In all the times I’ve commented about Apple’s lack of penetration into the core of the business market, I’ve remarked about the apparent lack of a large, dedicated sales staff calling regularly on such companies and the unavailability of specialty models that would fit certain niches. This would surely include that middle-of-the road expandable Mac with the guts of the iMac, a pair of internal expansion ports, and no display.

However, it’s all too clear that Apple has other ideas, and mine clearly can’t and probably won’t influence their vision. But that doesn’t mean the Mac and the iPhone are poor choices for your business. It just means that Apple is going after the enterprise from the back door.

Certainly, there is the corporate art department, where the majority of business Macs see service. Even where management and IT people have banned Macs from the rest of the company, graphic designers and video editors clearly have conveyed their views that most will not accept a PC box, even a high-end one, when a Mac Pro can be had.

Apple certainly knows this, which is why you see a slew of professional multimedia applications that receive regular and major upgrades. As far as graphics are concerned, Adobe has been given a mostly free ride, except for Aperture. Sure, Apple did kind of force Adobe to remove its Premiere video editing software from the Mac market, but that’s now returning; well, at least for Intel-based Macs.

But that’s not the only way Apple is quietly improving its business presence.

Consider college students, many of whom have acquired MacBooks and MacBook Pros. In a few years, they will enter the working world. Sure, if they take a job at an existing company, the odds are that they will have to work on the office PC. But more and more businesses are allowing their employees to use notebooks, either the ones bought for them, and their own, and here’s where Apple is gaining big time. Roughly two-thirds of all Macs sold these days are notebooks, and Apple now owns over 14% of the retail notebook market in the U.S. That would have been unheard of just a few months ago.

Another road to the business world is the fact that more and more technology experts, particularly the ones quoted in various tech publications, have engaged in very public discussions of their attempts to get all of their work done on a Mac. In most cases, they have succeeded admirably, although they sometimes need to resort to Windows courtesy of Boot Camp or Parallels Desktop.

IT people who may have ignored Macs can be heavily influenced by stories of that nature. And when the boss brings in a new Mac for himself or herself, it’s very hard for anyone in the systems administration area to say they can’t do that.

Now take a look at the iPhone, which is being touted by the early reviewers as perhaps the ultimate consumer-oriented smart phone. Why consumers? Well, certainly the music player component and the fancy graphical tricks are responsible. Some of the more critical tech pundits also complain that the iPhone’s email software can’t access an Exchange server, but I gather all that’s required is a minor setting to allow IMAP connections. That’s it. Many of the other alleged shortcomings are software related and can be addressed in a downloadable update.

Let’s not forget that the iPhone is strictly a version 1.0 product. In fact, Apple is not even booking all of its income from the sale of its flashy wireless phone at the initial sale, but over a longer period. That’s because the iPhone can and will be enhanced by software over time. Steve Jobs has said as much, although you won’t know what sort of improvements will come until they are at or near release. In fact, in a recent interview, Jobs made these comments about enhnced corporate email support: “You’ll be hearing more about this in the coming weeks. We have some pilots going with companies with names you’ll recognize. This won’t be a big issue.”

Indeed, even though AT&T has restricted the iPhone to its consumer calling plans, that doesn’t mean that business users won’t buy them. They’ll just put them on their personal plans for the time being. Once the initial demand dies down, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the iPhone supported on AT&T’s enterprise calling programs, assuming there is sufficient demand for it, and I’m sure there will be.

So, yes, you can state fairly that Apple isn’t making a direct push into the business marketplace. But as more and more iPhones and Macs are bought by the people who run those companies — or begin to work for them — you can bet that things will change.

No, I don’t expect to see it happen overnight. You will not wake up one day, walk into your nearest bank or hospital and see rows and rows of Macs adorning the desks of tellers, receptionists and record clerks. But the winds of change are in the air, and things can move quite rapidly if the positive trends continue unabated.

And one more thing, I do not regard the appearance of that Mac guy himself, Justin Long, as co-star of the new Bruce Willis “Die Hard” flick as anything more than an acting gig, even though Long does play a computer nerd. Maybe it’s just type casting.

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All right, I have said in these pages and on the radio show that I’m not really interested in buying an iPhone right away, that an ordinary mobile phone works fine for me. Yet, the iPhone feeding frenzy makes it near-impossible not to talk about it. Even Paris Hilton must feel jealous at all the press Apple is getting!

Just looking at the marketing campaign, you have to envy the masterful approach. Apple didn’t inundate the media with paid ads anticipating its arrival. The ads that were placed were mostly low-key. Just just show the phone and a few of its flashy features, and the tech press did the rest.

Why is so much attention focused on a wireless phone?

This can, I suppose, become fodder for college-level marketing classes, but I think the answer might be a whole lot simpler. Despite all the tens of billions of dollars the wireless providers have invested in their systems all these years, service still sucks. Indeed, the most severe criticisms leveled in the early reviews of the iPhone have focused, laser-like, on its weakest link, which is the quality of the AT&T network. Certainly, readers of Consumer Reports will recall that the company formerly known as Cingular rates at or near the bottom when it comes to audio quality, network reliability and customer service.

Forgetting the brilliantly-designed touch screen and all the rest, it appears that the quality of calls is strictly average, no better than the phones that AT&T gives you free in exchange for signing up to ones of its plans. Is that Apple’s fault, or AT&T? Well, it doesn’t really matter, although the latter runs the network, so you can blame them for such shortcomings. Even if Apple is using the very best audio chips in the industry, that’s something they cannot overcome.

However, making and receiving phone calls ranks extremely low as a reason for having an iPhone. The reason all the other wireless carriers and mobile phone makers are having fits about the iPhone is that Apple has exposed their other most serious weakness in a single product, and that’s the user interface.

It’s not that the iPhone does more things than other so-called “smart” phones, just as the original Macintosh didn’t necessarily do more things than its predecessors. In both cases, Apple took existing technologies and weaved them into an innovative user interface that is at once revolutionary as it is disruptive.

By and large, today’s mobile phones are stuck in the dark ages, with incredibly complicated navigation screens that bury even simple functions within numerous arcane dialogs, where you have to do ten things to accomplish one task.

A lot of that is dictated by the wireless carriers, of course. Take Verizon Wireless. I’ve been a customer of theirs for several years, largely because they have a good network, and call quality is reasonably tolerable. Customer service is even adequate, which is saying a lot in that business, unfortunately.

The problem is that Verizon dictates a consistently awful navigation system among all or most of its products. If it worked well, it would mean that getting used to one phone would pretty much acquaint you with the settings options of the next, give or take a few features. But you are confronted with the interface from hell, no doubt inspired by the worst characteristics of Microsoft Windows. Such similar-sounding labels as “Call Settings” and “Phone Settings” are guaranteed to force you to check both to locate the singular configuration panel that may fit into either category.

Now we all know that Verizon turned down a chance to add the iPhone to its lineup early on. No doubt one reason is that Steve Jobs clearly demanded that nobody tamper with the iPhone’s look and feel. Nothing in the iPhone could possibly have been influenced by AT&T, which, until now, was just another mediocre carrier existing in a universe of mediocre carriers.

Indeed, Apple will apparently service the phones itself if they require repair. The standard mobile phone warranty coverage isn’t even available for the iPhone. Instead, you have to rely on Apple’s own guarantee.

How will all this turn out? Well, despite its flaws, the iPhone will evidently be a smash hit! Consider that dude who has been suffering the hot New York City sunshine to be the first in line an Apple Store to acquire his very own iPhone. Like the iPod before it, the iPhone will be a cultural phenomenon, and you will see lots and lots of imitators early in.

In the meantime, AT&T’s competition is already rehearsing their talking points about why the iPhone really isn’t a good thing. But few will care. Have I said enough now?

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It has to be frustrating. Every single day, there are hundreds of newarticles written about the iPhone, about what it is, what it isn’t, and lots of stuff way in between. About the only news that actually concerns Apple’s former “main” product line, personal computers, is the recent report that sales of MacBooks and MacBook Pros have topped 14% in the U.S. retail market. That would be unheard of just a year or two ago.

Sure, Apple’s notebooks just got minor speed bump enhancements, so they are current with Intel’s state of the art; well at least the MacBook Pros, which sport the new Santa Rosa chipsets and all. So it’s not as if Apple hasn’t been lying low.

Then again, there hasn’t been any action on the iMac front in months, and I have several friends and clients that are looking to buy one once they’re assured that the model they choose won’t become obsolete the very next day. But other than enhancing the processors, graphic chips and maybe adding more drive storage and RAM, what is Apple to do? Make the white case brushed aluminum? Does that really make all that much of a difference, except to those of who feel that externals need to be upgraded every so often to stay relevant?

There’s also the Mac mini that some suggest is due for the closeout bin any day now, because not an awful lot are being sold. This would be unfortunate, because I think the mini is an excellent computer for the small business environment. In fact, I gather they’re even being used as cheap Web servers, which argues strongly in favor of their reliability. On the other hand, I suppose this model has been Apple’s reluctant stepchild. I suspect they were pushed kicking and screaming into entering the cheap PC arena, and it tends to be ignored more than it should.

But everyone I know who has purchased a Mac mini absolutely loves it. From the tiny form factor to generally good performance — if you’re not into playing computer games  of running 3D rendering operations of course — it can definitely get the job done. It’s also a wonderful way to leverage the display and input devices you may have salvaged from the last PC.

I can’t say much more than you know about the Mac Pro. I haven’t added one to my roster yet, but the folks I know who use them say they are superb professional workstations, capable of absolutely blistering performance even if you don’t possess the cash to upgrade to eight cores.

But there is still something missing in Apple’s lineup, and it’s a model I’ve argued for previously, and others have as well.

It’s an expandable desktop computer with, say, the guts of the iMac, but without the built-in display. Now I realize Apple made its reputation on all-in-one computers, and certainly a notebook fits into that category. But if you want a full-blown desktop with easy expandability beyond a memory chip or two, you’re forced to go with a Mac Pro, and is probably too much of a computer for most of you.

So what does Apple offer to fill this market? No, the Mac mini won’t cut it. It’s not that a computer with the innards of the MacBook is necessarily a bad thing. But it’s not built for simple expansion. Even adding RAM requires flexibility with a putty knife, and that strikes me as an awfully silly design choice.

But what about a middle-of-the-road expandable box with, say, two internal slots (one for the graphic card of course), a second hard drive and maybe half the RAM slots of the Mac Pro? Equip it with the same processors as the iMac, from the Intel Core 2 Duo family, and sell it for, say, $999.

I can, of course, see the arguments against such a box. It will cannibalize sales of the iMac, and thus work against Apple’s profit margin. But a sale is a sale, and I can see legitimate reasons why the iMac won’t be suitable for a particular purpose, and the Mac Pro would be gross overkill, just as the Mac mini would be severely underpowered.

Of course, having a logical solution doesn’t mean Apple is going to listen. One of the pleasing aspects of their product lineup is that it remains simple across the board. They don’t enter every niche, and it’s pretty easy to figure out which is which. You don’t have to cope with a thousand and one meaningless model names and configurations to figure out the differences. I can even see the sensitivity against the proliferation of products after the Performa debacle of the 1990s.

But I also see where Apple is not offering sufficient choices for their customers, and don’t get me started about a thin and light notebook.

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