What works in Apple’s favor it that the iPhone has plenty of competition, but no direct knock-offs. It’s the Apple product most likely to introduce the company’s computer solutions to a first-time customer. The second most likely product? The Mac itself. Apple said about 300,000 Macs sold at the Apple retail stores during Q2 went to customers who had never owned a Mac before.

Apple cites a “stronger product mix” including more iPhone sales while explaining how it beat analyst estimates by more than 2 percent for margins. Then there’s the $47 billion in cash the company reported for the period ending March 31: A lot of clams to toss at whatever research and development opportunities emerge.

Apple pointed at its “first mover” opportunity with the iPad as one place where it intends to exploit its advantages with fresh investment. Apple expects to release iPad units in 9 overseas countries by the end of May and ship the 3G versions by the first week of May.

One analyst said the iPad has a chance to become “the Mac of the masses.” In the 1980s Apple called the Mac “the computer for the rest of us.” Many analyst questions during the Q2 conference Q&A covered the iPad. As of this week, one tracking site estimates more than 1 million iPads in use: An introductory rate that outstrips the adoption of the iPhone in its first quarter of sales. Perhaps what the iPhone has done for Apple is a sign of what the iPad might add in several years.

Quicken Essentials has a chance to change that perception that is not hard to spot in the marketplace. But the release rolled out this week to the Mac community won’t be confused with a business tool soon, even though some people will still be stubborn enough to run a business using it. When we heard that Essentials was based on the new blood from Mint.com, acquired by Intuit last year, Essentials was at least worth a look.

The look of the software is one of the biggest changes from the Quicken Mac 2007 and 2005 releases. Seeing your major expenditures in a cloud presentation is cool, but only useful if there’s a wide range of spending levels. Reporting and planning tools got an update, with a nifty feature to help you plan for savings by tracking your spending. We’d use it as a cash flow estimator, but we’re full of imagination here. That’s not usually something that a finance tool inspires.

Unfortunately, Essentials has stripped away some things that worked well enough to call Quicken for Mac a very small business solution. Rapid data entry is an essential all by itself to keep your books, but Essentials reduced the number of keyboard shortcuts and added clicks. This did not quicken the financial chore for us.

Then there’s the issue of data conversion. Nobody would be caught dead re-entering data to move to a new tool, and there’s a two-step process to bring your old data forward. But in our testing, the existing Quicken for 2005 file got orphaned and unusable during our conversion. It’s a simple save-as, but Intuit hasn’t understood simple, sometimes.

I never want to learn that my original data file has now become a “file that needs a newer version of Quicken” than I had before my conversion. Alas, my 2005 data was tagged as a Quicken for Mac 2007 file. It’s simple enough, I’d think, to simply save my old data in a renamed file.

An interview with the Quicken for Mac product manager Eddy Wu, during a live demo, told a story of a product line in transition. Quicken for Mac 2007 is not being put to pasture, even as Essentials emerges with some very good ideas from Mint.com. Intuit is putting some fresh wood behind the arrow of Mint, a solution some users saw as salvation from an Intuit that had strayed far from acceptable value in Mac users views.

There are people running businesses on Macs who would cringe at the thought of using QuickBooks, even though it’s got invoicing, AP and AR ledgers, all the standard and essential tools for real business financials. (Okay, the payroll solution is miles behind the Windows QuickBooks software, but that’s not as damning for a small enough business to have no payroll, just 1099 contractors.)

Wu said that there will be other versions of Essentials to come, improving on things like investment reporting. The company is listening, having acknowledged the pain of its Mac customers and hoping some Mint ideas might help. Unfortunately the pain isn’t throbbing from the need for smoother interfaces. “I had such high hopes last year,” said a user commenting on Amazon, “when you were promising new good Mac versions, but alas, both Quicken and QuickBooks are missing essential features, which render them unusable.”

Not as unusable as a 2005 file that won’t open anymore, but you get the idea of the rejuvenation task that remains in front of Intuit. At a $69.95 by-over (can’t call it an upgrade), Essentials is still missing enough improvement to spark our new investment in simple business accounting.