Apple has received its share of attacks this year, and some of it appears to be deserved. But I won’t dwell on the possibilities except for the device that used to be its most important product — the Mac. Up until the past year, you could usually depend on annual product refreshes.

The usual setup was to launch a major upgrade — a new case design and other hardware features, such as the Retina display — every few years, after which there would be roughly annual refreshes with faster parts. But the latter depended on Intel’s product roadmap after the 2006 processor switch, and that state of affairs has become less and less dependable.

So at one time, you could be assured of a new Mac with a decent speed bump from year to year. If performance was important to you, it was worth investing in the new model every two or three years. You could verify the improvements in benchmarks published by Macworld and other tech publications.

Over time the famous Moore’s Law — about doubling the number of transistors per square inch in an integrated circuit every year — began to hit the wall. What’s more, Intel appeared to be more interested in boosting battery life than than boosting performance in its processor upgrades. Integrated graphics were also enhanced to the point where you could usually depend on being able to watch HD (and now 4K) movies and experience mostly usable performance from gaming without the need for discrete parts.

In recent years, it appeared as if the annual improvements were so modest as to represent only a few percentage points on a benchmark. When it came to real work, most users — Macs and PCs — would probably not notice the difference. What happened was that even the lower-end machines delivered perfectly acceptable performance for most people, and only the power users cared about every percentage point improvement. So you could hang onto your computer for several years and depend on acceptable performance before it was ready to pass down to another member of the family, or retire.

Apple’s notebook product separation was pretty well defined until recently. You had a MacBook for consumers, and a MacBook Pro for professional users who needed near-desktop power on the road. With the arrival of the MacBook Air, the distinction appeared to blur. These days, you have the MacBook, which is strictly entry-level when it comes to performance, but at $1,299, it sits way above the MacBook Air, which benchmarks as noticeably faster. But the MacBook has a Retina display and the MacBook Air doesn’t.

This fall, Apple reduced the MacBook Air lineup to the 13-inch model, unchanged from last year. The MacBook appears destined to take its place as soon as the price becomes sensible. That could happen in 2017, although this is not a prediction I’d depend on.

With the desktop lineup, Apple has merely confused customers. Throughout 2016, nothing was changed, not that it would have mattered much for the Mac mini and the iMac. As I said, year-over-year processor upgrades from Intel haven’t been significant of late, and power savings doesn’t matter much for a desktop computer that’s already quite power efficient.

The Mac Pro is another breed of cat. Three years in, improvements in Intel Xeons and graphics processors should have been significant enough to fuel a decent upgrade. As it is, you are basically paying the same money for a three-year-old computer, and it’s understandable customers are upset. Just what is Apple up to and why wasn’t anything done in 2016?

According to a published report, Apple only plans minor refreshes for the MacBook, MacBook Pro and iMac in 2017. Well, that might make sense. I would also expect to see the iMac inherit the USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports early next year, when Intel’s Kaby Lake processors are available in sufficient quantities. Otherwise, I suppose there’s no harm in keeping the current form factor that is fronted by the 27-inch model with that amazing 5K Retina display. Maybe Apple will boost graphics to manage two similar external displays.

On the other hand, it’s not that the 2017 iMac would necessarily be much faster than its predecessor, the 2015 model, except for speedier SSDs. But what about the Mac mini and the Mac Pro? The former is easily updated with the latest parts from Intel. The latter? That very much depends on Apple’s commitment to building a professional workstation. Leaving it alone for three years doesn’t seem to indicate much interest, and there’s that published report about Apple’s 2017 plans that do not mention the two “headless” Macs.

But what about Tim Cook’s recent promise about the desktop roadmap? Part of a message to Apple employees, Cook was responding to published reports that Apple was neglecting the Mac. While there were no specifics, Cook referred to “desktops,” and not “desktop,” meaning it involves more than a single model. But since there’s no timetable, not even a reference to 2017, only Apple knows when. It would have been far more reassuring for Cook to mention something about future Mac desktops during the October media event where the MacBook Pro was introduced.

As I said, it doesn’t seem terribly difficult to upgrade the entire Mac desktop lineup this coming spring, even if the changes aren’t significant. Other than the curious Microsoft Surface Studio and the spread of 2-in-1 Windows notebooks, personal computers haven’t changed all that much in recent years. The concept of a touchscreen PC is nothing new either.

Indeed, the Late 2016 MacBook Pro wouldn’t be regarded as a significant upgrade either were it not for the Touch Bar. Just making it thinner and lighter is otherwise not all that important.

Long and short, it’s probably unrealistic to expect major upgrades to Macs — or PCs for that matter — every single year. Apple doesn’t have to invest a whole lot of resources to continue to refresh Macs on a regular basis, assuming Intel cooperates with new parts. And that’s the major problem. Intel has been running later and later with its processor improvements, leaving Apple adrift to some extent. And, no, I do not expect to see ARM-powered Macs anytime soon — or ever. But it is possible the use of an A-series chip for support tasks, such as the Touch Bar, will increase going forward.

Do you remember the “bendgate” scandal? Perhaps not, because it was never a scandal, but some wiseacre got the bright idea to post a video on YouTube showing how “easy” it was to bend an iPhone 6 Plus. That someone was willing to seriously damage one’s expensive smartphone seemed crazy enough, unless, of course, the ad revenues were sufficient to buy a new one and then some. Or pretend to Apple that it wasn’t his or her fault.

But whenever Apple is involved, it’s easy to see a profitable reason to want to create some fake news or a phony scandal in order to generate hits and increase ad revenues. But at the end of the day, there was nothing wrong with the iPhone 6 Plus. It was strong enough to survive normal use, but that didn’t stop others from putting it to the test.

So Square Trade, a company that sells extended warranties online and in stores, ran some informal tests. Since they have to provide repairs in case your covered device is damaged or develops a defect, it was in their own best interests to see, and actually damaging the iPhone 6 Plus wasn’t very easy. That takes us to Consumer Reports, who ran their own tests in 2014, with great fanfare, against competing gear from HTC, LG and Samsung, and pronounced the iPhone’s durability as acceptable. There were no defects at all, but plenty of headlines were generated.

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So most of you know that the quality of cell phone calls ranges from almost acceptable to dreadful. More often than not, it’s the latter, as a voice at the other end of the call is often immersed in a digital haze that makes it a little hard to understand. To think that all of the advancements made in technology still fail to match the voice quality of the analog telephone system in the late 19th century.

Some of it is no doubt the result of the move to digital cellular systems over the years and the efforts to pack as many connections as possible in a single tower to handle as many paid customers as possible. So voice quality is less important. These days it’s all about data anyway. People talk via messaging or email, so having a high quality voice connection may not be so important.

In saying that, my experiences with cell phone systems over the years led me to AT&T, then known as Cingular. I signed up with the service primarily to be ready for the iPhone just as soon as my contract with Verizon Wireless had ended. At the time, in 2007, I was very disappointed with voice quality on the Verizon system, and I came to prefer AT&T, since the best connections seemed more analog, more akin to a traditional landline phone connection. But network reliability wasn’t as good. I encountered more dropped calls.

In passing, the dropped calls are largely history, at least in the areas to which I travel.

That takes us to HD Voice, which is a technology designed to provide higher quality audio on a cellular connection. Referred to VoLTE, which is Voice over LTE), it’s similar to a VoIP connection on a traditional Internet network. When two parties with HD-voice mobile phones are connected in a network that supports the feature, call quality is noticeably better, which is mostly my perception from personal experience.

The wireless carriers have had different rollouts of HD Voice. To AT&T, it’s clearly been a work in progress.

So that takes us to a problem I occasionally confronted when calling someone on my iPhone. The ringing sound seemed much slower, deeper. When someone answered, they’d be speaking real slow too, akin to playing a 78 RPM record at 33-and-a-third RPM. But that assumes you’re familiar with vinyl, or just imagine playing any recording at a slower speed and you’ll see what I mean.

With AT&T, I only encountered that problem when placing a call, not receiving a call. Usually, when I hung up and called back, the problem was gone.

I’ve mentioned my encounters with AT&T support before, but it has taken four calls, the latter with a higher level of technical support, to get the extent of the problem and it’s expected solution.

So during the first two calls, the technician claimed to be making changes to the provisioning of my iPhone. Since the phone numbers were ported from Verizon, that condition supposedly created potential integration issues. Or perhaps the technician was shooting from the hip, since the cause appears to have nothing to do with the source of my phone number.

Each time, I concluded the call after being told to power down my iPhone, and power up again. This would allegedly activate network changes that would address the problem. But I have come to feel that they were just mollifying me or hoping that the act of power cycling would clear up the connection glitch.

It didn’t.

But on the second call, the technician promised to send the problem up to engineering, and I should call back if it recurred, which it did a few days later. You see, I don’t make phone calls all that often.

On the third call, the technician claimed that engineering wasn’t able to duplicate the problem, and suggested I call the number I received in a text message a few days prior.

That’s when I finally had what seemed to be a more logical response.

The higher-tier technician seemed totally aware of the problem, which, he said, involved glitches using HD Voice, a sort of digital mismatch he tried to explain. He claimed it was a known issue and that it should be resolved by the end of the year, that I should call back if it wasn’t corrected. In the meantime, I was advised to turn off HD Voice on my iPhone to remove the symptoms.

That’s done by going to Settings > Cellular > Cellular Data Options > Enable LTE > and switching from the Voice & Data option to Data Only. It seems more complicated than it is, but making that one change takes only a few seconds. Obviously such changes on an Android phone will involve far different settings that may depend on the device and OS you’re using.

What I did notice was that voice quality seemed to degrade slightly without HD Voice, but the problem didn’t repeat itself. At least not so far. If the technician’s answer is accurate, that makes sense. The new service is still being refined on the AT&T network. If you’re a customer, it may not even be active in your city, in which case the HD Voice option will not be available.

Now the technician claimed that support people had ready access to technical information about known problems and solutions. It surprises me — but not a lot — that the first tier AT&T techs were totally ignorant of that information, which means they weren’t paying attention, or made no move to consult such data. Perhaps they were more interested in getting me off the phone and moving on to the next customer.

I’ve said previously that AT&T’s customer service has nosedived since the acquisition of DirecTV. It may not take a further hit if the bid to merge with Time Warner is approved. That’s only because Time Warner doesn’t provide direct services to customers that require tech support. Or maybe AT&T will see the need to cut costs even further.

I’ll let you know if the HD Voice problem — if that’s what it is — has been resolved.

It’s very clear that Mac users are really feeling left out these days by the dearth of product upgrades from Apple. Some of you may have read the Bloomberg piece that claims that the Mac platform is getting short shrift. But CEO Tim Cook now asserts there are great things for desktop computers in Apple’s product roadmap.

Now Cook did write that message to Apple employees in response to media concerns about what was going on with the Mac platform. It wasn’t so many years ago that Macs came first for Apple, but the massive growth of the iPhone, which arrived with modest expectations, sure changed things. But the Mac still represents roughly $22 billion in annual revenue for Apple. There were many years when the company didn’t earn that much for all its products, so it’s very significant and it wouldn’t make sense to led it slide even if we are in the twilight of the PC era.

Besides, and let’s not forget this, iOS apps are developed on Macs. There is no iOS version of Xcode. As we know, iOS was built on the foundation of the macOS. I do suppose it’s possible for Apple to make a version of Xcode for the iPad, and that might lessen reliance on Macs. But not yet.

Despite Cook’s reassurances, though, there is a big disconnect between his promises about the desktop “roadmap” and the claims of that Bloomberg columnist that next year’s Mac upgrades would be limited to minor refreshes for the iMac, MacBook and MacBook Pro. That’s not terribly encouraging.

Now I would expect only minor changes for the MacBook and MacBook Pro, particularly the latter since it’s already had its major redesign. At the same time, I think Apple understands the prices for both are on the high side. That does explain why the now-shipping LG displays and USB-C adaptors from Apple are being discounted by 25% through March 31, 2017. That decision was made to lessen the barrier to buying the new Mac notebooks.

Indeed, I would not be surprised to see those price reductions continue without change. I would not be surprised to see the next MacBook and MacBook Pro refreshes to also come in at lower prices. With the MacBook Air limited to the 13-inch model — which received no changes this year — Apple appears to have crafted the MacBook as its intended replacement. When the price comes down, that is. Using the example of the 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display, dropping $300 from the entry-level prices of the MacBook and MacBook Pro make perfect sense. That’s in keeping with the way Macs have prices have been revised in recent years. It would also give Apple the excuse to discontinue the MacBook Air, and keep a simplified notebook lineup.

As to the iMac, I suppose there’s not much reason to change very much, except for adding Intel Kaby Lake CPUs, more powerful graphics, USB-C and Thunderbolt 3. In addition to faster parts, and this is pure speculation on my part, I can foresee a Pro version with an Intel 8-core i7, and perhaps two internal SSDs. Offering such a high-end iMac might, in fact, satisfy at least some Mac Pro users as a very workable and more affordable alternative. It would help if Apple devised a graphics system capable of driving two external 5K displays.

I have no idea of demand for the Mac mini, but a simple component update wouldn’t cost much to produce, and it would keep an entry-level option for new Mac users who find Apple’s usual prices to be way beyond their budgets.

The Mac Pro? Surely Apple’s desktop roadmap isn’t limited to minor refreshes for a single model. Could it be that Apple is waiting for the newest generation Xeons and graphics chips before delivering that long-delayed upgrade? One article erroneously claimed that Apple only uses AMD graphics, and cited some new developments from NVIDIA, such as Pascal architecture, as something Apple has missed. What that critic ignores is that Apple has always moved back and forth between AMD and NVIDIA parts in delivering graphics hardware over the years. So the new Pascal technology could, I suppose, form the basis for updated Mac Pro graphics. Or give power users a choice of the best from AMD and NVIDIA and let them make their own decisions, although that approach is out of Apple’s comfort zone.

Is there room for yet another desktop Mac? I doubt it, because the focus is mostly on notebooks these days. That said — and perhaps I’m reading more into Cook’s statement — I suspect Apple is committed to doing some interesting things for the Mac platform. The introduction of the Touch Bar was a not-trivial addition, and it was obviously not intended for a single model. It’s quite possible that a future MacBook will have it too, and then there’s the possibility of a Magic Keyboard with Touch Bar. It won’t come cheap, and I wonder how Touch ID on a wireless keyboard might integrate with a Mac. Perhaps Bluetooth 5.0 will offer more options, or Apple will pull some Bluetooth integration stunts in the spirit of what was done with the AirPods, using a special chip for instant pairing and tighter integration.

Listen, I’ve used Macs for three decades. I cannot foresee switching to an iPad for the work I do, and I’m confident there are enough people out there to keep the Mac platform going for a while. Sales growth may lie in the past, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be enough revenue to keep it going for quite a while. Maybe not for the next 30 years, but I probably won’t be around to care.