I hate to be blogging about Apple again, but it has been quite ubiquitous of late and given that I own an iPhone, an Apple TV, a Mac Mini and a MacBook Pro, I cannot help caring.

From a PR standpoint, the last few months have been mixed at best for Apple (more on that later), and yet from a financial standpoint it has been pretty much blowing right through this recession, announcing just last month the best non-holiday quarter in the company’s history. What’s going on here?

I grew up very much a PC guy. My first computer, in 1994, was a 75MHz Pentium I with 8 megs of ram and a 500 MB hard drive running Dos and Windows 3.11. I was 14, it was by far the coolest thing I’d ever owned, and the internet was just getting started. Sometimes when I’d go visit a school buddy of mine, I’d take a peek at his dad’s Apple PowerPC which, he liked to remind me, was much more expensive and cooler than my PC. It also wasn’t compatible with mine. It never would be. Apple actually cultivated that difference, it thrived on it: remember ‘think different?’

From that point until about a year and a half ago, I discarded Macs as over-priced, over-engineered rounded cubes without a delete key or a right-click button, designed by and for intellectual snobs.

Fast forward 15 years and I find two facts remarkable:

• I now use Macs almost exclusively, at home and at work
• Apple switched to Intel

The two are of course very closely related. Apple switching to Intel enabled software developers to easily make software that worked in Windows, Linux, and OSX as desktop and cloud applications. This made Apple more a part of the greater ecosystem. Now the lines in between Mac and PC users weren’t so clearly defined.

I think it’s fair to say that the switch to Intel was mostly a financial decision, and one to everyone’s best interest since it takes a lot of capital to put out high quality hardware and software. But the bottom line is Apple is still exclusive at heart. It still wants everyone to do things their way. That’s exactly why the iPhone still only has one App Store, one browser, and why it considers that people who want to play with the guts of the hardware they paid for are threats to national security.

So Apple is now more inclusive than it used to be thanks to the Intel switch. It even gave up on the DRM battle, a move which I personally believe it disagreed with from a philosophic standpoint but just had to do for PR reasons. Moves like this sometimes give the impression that Apple wants to play nice with the other kids, but that is simply not the case. The last few months have happened to highlight of a lot of its core values:

• Sling and Skype apps not allowed to work over 3G
• Apple specifically blocking iTunes from syncing with the Pre
• Numerous accounts of the poor and arbitrary approval process of the app store
• Safari and Apple’s own store still the only browser/app stores allowed on the device
• And the big one, last week Apple rejecting the Google Voice app

To those saying that #1 and #5 are AT&T’s doing, even if it is (I think it’s more complicated than that) you can’t have a partnership when it’s profitable that you then denounce when it’s not convenient from a PR standpoint. It’s too easy.

Now you have high-profile bloggers like Om Malik and Michael Arrington that are quitting their iPhones and the whole tech press is upside down over the Google Voice controversy. But like I said, Apple has always had this ‘do it my way’ attitude. Sure they like innovation, but only so far as it benefits their advancement.

So then one may ask, is all of this bad press hurting the company’s bottom-line? It may be a little early to tell, but I would be willing to bet they’ll do fine next quarter, and will hit it out of the park again during the holiday quarter. I think there are a few reasons for this.

First, Apple gets about half of its business from the international market. The issues they are having as a consequence of the partnership with AT&T (Google Voice, poor call quality, MMS) are simply not factors abroad.

Second, what makes the phone most useful to a lot of us are all of the 3rd party apps: Remember the Milk, Evernote, Air Sharing, games… Once you’re hooked to the system you start depending on it, and that brings an additional, hidden factor against switching that most users will be well aware of once their contracts expire and they need to make a decision on which new phone to get.

Last, and most importantly, Apple’s biggest asset is its ability to create envy in consumers. It is a delicate balance of software design, hardware design and marketing that so far Apple has been the only one to strike. But they remain an advocate of a ‘complete Apple solution’. Your phone, hardware, software, everything should have the Apple brand. If you’re trying to mix and match, you will always run into the rougher edges of the company’s philosophy.

At the end of the day, it’s a matter of how much of your freedom as a consumer are you willing to give up. This makes the technological world delicate to walk into as you are always locking yourself into contract, or buying devices that are really the foot into the door of a much larger structure that will keep you hooked for many years.

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