According to Apple’s financial guidance for the current quarter, sales will rise somewhat. This is a change from previous quarters this calendar year where sales were lower, mostly because of reduced demand for iPhones. Forgetting the reason, there may be legitimate criticisms that Apple didn’t release enough new gear this year, and perhaps that explains lower demand for other products too.

Of course, I’d be ignoring less-favorable market conditions in China.

Now both iOS 10 and macOS Sierra were decent upgrades overall. The latter might not have much to appreciate beyond Siri — for those of you who care. and I don’t — and a few odds and ends, but it does appear to demonstrate an ongoing commitment to the Mac.

However, Apple is mostly judged by new hardware, and that’s where it appears to be a mixed bag.

It all started off modestly enough with a 2016 MacBook, a minor refresh that dealt with some performance issues with a somewhat faster processor. The iPhone SE, largely an iPhone 5s with parts derived from the iPhone 6s, was surprisingly successful. Evidently Apple underestimated the demand for smaller iPhones while lost in the success of its larger handsets.

The iPhone 7 proved to be a mixed bag, until it was actually released. The early supply chain rumors indicated a modest refresh, more the equivalent an iPhone 6s with some extra stuff. The loss of the headphone jack was known early on, but most of the complaints came before the fact. After Apple announced that an adapter plug would be supplied with the new gear — and replacements were only $9 each — the furore died down, or so it appears.

But the iPhone 7 was a more extensive upgrade than you might realize just looking at it head on compared to its predecessor. There were big changes inside. The A10 Fusion CPU delivered near desktop PC performance, and the fact the handset was genuinely water-resistant was a huge plus. That perhaps justifies removing the headphone jack, although other supposedly water-resistant smartphones do not require this sacrifice.

The new Home button, which is no longer a physical switch, might be more reliable, but the feel of the Taptic Engine, when you press it, doesn’t match the real thing. It has the same faint squishy feeling I noticed when I briefly used a Magic Trackpad 2. But it’s no doubt more reliable, and maybe justified by the water-resistance factor.

Apple touts the new camera, but tests against other smartphones don’t indicate much of a clear advantage overall. The twin-camera design of the iPhone 7 Plus does have value, and maybe that explains the reason for the high demand. But as of the time I write this, Apple is claiming on its site that you can order one now and have it delivered by December 22nd.

The real arguments persist when it comes to the Late 2016 MacBook Pro, and perceptions that Apple is abandoning pro customers due to certain controversial decisions. I see the point of the complaints, but some of it may be due to expecting too much after a drought of new Macs for so long. That pent-up demand may also explain why the models equipped with the Touch Bar remain backordered. Or perhaps professionals do see the reasoning behind Apple’s decisions beyond just making them thinner and lighter.

But the year will end with unanswered questions about the future of the Mac. Sure, the MacBook Pro undeniably took a long time to design. Apple claims they spent two years working on the Touch Bar, and I have no reason to dispute that claim. But there’s still a level of demand for desktop Macs too, and Apple has said nothing during those meetings with the press, other than justifying the logic behind the MacBook Pro, to reveal what’s going on.

The Mac Pro is still being sold at the same price as 2013. The lone change I can see offhand is that the price of upgrading to 1TB solid state storage has been reduced by $200. But that’s still expensive compared to what you pay from third parties. But at least you can upgrade the drive; you can’t do that on the MacBook Pros with Touch Bar, where the SSD is soldered to the logic board.

But Intel and AMD have released faster parts, and it wouldn’t take much in the way of expense for Apple to do a simple refresh. What are they waiting for?

All right, maybe Apple wants to redesign the Mac Pro, making a larger version with internal expansion capabilities so fewer users will be left with cable nightmares after hooking up a few things. Or maybe Apple is waiting for new processors from Intel that are due to arrive next year, and maybe we’ll see something by then.

Right now, if you go to Apple’s online ordering center, you will see no hint whatever that the Mac Pro is anything but a current product and not a three-year-old relic that never quite met its expectations.

I’m expecting new Macs by spring. I hope I’m not proven wrong, and I’m also hoping there will be some interesting hardware developments throughout the year. Rumors suggest that the next iPhone may be a huge upgrade, sufficient to call it an iPhone 8. Maybe there will be some new stuff on the iPad front. We’ll see.

On the heels of a comment from a Mac journalist that Sir Jonathan Ive is no longer actively involved in designing Apple gear, there appears to be a different conclusion. The original story was based on tech journalist Jason Snell’s brief comments on John Gruber’s podcast. But Gruber himself, writing in his Daring Fireball blog, says he thinks precisely the reverse. That, despite spending a lot of time on the design of the new Apple campus, and overhauls to Apple Store designs, he’s still as active as ever working on Apple gear.

So there you have it. It’s not something that Apple would choose to reveal unless Ive’s name was abruptly removed from the list of executives. Besides, it doesn’t appear as if the latest gear strays much from what one expects of Ive. Indeed the criticisms made about Apple’s recent product releases usually reflect the reaction to the “Ive look.” If he’s no longer actively involved, the people who did design those products are clearly infused with his spirit.

But since Steve Jobs left Apple in the hands of his chosen successor, Tim Cook, there have been complaints that the company has lost its creative vision. The very first example was the iPhone 4s, released the day before Jobs died. What was so new and different about a device that looked very much the same as the iPhone 4?

Well, there was always the launch of Siri…

Otherwise, the iPhone 4s, sporting the usual performance enhancements, also had a redesigned antenna system that was intended to reduce the “Antennagate” effect. So even though Apple staunchly denied there was any problem with the iPhone 4’s antenna design, they made it better anyway.

Over the years, there have been criticisms that some of Apple’s products are just indulgences, rather than gear designed to advance the state of the art. But such a statement isn’t relevant, since Apple has a right to release a product for any reason whatever. It is not bound to have each product outdo its predecessor or other products. If they want to release something that just looks nice, such as the Power Macintosh G4 Cube or the Apple Watch Edition, so be it.

Besides, how many smartphones from Samsung and how many PCs from Dell or HP advance the state of the art? Clearly Apple is expected to operate by a different set of rules. Besides, at the end of the day, the buying public will decide what represents innovation, the products to lust after, and the products to avoid. If sales are poor, Apple will do the proper thing which is to put it out of its misery. Take the G4 Cube as an example. It never quite caught on, and it’s not worth arguing that it was too expensive, underpowered, and lacked the usability of less attractive Apple gear.

If it was only $400 cheaper.

In any case. the critics went right after Apple ahead of the arrival of the iPhone 7, mostly based on supply chain leaks that it wouldn’t look very different from the iPhone 6s. How dare Apple not make every iPhone daringly different? That it would lose the ancient headphone jack was another compelling talking point.

In the real world, the internals of the iPhone 7 are very different, with faster components. and it’s also water resistant. Really water-resistant, not just a manufacturer’s claim. Compare that to the Samsung Galaxy S7 Active, also said to be water-resistant, but it failed a Consumer Reports dunk test. There were no such complaints about the iPhone 7.

The lack of a headphone jack may have been a less-compiling issue, since there appear to be no huge online petitions demanding that it be restored, or threats of class-action lawsuits. After all, it’s Apple’s prerogative which features to add, which features to remove, and which products to vanquish. That there may not be anymore AirPort routers developed, that the Thunderbolt displays have been discontinued, is in keeping with what Steve Jobs did in 1997 to simplify the product lineup. You can’t buy a Apple laser printer or Newton either, unless someone has such vintage gear available on eBay or somewhere.

When you look at the products Apple has released in recent years, in large part they appear to represent the same design philosophy as older products. With notebooks, it’s very much about thinner and lighter, in addition to all the other features. When you see a video of Ive touting Apple’s latest examples of innovation, it all seems to fit. He comes across as natural and sincere, and you can believe he had something to do with those products. He didn’t just sign off on them, and pretend to understand the niceties.

When you consider innovation, it’s not about duplicating what Apple has done already, such as a Jet Black version of a Samsung smartphone. True, Apple will often offer features that have already appeared elsewhere, but not without changes. Right now, I wonder what PC makers will do in response to the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar. Or will they continue to tout their 2-in-1 convertibles as a better solution?

Apple’s recent decisions raise the question about what they might give up on next? So there are no more Thunderbolt displays — or any displays with the Apple brand — and Apple has worked with LG to produce 4K and 5K displays with the proper features to support the new MacBook Pros and other gear. In recent days, the future of automation, AppleScript, has arisen what with the dismissal of long-time manager Sal Soghoian, although Apple claims that they haven’t given up on the technology.

On Monday came reports that Apple’s Wi-Fi router division, the one that built AirPort gear, has been disbanded. Of course, this hasn’t been confirmed, and AirPort gear is still being sold. But none of the products have been upgraded since 2013, and Wi-Fi technology has continued to advance.

Certainly the future of the Mac was questioned before last month’s media event. But the presentation focused solely on the MacBook Pro. The MacBook Air lineup was reduced to the 13-inch version, with the 11-inch consigned to educational use. Nothing was said about desktops.

So the argument goes: What about the Mac Pro? Although it’s clearly not a huge seller, there is a segment of Mac users who require a professional workstation for such processor-intensive work as 3D rendering, math and science. These are people who helped keep the Mac platform afloat for years even during the dark days 20 years ago when it appeared Apple would die. Does it make sense to just leave these users to fend for themselves, which most likely means Windows? Remember that high-end users of this sort also influence other purchases too, for home, other divisions in a company and so forth.

At the same time, IBM has over 90,000 Macs in use around the company, and they are saving loads of money compared to PCs. That would surely indicate Apple cares about getting Macs in the enterprise — at long last. So why would they abandon the entire platform?

Besides, it’s not as if Apple isn’t investing in the Mac. Clearly the Touch Bar and the entire MacBook Pro redesign involved a substantial investment in time and money. It probably involves a higher investment than most any PC maker would generally commit to new models. So does Apple understand the needs of its customers?

In most every way, the new MacBook Pro is better than its predecessor, although processor performance is not much better. But that’s the limit of Intel’s processors. So the SSD and graphics deliver much higher benchmarks. The 15-inch model drives two 5K displays, each with single cables. Clearly the larger audience for Retina-style displays represents the professional/business. So why do it if Apple isn’t interested in the pro market?

The complete switch to USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 is at most a short-term inconvenience, that will lessen as more accessories that support these ports are released.

What about the Touch Bar? A silly toy, or a valid productivity tool that answers the concerns about notebooks with touchscreens? Apple made a point of demonstrating how it improves productivity for Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Photoshop workflows. Microsoft is adding support for Mac Office? Why do that for a feature that is only available in a single model line unless Apple plans a wider rollout in the future?

Indeed, I would not be surprised to see a Magic Keyboard 2 with Touch Bar, and perhaps support in a future MacBook. That would justify developer support.

Yes, there are valid concerns. The loss of the MagSafe adapter, which has prevented Mac notebooks from dropping to the ground when a cable is randomly tugged, for example. But I do suppose that such support could be grafted onto a power adapter with USB-C capability. There’s also the 16GB RAM imitation, and Apple marketing VP Philip Schiller is extremely sensitive to those concerns, pointing out on several occasions that both performance and battery life would suffer if Apple moved to a technology that allowed you to install a maximum of 32GB.

At the end of the day, the best answer is customer demand. It may seem high now because Apple hasn’t fully ramped up production, although that’s not something that outsiders would know, unless there are rumors from the supply chain. But if demand continues through the first quarter of 2017, perhaps Apple is on to something.

Some suggest Apple ought to spin off the Mac into a separate division, but that is just paper pushing. It may not actually help when it comes to development efficiencies, because of the tight integration between macOS and iOS.

There’s also a published report speculating that Apple’s chief designer,  Sir Jonathan Ive, is no longer directly involved in actually designing new Apple gear. According to such tech journalists as Jason Snell, a former editor at Macworld, he’s spending most of his time dealing with Apple’s new spaceship campus. But even if he isn’t sitting alongside his team working on new gear, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have final approval, which means they would have his stamp on them even if he’s not doing much in the way of grunt work anymore.

Should Ive leave. though, there’d be a huge media freakout, even if his team is perfectly capable of doing the job without him to lead them on.

What’s Apple going to give up on next? Not the Mac, though gear more suited to pro users might not get much love going forward.

As much as Apple has added products to its lineup over the years, other products have gone away. Some of that was due to the bloodletting after Steve Jobs took over as “interim” CEO in 1997. So Apple tightened its focus on its core products, and gave up digital cameras, after being a pioneer in that market, the Newton and even printers. Lest you forget, the original Apple LaserWriter, with Adobe PostScript, pioneered an entire industry. And put one I worked in for a number of years out of business.

One of the biggest changes, however, was just making the Mac product lineup understandable, reducing it to the consumer and professional desktop and notebook models. Apple still follows that approach, more or less, although the Mac lineup spread out somewhat before the current MacBook Pro refresh.

But other changes are afoot, and Apple customers will no doubt be confused over what’s going on.

With the discontinuation of the Thunderbolt display, Apple exited that business. If you want a 4K or 5K display, Apple suggests you choose the new models from LG, which were designed with Apple’s help.

Just last week, it was announced that long-time Apple automation executive Sal Soghoian had been let go, supposedly for business reasons. Indeed, you had to wonder about the future of AppleScript, which has been widely adopted by Mac users and is embedded in professional Mac apps. Many people use AppleScript or Automator workflows to get work done. So I use such an applet to stitch together segment files for the commercial free versions of The Tech Night Owl LIVE and the Paracast.

I’ve known Sal for years, and I got a short email from him the other day. He’s doing just fine. Meanwhile, Apple’s Senior Vice president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, is quoted in an email to a Mac user that the company is still committed to automation. All well and good, though that doesn’t explain why the department’s head was let go, unless the division is being merged or reduced for those unmentioned business reasons.

But Apple is not going to tell us about their internal organizational charts.

Now comes a published report from Bloomberg that Apple shuttered its Wi-Fi router division, meaning no more AirPorts or Time Capsules. The router team has supposedly moved on to the Apple TV division.

All this comes 17 years after Apple became one of the first manufacturers of such gear. Today there are dozens of companies making routers, and ISPs routinely provide a pretty decent one with your Internet service. What this means is that there’s very little room for Apple to make a significant contribution to a commodity market. Of course Apple continues to supply Wi-Fi capability with all its gear, again using industry-standard chips for the most part.

Indeed, it’s been three years since the last Apple router, an AirPort Extreme, arrived. Since then faster routers have been released by other companies. Manufacturers have also simplified the setup process, meaning you are usually taken through a fairly simple walkthrough that lets you keep a preselected secure password or set your own. You might choose the occasion to modify the network name to something you can understand, but otherwise these things usually just work. This is far different from the way it used to be, when you had to cope with an arcane web-based interface and figure it all out for yourself.

But just the fact that you may not have to buy one most assuredly reduces the need to worry about it, unless you live in a large home, or have thick walls and need an extender or a more powerful router to get a solid signal in your home from end to end.

Fortunately, I do not have such a problem. My present home isn’t that large.

Now I can see why there won’t be anymore AirPorts. Apple probably isn’t selling enough units to make a difference, and the market they pioneered is no longer viable for so many players.

So what is Apple going to ax next?

Certainly speculation is rife with possibilities. What about the Mac Pro? Is it possible Apple no longer cares about the professional user? Certainly there has been a load of debate over the design decisions made with the Late 2016 MacBook Pro. But since I’ve covered that a number of times already, I won’t bore with the details, except to note that Apple VP Philip Schiller continues to find it necessary to explain why it doesn’t come with a 32GB option. But no previous MacBook Pro did either.

In any case, it would help if Apple was a little more forthcoming about some its decisions about the future of certain products. It doesn’t make a whole lot of difference with the AirPort, although automation does have a lot of appeal for professional users. Despite its low sales — and I’m assuming they are low for obvious reasons — there is a loyal market for the Mac Pro. It’s just a matter of what Apple needs to do to continue to serve that market, whether it involves a new design, or keeping the present one with newer parts.

In an email to a reader, I predicted there would be another Mac refresh in the spring of 2017, after more versions of Intel’s Kaby Lake processors are available. Certainly the iMac will get some love, but it’s less certain about the Mac mini and the Mac Pro. It would just take a couple of sentences from Tim Cook to address Mac user contains, and such a statement is long overdue.