You’ve heard all this before: There’s an article in a certain online publication that pretends to analyze Apple under Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive and reach conclusions about the company’s future. There’s a lot nuance as to what they believe Apple is doing or not doing, but, obviously, real facts are scarce. It’s not as if Apple gives very much information about its future plans.

True, when new products are released, there may be some carefully curated background information. So we know that it took two years to create the Touch Bar for the new MacBook Pro. On the other hand, that may be, in whole or part, very much about corporate spin, to tell a good story in order to make the product seem more attractive. Or just to create an air of magic around the design process. But since nothing can be verified, how are we to know what really happened? It’s not as if selected members of the media were allowed to document the process with video on the promise not to talk about it till the products were released.

And, of course, you do not expect Apple to do any such thing. A key attraction about the company’s creative process is that it’s mostly done in secret. You don’t know about what’s coming until a few months before it arrives, where supply chain leaks might provide some telltale hints. So, months before it was launched, you knew the iPhone 7 wouldn’t have a headphone jack and probably would look very close to the iPhone 6s, its predecessor. Weeks before the MacBook Pro arrived, there were reports that the function keys would be replaced with some sort of OLED-based touchscreen. The actual brand name, Touch Bar, wasn’t mentioned, or at least I didn’t see it.

The article in question raises concerns over the fact that Jonny Ive has had a small team around him for up to 20 years, largely unchanged. Very likely some of those team members will be ready to retire before long, or move elsewhere, and that might signify a potential creative crisis. I suppose that might be true, and the article presents concerns over the apparent lack of young hires to replace the experienced staffers. Again, that’s almost impossible to know, unless someone is promoted — or hired — as an executive and has their name posted somewhere, such as in a LinkedIn profile.

True, some new blood in a department is a good thing, especially one where personnel changes have been few over a number of years. The participants in that article try hard to seem knowledgeable, but it’s clear they are making things up along the way, or just speculating without real information.

One positive, I suppose, is that they rate Tim Cook better able to handle Apple as it grew into the stratosphere. Perhaps because Cook was more open to changes, such as giving stockholders dividends. But Jobs was anything if predictable, and he did change his views more frequently than not. So this is just the sort of unfounded speculation that may seem credible, but lacks facts with which to back it up.

Unless they have ouija boards in use and they imagine they are communicating with Jobs from the “other side.”

Now one more tidbit from the article may be worth a comment. It’s nothing new. It’s the usual fear-mongering that Apple cannot afford for any product or service to fail. It would be ruinous to the company. Products that haven’t soared allegedly include Apple Pay, which remains the top mobile payment platform, and the Apple Watch, which is early in is lifecycle.

The assumption here is that Apple should not be preparing for the long-term, giving a new service or product time to grow and find its potential. There has to be immediate gratification. But remember that the iPhone didn’t just enter the market with sales of tens of millions of units a year. It took several years to really grow. When the iPhone was launched in 2007, there wasn’t even an App Store, and the story goes that Jobs had to be convinced to allow it to happen rather than rely on web apps.

The iPad grew faster. But it was, in part, an extension of the iPhone ecosystem, an already established market. And after a few years, it appeared to have reached a saturation point. But sales aren’t dropping as much as they used to, and average sale prices are higher. So the iPad’s future potential is not at all certain, although you can see where the critics will count it out.

I suppose the same can be said for the Mac, where sales are off from their peaks, but Apple is still making lots of money from them. The Late 2016 MacBook Pro clearly represents a big investment in the future. Apple didn’t refresh the design and invent the Touch Bar with the expectation that traditional personal computers were about to disappear.

Now I enjoy speculation about Apple as much as anyone. But I also hope the speculation is informed, and that’s rarely true.

Both Apple and Google have app stores. Big app stores, with millions of titles available for download or purchase and download. Although Apple had the lead out of the starting gate, Google is somewhat ahead of Apple now with 2.4 million offerings in the Google Play store as of September of this year. In contrast, two million items were listed at the App Store as of June, so perhaps Apple has caught up since then.

However, Apple developers appear to earn far more money. The total payouts are said to be $50 billion as of the June WWDC. But those numbers include all sales since 2008, when the App Store debuted.

The long and short of it is that you’d think both Google Play and the App Store are pretty comparable, that it probably doesn’t matter which platform you choose. You’ll probably find many of the apps you want in versions for each. But in the real world, it may not be so easy. So there are loads of wallpaper apps or apps that appear to substantially duplicate other apps at Google Play. A lot of it is sheer junk, and I observed this when I used a pair of Samsung Galaxy smartphones a couple of years back.

Indeed, I even found apps that superficially duplicated some of the look and feel of Apple Mail for iOS, or situations where developers had several different versions of an app, perhaps one free, another carrying a price tag, or was just slightly different.

Apple sweats the details more, with their app reviewers demonstrating greater commitments to making sure submissions actually work and are free of obvious bugs or security holes, before they approved and posted. Sometimes apps are removed when troubles are discovered later on, and developers have long criticized sometimes arbitrary review decisions. Apple has also been removing older apps that haven’t been updated to current iOS features. In other words, software that’s catching dust and hasn’t been updated in a while is at risk of being pulled.

The standards at Google Play are less stringent, though certainly apps that may contain security problems would not get approval or be pulled if the issues are discovered later on. The larger problem is that it may take a year or two for a new version of the Android OS to be available in a large number of smartphones. As of the first year, market share may be in the single digits. So developers are loathe to support features that only a small percentage of the user base can use. That would appear to hold back advancement of the platform.

In contrast, most users of iOS gear will upgrade their hardware within the first year, assuming that gear is compatible. Most of the upgrades occur within the first few months.

But I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether Google Play or the App Store is better for them. My experience favors the latter, and Apple is also a better fit for developers who want at least a chance to make some money. But with over two million apps, the possibility of making a killing can’t be that high.

But what about the Mac App Store?

Well, it’s a mixed bag in terms of the selection. Because of the sandboxing constraints imposed by Apple, many apps cannot be posted. Or they are posted with fewer features. Rogue Amoeba’s amazing Audio Hijack — an important tool for podcasters or anyone wishing to grab and mix audio from different sources — contains a bag of tricks that won’t past muster at the App Store.

Fortunately, developers of such apps can still sell them independently at their own sites or through such download sites as MacUpdate or CNET. Still, not being available from Apple has to reduce the chances for success. In saying that, key productivity apps with somewhat invasive installers, which put files in a number of folders on your Mac, are also excluded. You cannot buy such apps as Microsoft Office for Mac or QuarkXPress from the App Store. They are distributed direct from the publishers.

But what about the quality of the offerings at the Mac App Store?

Well, there’s a published report in a certain online publication that claims the “Mac App Store [is]  Full of Bogus Junk.” How so?

Well, the author of that piece points to several apps that appear to masquerade as apps from Adobe and Microsoft, but that may not quite be true. Examples include apps that contain training videos for Adobe Photoshop but at first may appear to be knockoffs of the app itself. But that’s not true, since they are clearly training videos, or at least that becomes clear if you read the description. So you can hardly call them bogus.

You can only download Adobe’s key Ma  productivity apps if you order up a subscription to the Adobe Creative Cloud. You can’t buy or subscribe to them from Apple and, as I said, the same is true for the key offerings from Microsoft, although a simpler offering, Microsoft’s free OneNote, can be downloaded from the App Store.

Users of iPhones and iPads can get mobile editions of various apps from Adobe and Microsoft, including Office. Would that Microsoft would design a version of Office for Mac that can be purchased from the Mac App Store. It would require a simpler installer and a less-invasive setup process. After all Apple’s Final Cut Pro X, which is a very sophisticated app, is available at the App Store.

But suggesting that a handful of apps that might provide training videos or offer support functions for a major productivity app doesn’t mean that the App Store is filled with knockoffs or junk. At worst, it may be that the labeling ought to be clearer.

While the article might get plenty of hits, there’s no context. How does the Mac App Store compare to what the Microsoft Store offers? Even though there are far more Windows apps than Mac apps, the quality has traditionally been lower. And developers have been slow to embrace Microsoft’s online software repository.

Yes, Apple can surely do better. And it would be nice if categories of apps that are now excluded from the App Store were allowed. But a few apps that one calls “bogus” doesn’t make it a bad place to go. It’s just someone looking for bad news about Apple even though the situation is usually worse elsewhere.

When Apple first announced that iPhone sales had dipped in the March quarter, you can bet that the critics were salivating. After predicting doom and gloom for the company for so many years, maybe they weren’t crying wolf after all. Maybe the iPhone would lose sales big time, and become a niche product in the marketplace. Is Apple fated to become the next BlackBerry?

All right, that’s pushing it.

But it’s really easy to talk about crumbling demand for iPhones — and Macs for that matter — considering recent declines in sales. And don’t forget the iPad. Aren’t tablets passé?

Such “nasty” details may seem to verify the claims from some so-called industry analysts and tech pundits who always seem to find excuses to demonstrate that Apple is doing something wrong, and that the company’s leadership, particularly CEO Tim Cook, just isn’t smart enough to figure it all out and do what they really want Apple to do. Besides, isn’t he the operations guy? What business does he have leading a company that relies on cutting-edge innovation?

So what do they want Apple to do? Well, make cheaper Macs for one. Why should Apple keep the majority of the high-end PC market to itself, when it can go head-to-head with Dell and HP and sell the same cheap commodity hardware? Why earn big profits when they can sell lots of gear with margins of just a few percent, if that?

The iPhone? People want cheap, so make a $199 model, discount it with two-for-one offers, and sales will triple. And profits will tumble.

That’s part of it anyway. Mostly it’s about cheap, or revolutionizing a market every year or so.

And why hasn’t Apple licensed its crown jewels, iOS and macOS so that other companies can build commodity hardware and spread the joy? Of course, the critics forget that Apple gives the operating systems away on its own gear. Profits come from the sale of hardware and not operating systems, so the only impact of such a foolish decision would be lost sales. Apple went through some of that during its brief foray into Mac OS licensing in the mid-1990s. Several companies, such as Motorola and Power Computing, built cheap PC clone-style hardware running the Mac system software. Rather than expand the market, they competed directly with Apple’s higher-priced machines, although they offered poor quality control and irritating bugs that weren’t always caused by the OS.

Fortunately, Steve Jobs helped Apple come to its senses in 1997, as he sliced and diced unneeded or poorly performing stuff, killed OS licensing, and set the company on a stable, profitable course. But it didn’t happen overnight.

So when the critics want Apple to revert to what it was when it was in danger of going out of business — or being sold off at reduced prices to a competitor — you wonder what they’re drinking, or smoking.

So is it true that Apple’s best days are behind it? That doesn’t appear to be the case, since the company’s financial guidance for the current quarter indicates a slight sales increase. Apple doesn’t engage in wishful thinking, and such estimates tend to be conservative. But it would indicate pretty high sales of the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus.

Now demand may well indicate this may happen. Although you can pretty much find the iPhone 7 you want at an Apple Store, or other vendors, you may have to wait another three weeks or so for an iPhone 7 Plus. Apple is currently listing availability by December 22 if you place your order now.

Supposedly the iPhone 7 was intended to be an “s-type” or minor upgrade to the iPhone 6s, which didn’t do as well as its predecessor after the first full successful quarter. So what’s going on here? Why the tight supplies? Well, industry analyst Gene Munster, of Piper Jaffray, reports the iPhone as No. 1 on its annual holiday wish list survey. The 7.2% rating, based on responses from 1,000 consumers, is just behind the 2013 total of 7.7%. But it’s also way ahead of the iPhone’s position in 2015, 5.2%. Don’t forget the mixed performance of the iPhone 6s, so this may be significant.

Oh, and number two on the list is the MacBook, at 2.15%. Of the top 10, there’s nothing from Samsung or Microsoft. Number four is the “Smartwatch” category, but its not subdivided by brand, so maybe Samsung would be in there if individual models were included. Still, at 0.9%, it’s substantially lower than in 2015, where it was 1.6%. Does this portend a problem with Apple Watch sales? Since the results don’t name brands or individual models, there’s no way to know.

Now compare that to Target’s Black Friday sales report, where new TVs were moving at a speedy clip, and the iPad Air 2 was in high demand. But that’s just one retailer. It may well be that Piper Jaffrey’s survey reveals a wider sampling, but again it’s still a wish list, not a sales report. When push comes to shove, would-be customers may be influenced by special deals and more immediate concerns, such as the feeling that the family TV has seen better days, and wouldn’t one of those nifty new 4K sets look great in the living room?

The fact that Apple products are way ahead of the competition in that wish list, however, clearly indicates there’s lots of potential for the brand’s ongoing success, at least for this holiday season.

After fits and starts, it is starting to appear as if the long-awaited 4K TV revolution may be coming to pass, to the delight of TV makers. It has certainly reached a critical mass, with more and more low-cost sets supporting the new standard. So I noticed a Samsung 40-inch 4K set for $347.99 at Target, and that’s not the cheapest price you can get. Walmart was offering a no-name (Sceptre) 43-inch 4K TV for $279.99.

Of course, such discount prices are generally exclusive to Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales, but the point is that 4K is now available on all but the cheapest sets — yes you can pay less than $279.99 for some of them — so it has become more and more likely that most any TV you buy this holiday season will be 4K. That is the one certain way to guarantee a large share of the market for the new format.

Predictably, that development took several years to occur, as TV makers were able to increase production of the higher resolution flat panels to the point where the costs were roughly comparable to regular HD. But that doesn’t mean customers are ready to make the move, although a report from Target on Black Friday sales does appear to indicate a trend. According to published reports, more than 3,200 units were being sold every minute across the retail chain.

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