Take a look at your wireless phone, especially if you’ve had it for more than a few months. It probably shows a fair amount of mileage, with loads of nicks and scratches. The pristine, shiny case looks like it’s been a victim of a few too many drops onto the pavement or tiled floor, and it’s amazing the thing still works. Well, maybe not completely, because it sometimes turns off without warning. But you turn it on again and get on with your business.

Oh yes, maybe you’re different. You put your phone in a leather case, and it looks as good as new. Certainly the Motorola RAZR and its siblings might survive, because of their titanium case. But they can be bent.

After a year or two of this use and abuse, you’re ready to hand it off to the kids, who probably have phones that seem as if they’ve had several close encounters with the wheels of a spinning automobile. Or maybe it’s no longer working, so you just buy another one for $50 or so from your wireless carrier, in exchange for giving them another two year’s of your business.

Yes, you expect a cheap phone — even if it’s cheap because of your service provider’s subsidy — not to last terribly long. It’s part of our disposable society. Electronic gadgets work all right for a time, but they age so quickly you’re ready to buy replacements before you know it.

Into this environment comes the iPhone. So will paying $499 or $599 — plus whatever fees Cingular exacts from you for a bucket of minutes and Internet access for two years — afford you any greater degree of reliability? If you’re paying that much for a phone, it ought to survive a few years before it needs to be replaced, right?

Well, I suppose you could look at the iPod as an example. How does the number one music player on the planet manage after a few hard years? Well, my son has gone through a pair of these since the product was originally introduced. Both were hard drive versions and they stopped working after a year or two. One was consigned to the recycle bin, while I got a break on a hard drive replacement for the other. It hung on for another year before it bit the dust.

Finally, I gave my son an iPod nano, hoping its Flash-based memory configuration would make it more robust, but he has no idea where it went during the move from the dorm, to the home and to the apartment he now shares with two other students. So he wants another iPod for his 21st birthday.

But Grayson Steinberg is no isolated example here. He isn’t that careless with his stuff. In fact, his Canon i860 inkjet printer just keeps going and going like the infamous “Energizer Bunny.” His 17-inch PowerBook G4, one of the early versions, has a couple of dents on its aluminum case, but otherwise runs perfectly.

In general, the iPod’s track record is no better than those tiny cell phones. The batteries go, but you have to send yours to a repair center — or risk ruining it by doing it yourself — to install a replacement. The same is true for the iPhone, unlike most other wireless communications devices that I know about..

But even before the battery stops taking a charge, consider the typical scratch-prone case of the iPod. Now consider taking your greasy fingers — and they will often be greasy even if you take hand cleaner with you — and typing away at the iPhone day after day. Just how robust is the screen and how long will it survive normal wear and tear before it’s filled with deep scratches?

And surely you wouldn’t dare drop the thing? But it does happen. It’s small, and I can see where you are fumbling for the keys to your car or home with the iPhone in the other hand and the juggling competition ends in failure. Something drops, and you just hope it’s the keys and not the iPhone. Or maybe not. You see, those key fobs on new cars can cost a few hundred dollars to replace if they’re damaged, so it’s a wash.

Now we really don’t know whether Apple has taken all this into account. Certainly the high price they’re charging ought to cover a more resilient case that’s able to withstand the rigors of intense use without breaking apart. We’re six months away from the product’s release, and the only samples were prototypes under the watchful eyes of Apple during the Macworld Expo and various press briefings.

Yes, it may well be true that I’m an alarmist and I’m expecting the worst, and that the iPhone will somehow be more reliable and more resistant to damage than every single wireless phone I’ve ever used.

But there is one more thing: How well does it handle phone calls? I mean, isn’t that the main reason you buy a wireless phone, even if it has loads of other gadgets and/or playthings to use? How many of the people who had face time with an iPhone got to try it out to see how well it fares as a phone, its most basic task?

Yes, we know that Cingular claims to have the fewest dropped calls in the industry. Maybe they do, and maybe all those reports of its service shortcomings are ancient history. But the reliability of mobile phone connections in the U.S. is nothing short of miserable. Don’t expect the iPhone to make it any better.

Related Articles:

• Does Apple Need an Information Czar?
• Apple’s First Impression Dilemma
• Apple Hosts Special Event on Night Owl’s Birthday
• Newsletter #457 Preview: No, Apple Isn’t Going Downhill
• Apple Is Releasing Products Too Early!

As most of you know by now, Microsoft’s latest and greatest operating system, Windows Vista, will ship to consumers next week. It is already available for businesses and, in fact, you’ve probably read plenty of reviews about it.

When Apple finally pulls the wraps off the entire Leopard feature set, you’ll find plenty of comparisons to read, even before the product actually ships. Is it better than Vista? About the same? Inferior? Believe you me, you will see all sorts of comparisons and contrasts.

Some of those studies will make a lot of sense, some will not, but I’m sure most of the tech pundits who write about the subject are perfectly sincere. If they’re dead wrong, well nobody’s perfect.

On the other hand, there is one tech writer on the planet who doesn’t care about facts and logic. He wants to push your buttons by saying absolutely crazy things and hoping, I guess, that you’ll send him lots and lots of hate mail. More important, that the hit counts at his publisher’s site will go way, way up so he can, I suppose, ask for a raise or a plaque or whatever lights his fire.

Now I don’t want to enhance John C. Dvorak’s popularity or cater to his attention-grabbing schemes any more than is necessary to make a point. So I won’t provide any links here. I’m sure you can find the proper site yourself if you really feel inclined to read his latest venture into the ninth dimension, where logic is a concept that does not exist.

His latest rant claims that, by making Vista more like Mac OS X, Microsoft is playing into the hands of such companies as Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Intel, who want to create a standardized Linux distribution. This way, the confusion, incompatibilities and plain headaches that exist now will be things of the past.

Indeed, Dvorak believes that most people simply hate Macs, so if they perceive Vista to be Mac-like, they will abandon it in droves in favor of Linux!

Are you with me so far? You see, I’m quite serious here. That’s what the man says. Dvorak believes that “When it comes to the Apple-versus-PC battle, one oft-neglected discussion is that the majority of people do not like Macs. Get over it. It’s true.”

In other words, the feeling that Apple has the mind-share while Microsoft has the market share is all wrong. People really love Windows, but have strange and queasy thoughts about Macs.

Dvorak is concerned, for example, about the way a Mac “feels when saving files. I know this is silly, but I’ve never felt comfortable with it. It was mushy in some weird way that always gave me the creeps.”

Now that comment gives me the creeps, but for a different reason, one obvious to most of you.

He then goes on to claim that, “something weird happened on a Mac” he wouldn’t be able to recover the file, although the PC wouldn’t cause such a catastrophe, because “with a PC, I could take the hard disk out and easily put it into another machine and then go exploring the drive without worry.”

Evidently, Dvorak missed the demonstration of the Mac Pro, where you can swap drives in and out in moments, a lot faster than on most PC boxes. But even on the old Mac minitowers, replacing hard drives was no big deal, or maybe he thinks Apple makes only iMacs and Mac minis for desktop use, but the average user of those products isn’t going to want to replace his or her own drive anyway most of the time. Of course, with the proper technical skills involved in opening those boxes, it’s not all that difficult, actually.

I could go on, of course, but I think you get the point. You see, the Mac OS is the “right-brain” operating system that, horror of horrors, empowers the individual, whereas Dvorak says we should be using a proper “left-brain” system such as Linux. I mean, you don’t really want a computer that just works, when you can spend hours learning how to configure a Unix-based system from the command line or some arcane setup application. And then, take joy in an inconsistent user interface and the inability to run many of your favorite applications, such as Adobe Photoshop, iTunes and Quicken. Don’t you just love it?

This doesn’t mean Linux can’t become a user-friendly desktop operating system, but if that happens, it’ll no longer be for the left-brain.

And that, my friends, is when Dvorak will have to return to his Prozac to recover from the mental shock.

Meantime, if you see more nonsense like that online, have a good laugh and just forget about it.

I suppose I could invite Dvorak on The Tech Night Owl LIVE and tell him all this to his face, but why?

Related Articles:

• Apple’s First Impression Dilemma
• Microsoft Apps and the Mac
• Is Steve Jobs Really Milking the Macintosh?
• The Plight of the Apple Early Adopter
• Apple’s Unfortunate Economy of Words