The media is busy tripping over themselves to pronounce 2016 as a bad year for Apple. Supposedly they fell short on the innovation front. One major national daily newspaper awarded a mediocre B- rating as a result. Others were even less disposed towards Apple’s abilities to deliver the goods.

While there are legitimate reasons to criticize Apple, you have to wonder how a company that can generate a couple of hundred billion dollars every year can be so terribly flawed? The implication is that Apple has this cult of hundreds of millions of avid fans that have been brainwashed into buying iPhones, iPads, Macs, and the Apple Watch, not to mention downloading stuff from the app stores and iTunes.

Do you see a disconnect here? Or does Apple’s management still have the ability to generate a reality distortion field to fool people into spending large sums of money on their gadgets? This is certainly an amazing ability that any political candidate would love to acquire. They would win elections by landslides without actually having to compete with anyone for votes.

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As most of you know, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 was pulled from the marketplace because it had a battery that could overheat or burst into flame. This was — or should have been — a major story not just for the few million users of the product, but for anyone who might have considered a Samsung product.

In retrospect, it appears that Samsung mostly did the right thing when it comes to issuing recalls. But it’s also clear the company’s engineers never got a good handle on the cause. They assumed a manufacturing defect with the battery, but even the “fixed” versions exhibited the same symptoms. So those units were also recalled, and Samsung finally got the message to take if off the market.

Only later was an actual apology issued. At first, the information released to the public was about the problem and how to return the devices for a refund or credit towards buying something else.

Now if that problem afflicted an iPhone or any Apple product using a battery, it would make worldwide headlines. There would be demands for investigations in the U.S. Congress and other government bodies around the world. They’d be calling for Tim Cook’s head if he didn’t provide a reasonable explanation as to what actually happened and why.

With the Galaxy Note 7 phablet off the market, just how would that impact Samsung’s smartphone sales during the holiday quarter? Some suggested Apple would benefit “bigly,” and that might explain the high demand for the iPhone 7.

Or maybe not.

According to Stephen Baker, a hardware analyst for NPD Group that I interview regularly on The Tech Night Owl LIVE, it doesn’t appear that Samsung’s holiday sales were hurt at all. Sales were in line with expectations.

Now without any surveys covering public attitudes to go by, I’m lost in speculative mode. So don’t take my conclusions seriously.

So it may well be that the public, or at least the people who’d normally choose a Samsung, were willing to forgive the company for this mistake. After all, they did do right by customers and recall the product once the defect was confirmed. It might have been nicer to issue an apology up front rather than weeks later. But it would have been better for Samsung to work harder to isolate the problem rather than release a flawed fix that had the very same symptoms. That looked real bad.

But I suspect that good sales were not the result of a forgiving public. I think it was more the result of most people being unaware that there was even a problem.

Yes, there was a decent amount of coverage in the mainstream news media, and more coverage on tech sites. Cable news shows ran short reports about it, but you wonder how many people they truly reached, and whether there were regular follow-ups on the status of the defective products. Were there stories about its financial impact to Samsung’s bottom line? What about the executives who may have been responsible for this outrage?

As I said, if Apple received a negative headline of this sort, it’s fairly certain that a large number of people would know about it. Samsung? Not so much unless the coverage was extensive. If the cable TV talking heads invited executives and tech analysts to discuss “batterygate,” perhaps there would be greater awareness.

While I’m not a betting man, I suspect that a poll among owners of smartphones would show very little awareness of the fate of the Galaxy Note 7. Maybe power users and devoted Samsung users would have a smattering of knowledge about the situation, but otherwise no. So it’s understandable there wasn’t any discernible impact to sales. Other than a sarcastic comment during the media event where the iPhone 7 was launched, it’s not that Apple made a big deal of it.

After all, such problems can happen to any tech company. Lithium-ion batteries do occasionally overheat in lots of products, only not as often. There have been occasional failures of that sort involving iPhones and other gear. So Apple must know it could happen to them too, and thus it was better not to make a big deal about it.

As I said, I’m not inclined to allow for a forgiving public, just a public mostly unaware of the problem.

That takes us to the Late 2016 MacBook Pro. The Consumer Reports review, in which these notebooks were not recommended due to alleged inconsistent battery life, was only released late in the holiday season. Even though the magazine has millions of readers, it’s not apt to have much of an immediate impact on sales. Since Apple is apparently working with the publication to find out what went wrong, it’s quite possible a fix to the test methodology, or to the Macbook Pro, will come before long, and the rating will be adjusted accordingly.

I would be curious, though, to see a polling firm survey the results of such scandals to see how the public is reacting to them, or if they are even aware of such things. Indeed, if you look at some of the surveys, it’s frightening to discover the falsehoods that many people believe. But I’ll stay away from politics. If you’re curious, a quick search will yield some startling — sometimes frightening — results.

Of late, Apple has been dinged for not being devoted to delivering frequent updates to Mac hardware. That’s now. But once upon a time, the critics claimed that Apple rushed to make older gear obsolete so you’d buy something new more often. It sure seemed that way because almost every OS release seemed slower than the previous release, making it less usable on older hardware.

One of the most blatant examples in Apple’s early history was Mac OS 7, released in 1991. It was a pretty major release for its time, with a modernized interface, embedded MultiFinder for automatic cooperative multitasking, and it was 32-bit clean. That meant that, if you had the proper hardware, you could use more than 8MB of RAM, and that was a good thing.

Indeed, Apple didn’t begin to migrate to 64-bit computing until the Power Mac G5 arrived in 2004. The earliest Intel-based Macs didn’t even support 64-bit for a year or two.

In any case, System 7 worked well enough on the faster Macs, but if you had an entry-level machine, such as the Macintosh Classic, it was very much about trudging through quicksand. I recall using one of these machines at the office; management bought a few to manage the task of sending files to the CompuGraphic high-resolution output device. But for doing real work in QuarkXPress or one of the other high-power apps we used, forget about it.

Of course, as hardware became more powerful, the shortcomings of the OS weren’t so clear-cut, until Mac OS X arrived. But you still wanted to stay reasonably current to get acceptable performance from your apps; in those days we called them “applications,” by the way. Even then, the Unix-based industrial strength operating system was dead slow at the beginning. The Mac that would run the Classic Mac OS with great performance seemed barely able to cope with what is now macOS.

Funny thing, though: As Macs became more powerful, even older models could run the latest OS with decent performance. The late 2009 27-inch iMac that I used as my main work machine did just fine with macOS Sierra. To be fair, it was upgraded with an SSD. But Apple continues to extend support for computers built six or seven years ago, and most should be able to get acceptable performance. Indeed, this is a key reason why people aren’t as apt to upgrade. As I have written before, year-to-year performance improvements are very modest nowadays due to Intel’s emphasis on power efficiency over maximizing number crunching power.

I still have a 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro. I like large screens, but Apple discontinued this form favor in 2011. The following year, when the MacBook Pro with Retina display arrived, they topped out at 15 inches. In any case, I have performed two upgrades in the last couple of years. The one that delivered the most improvement was replacing the 500GB hard drive with an equivalent SSD. I also doubled RAM to 8GB. My son, Grayson, has been working on that computer since he came home from Madrid for his annual two-week visit. He says it seems to run about as fast as the new 13-inch MacBook Air that he purchased earlier this year.

Sure, we’re comparing a high-end Mac notebook from six years ago to a 2015 entry-level machine. What it means is that there is not a whole lot of incentive for you to buy a new Mac. Grayson will probably keep his computer until it drops, same as he did with its predecessor, a 2008 MacBook. Other than professional users who need every ounce of performance, many Mac users will probably agree with him.

The situation is probably similar on the Windows platform. Any decently equipped PC built in the last few years should deliver acceptable performance with Windows 10 and most of the apps they need. The incentive to rush out and buy a new PC isn’t there. Indeed, many businesses stick with old hardware — and older operating systems — until the machines are essentially worn out. I cannot tell you how many companies I’ve visited in recent months that are still using aging hardware with Windows 7, released in 2009, or even Windows XP, which arrived in 2001.

In short, the suggestion that Apple — and Microsoft for that matter — have been doing things to make computers obsolete after two or three years is just plain absurd. PC sales are down overall. Many customers rely on smartphones and tablets, and where they need the power and flexibility of a traditional PC, they hang on to what they have for as long as they can.

Then there’s the claim that Apple isn’t really that interested in Macs anymore, because they earn so much more from iPhones. But why would they drop a business that delivers $22 billion in revenue every year? Tim Cook claims the roadmap is positive for Mac desktops. This despite the fact that far more notebooks are sold. There’s an unconfirmed report that only the iMac will merit a refresh in 2017, but he did not say, “desktop.” He said, “desktops.” Other than implying a multiyear roadmap, it would seem Apple has more in mind than a minor refresh for a single model.

Then again, aside from using faster parts, just what do you expect Apple to do? Indeed, what sort of improvements would you expect for the iPad or the iPhone going forward? Would having an iPhone 8 with an edge-to-edge OLED display really make it a must-have? Or would that be just a frill that you’d consider when it’s time to buy something new? For me, I’d say the latter.

Now when it comes to the Apple Watch, since it’s early in the game, each iteration will probably change considerably. In the next year or two, it’ll have a cellular radio. Assuming it’s really successful — and we only have an unproven claim from Tim Cook that independent analysts would find difficult to verify — you expect that it will take a few years for it to reach maturity. Then the changes will be minor, same as the rest of Apple’s products.

Not so many years ago, there was good reason to upgrade your tech gear fairly often. Each year brought major performance and feature improvements. If you had the cash, you could revel in the glory of all those enhancements. If you hung onto a device for even a few years, you may have felt you had an obsolete product.

This was especially true in the early years of a product’s lifecycle. So you could depend on every iPhone being substantially better than its predecessor. The traditional two-year upgrade cycle was based on the standard cellular contract, where you’d pay a small amount of money — or no money — and take your device home. The phone was usually locked, so you couldn’t just switch to another carrier until the agreement was complete. If you broke it before then, you’d pay a hefty early termination fee that was usually on a sliding scale.

So this encouraged you to seek something new after the contract was up, especially since the monthly price seldom changed after the initial down payment. Of course, you could buy the handset outright and be free of such restrictions.

More recently, carriers in the U.S. require that you buy the smartphone up front, or agree to some sort of time payment plan where you essentially lease the device for a given period. Again it’s usually two years, and many plans let you upgrade free every 12, 18 or 24 months. Of course, if you upgrade before the unit is paid for, you have to return it, usually within a short period of time after its replacement arrives. Otherwise, you’ll be billed for the balance due.

Even though smartphone sales have cooled, that’s more a function of a saturated market in most developed countries. But it’s also true that up-to-date hardware, unless it’s strictly low-end, is good enough for most people. True, there are plenty of differences between the 2014 iPhone 6 and the 2016 iPhone 7, but both perform well enough with iOS 10, and the new features are not really essential for many people.

That doesn’t mean that the iPhone 7 isn’t selling so well. Indeed, demand appears to be high, and the “Plus” version was back ordered until recently. A published report indicates that Apple saw twice as many activations of iPhones and iPads as Samsung, its nearest competitor, during the holiday sales period.

But when it comes to the iPad, upgrade fever cooled long ago, as people decided that the device they had was good enough and there was (with few exceptions) no cellular contract or upgrade program to entice them to order something new. In the September quarter, the sales drop was in the single digits, better than it has been in recent quarters, which may indicate sales are starting to flatten. Perhaps as more people decide to upgrade, sales will increase again. Or maybe many iPad users aren’t quite as convinced of the benefits of the tablet form factor.

So is there anything that Apple can do to make you want to replace your iPad, assuming it still works well enough for your needs? Other than the usual speed bumps, they haven’t changed all that much. The exception is the “Pro” lineup, which has a Smart Connector for a compatible keyboard. The 9.7-inch version also includes the wider color gamut that Apple added to the iPhone 7 and to last year’s iMac.

Indeed, that the average sale price of iPads has increased may indicate that the Pro models are taking an increasing share of sales. We might know a lot more when the December quarter financials are released in late January 2017.

As to Macs, upgrade fever cooled long ago. It appears that more and more people are hanging onto their Macs for longer periods. The fact that annual refreshes are generally very modest also fuels contentment with the one you already have. Why spend a bundle of money on a new computer when it hasn’t changed all that much?

As I wrote yesterday, the Late 2016 MacBook Pro — absent the Touch Bar and the battery life controversy — is only slightly faster in many respects than its predecessor. Graphics are a sweet spot, and the SSD is a lot faster too. But unless you’re concerned about decent gaming, and having every drive-based function sped up as much as possible, perhaps it won’t matter. Indeed, even if Apple, as predicted, refreshes the iMac in 2017, it probably won’t be sufficient to tempt many owners of the 2014 and 2015 models. The same may be true for the Mac mini.

A key exception is apt to be the Mac Pro, if it ever earns another upgrade. After more than three years, it’s clear that Intel’s Xeon processor and graphics hardware from AMD and NVIDIA run noticeably faster and would thus yield the sort of improvement professional users expect from a high-end workstation. Apple will no doubt add support for USB-C and Thunderbolt 3, which will also speed up peripherals that support the new technologies. That is, if a new Mac Pro ever comes.

Overall, however, selling upgrades to existing customers has become more of a hard sell. The lack of significant improvements year-to-year, and the usually superb reliability of Apple’s gadgets, means that customers are apt to keep what they have for longer periods.

Unless there is some spectacular development that advances there state of the art in such products in a way that makes the new hardware must-haves, this is the new normal.

It doesn’t help that the ragged nature of the world economy has made it more difficult for people to invest in upgrades for their tech gear before its time.