuses and come to realize that, in the end, it’s still the product that counts!

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On Tuesday, I got a letter from Microsoft. No, it wasn’t personal. I was, in fact, one of 100,000 to receive an invitation to participate in the Windows Vista pre-RC1 test program.

Now regardless of what you might think, gentle reader, I am not a Microsoft basher by trade. In fact, I respect the company for building products good enough to dominate the personal computer industry. True, I also criticize the company for its many security lapses, but everyone benefits if they build an operating system that’s more reliable, and, one hopes, more secure.

In fact, one of my early book chapters covered a Windows communications product, although, truth to tell, it was actually written on a Mac running the late, lamented SoftWindows. Even when I have engaged in writing about the Mac at full tilt, I have remained exposed to Windows. Sometimes Microsoft even has a good idea or two, so let’s avoid the knee-jerk reactions.

I have also tried to maintain a good professional working relationship with Microsoft. I’ve had their representatives on one of my radio shows, The Tech Night Owl LIVE, and my current favored keyboard is one of their “Comfort” models, which mimics the ergonomic keyboard, although the main keypad is in one piece.

So why did Microsoft choose to include me in that list of the favored 100,000? Well, it’s not that I am a special person, a VIP or whatever. I just happen to be among the two million or so who downloaded Windows Vista beta 2. So I suppose I was picked at random. I doubt that Microsoft’s Windows team knows me from a hole in the wall.

But it raises the larger question of whether Microsoft can, at long last, get its often-delayed operating system out the door and have it in the hands of consumers by the end of January next year. At least orders are now being taken, and after a brief flap over a premature listing in Canada, we know what it’ll cost for all that PC joy.

As to that pre-RC1 test version, it is apparently the one that precedes the real RC1. If all goes well with the latter, Microsoft will be able to release Vista manufacturing on its latest schedule. If it proves to be a shaky beast, and you’ll see the online chatter about Vista’s current condition soon enough, there will be another delay supposedly to set things right.

Microsoft’s bigger problem, whenever Vista is released, is convincing existing PC users that what they have now, even if it works and isn’t driving them insane with malware, isn’t good enough and that they need to upgrade. This will be no mean task, no matter how well Vista turns out. You see lots of big businesses aren’t even up to Windows XP yet, and that came out in 2001.

Several banks in my area, for example, still operate with Windows 2000, and it does seem to get the job done. Or at least my bank hasn’t lost any of my money yet, or had any heavy-duty outages that I know about, although they occasionally freeze their site over the weekend for maintenance of one sort or another.

While power users and owners of brand, spanking new PC boxes will no doubt rush to acquire Vista right away, I expect the larger business community will sit back and wait to see what’s really involved in that upgrade, and whether it makes sense financially to take the plunge.

However, don’t count Apple out when it comes to skepticism about a new system version. If you’ve taken the Mac OS X ride from the beginning, you’ll see that Tiger is a superb system, and that the remaining quirks are minor for most. Already some Mac users are suggesting that they might just hold off on moving to Leopard; that is, unless some of those “Top Secret” features Apple doesn’t want to tell us about are truly compelling reasons to upgrade. So far they are skeptical that a system-based backup, multiple desktops and eye-candy for iChat and Mail are sufficiently powerful selling points. And full 64-bit support doesn’t light their fires.

In any case, when finally Vista gets out, Microsoft will be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to tell you that it’s the greatest thing in the world. Even if many are convinced, and they will be, the next question is which version to buy. You see, Microsoft wants to give you choices, and there are six. Yes, six versions of Windows Vista to select from.

Now the low-end version, Windows Vista Starter, will supposedly be restricted to so-called “emerging markets,” or third world countries. The real starter pack will be Vista Home Basic, which is sort of a glorified Windows XP with enhanced security and search.

To get the new, Mac-inspired interface, Aero Glass, you need to upgrade to Home Premium, which also includes support for Media Center and Tablet computers. You’ll also need a PC with a graphics card of sufficient power to support the new fancy visuals.

Next on the on-ramp is the business version, known, with a typically Microsoft degree of clever packaging, as Vista Business. This will be the counterpart to XP Professional. There is also a Vista Enterprise version for large businesses that also includes enhanced encryption, virtual machine and Unix services support.

Now take Vista Home Premium and combine it with Enterprise and you get Vista Ultimate, which supposedly does everything but take out the trash every night. It’ll also cost $399, retail, which is more than some pay for the entire computer. An upgrade version will set you back $259.

Let me remind you, once again, that the last version of Mac OS X cost $129, and a five-user home package went for $199. With Vista, as with XP, Microsoft will also strictly enforce activation on just one computer. You try to activate it on a second box, and Microsoft will spit the attempt back in your face, forcing you to buy another user license.

More important to me is that all those versions, even if the differences are fairly clear-cut, will just confuse people. I can imagine the nightmares consumer electronics stores will suffer as customers walk over to salespeople begging them to explain which upgrade they should buy.

Of course, Microsoft’s support people will also be fielding lots of calls from confused customers with the very same questions. I could say they deserve it for what they put the world through as a result of all those viruses and such, but maybe they won’t invite me to download the next prerelease of Vista.

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It’s pretty much agreed now that, for the time being at least, the Mac Pro is cheaper than a comparably-equipped Dell Precision Workstation 690. That won’t stop some from saying otherwise, but that’s not important in the scheme of things.

However, what annoys me is the fact that far too many tech writers and bloggers still insist that this is something brand new, that the Mac was previously more expensive, that this represents a new tact on the part of Apple. That’s not quite true, to put it mildly.

You see, once someone gets a reputation, particularly an unfavorable one, it’s not easy to overcome. Back in the bad old days when John Sculley was CEO of Apple, it was perfectly true that Macs cost a lot more. There’s no dispute of that. Through the years even after Sculley departed, you had to pay a premium to go Mac, even if the cost of upkeep was less. Apple made some bad decisions in those days, and, eventually, those decisions killed the company.

Even the iPod was once thought to be a more expensive product, until Apple secured those killer deals when it cornered the Flash memory market, that is. Then things became a lot more competitive. But a price difference of perhaps $50 isn’t so significant if you’re spending $300 or more on a consumer electronics product. If you factor that increase onto a product costing five or ten times as much, however, pretty soon you have real money.

When Apple moved to Intel processors, again the online chatter had it that prices would go down, forgetting that the prices for parts from either IBM or Intel weren’t all that different. In fact, some suggested that Apple paid a higher price to switch, and might have to eat the difference or pass it on to you and me.

Regardless, I’ve said this before and I’ll say it now: In recent years, a Mac has been extremely competitive with name-brand PC boxes with similar configurations. Now that Intel is inside both, the comparisons might be easier, but the end results still show that a Mac is not more expensive, and hasn’t been for awhile.

For the moment, let’s put the top-of-the-line aside, and look at the Mac mini. Yes, I know there are rumors that a new model may be in our midst soon enough, but, based on Apple’s current strategy, I don’t expect prices to change much. It may be faster, of course, and perhaps have more multimedia features, but that’s not the point.

Now we all know that getting consistent pricing on Dell is a needle-in-a-haystack quest, but since they are the number one PC maker, I’ll continue to compare them with Apple, even if it requires reading a few tea leaves.

The basic Mac mini, at $599, has a 1.5GHz Intel Core Solo processor, 512MB RAM, a 60GB hard drive, an integrated Intel GMA950 graphics processor with 64MB of shared memory, a Combo drive, gigabit Ethernet, built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and a remote control.

The least expensive Dell equivalent I could locate was a Dimension E310 P4 Vista Capable, which has a 3.06GHz Pentium 4, which you cannot compare directly to the Core Solo or Core Duo, an 80GB hard drive, an older Intel GMA900 graphics processor, a remote control and FireWire. I couldn’t locate a gigabit network interface, though in fairness to Dell, it does have a modem, which the mini lacks, so let’s call it almost a wash in terms of hardware. Dell’s price is $565, reduced from $678.

A basic set of multimedia software and an optical mouse, to match what Apple provides, boosts the price to $622. This may, of course, change by the time you get to check it, but I expect the basic trend will be similar enough for the sake of this highly informal window shopping session.

Yes, there are cheaper boxes from Dell, but you have fewer options to customize, so you can’t really do an honest comparison. Just as important, the Dell I configured, though it is supposedly capable of running Windows Vista, contains older Intel chips, and performance is apt to be inferior, even though the processor has a higher clock speed rating.

But even if performance could be regarded as equivalent or close enough not to be significant one way or the other, you can’t make the argument that a Mac mini is more expensive. You can do similar comparisons down the line and prices will also be highly similar, until you get to the Mac Pro, where Apple has a huge advantage.

So why are the pundits saying otherwise? As I said, it’s hard to erase the memory of a bad reputation, even when it is disproved over and over again.

However, I’m more interested in the truth, even though that’s something a few out there still can’t handle. No, the Mac is not more expensive! This myth has to end here and now, and if someone tells you otherwise, insist they check their facts first.

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