Apple clearly has a difficult time figuring out how to conquer the living room. At one time, it was thought that Apple might be building a TV set. That emerged from a Steve Jobs quote in Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of him. Jobs announced the discovery of the greatest TV interface ever, and that surely freaked the industry. Remember the TV market is saturated, and manufacturers are racing to the bottom to sell cheaper and cheaper gear. I wouldn’t suggest what profits are being made, but they can’t be very high.

So where would Apple contribute to that market? It’s one that has been satisfied for years by many capable companies, and TVs are very much commodities except for the high-end models. Compare that to Apple. When Apple released the iPod, the digital player market was nascent with plenty of opportunity for a fast mover to take over. Apple also entered the smartphone market and made the iPhone warm and fuzzy for everyone, not just for executives and power users. Despite being touted for years as a next great thing, tablets didn’t do well until the iPad arrived.

You see the picture.

There were reports over the years suggesting that Apple had sampled TV prototypes, but eventually abandoned the project because they couldn’t devise a viable marketing plan. Making just another product in a cluttered and slowing market is hardly a sensible choice. Maybe it is for Samsung and other companies that opt to be in lots of places, from toaster ovens to smartwatches, and everywhere in between. But that’s not Apple’s game plan.

But Tim Cook continued to repeat the claim that Apple was deeply interested in the living room, so how would that present itself? One possibility was to build a subscription TV service to provide an alternative to cord cutters. These are the folks who have given up on traditional cable and satellite TV and try the a la carte route with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Instant Video and other services. If you add a TV antenna to receive local broadcast stations, you may get all or most of the content you want without returning to a traditional service.

If you live too far from your nearest TV stations — as I did a time or two over the years — you might still have to return to cable or satellite anyway. In fact, that was the original reason why cable TV was created. That came before cable networks began to provide alternative original programming.

Well, the roster of steaming services also includes some of the same networks who deliver content to cable and satellite providers, such as HBO, Showtime, and even the individual free TV networks. Many offer free — with ads — downloads of recent shows, but you may have to pay if you want the older shows in their inventory.

So what would Apple offer in this market? At first, it appeared it might be something similar to Dish Network’s Sling TV, essentially a streaming service with a slimmed down package culled from a satellite provider’s regular packages. There are add-ons to more closely approximate what you get with satellite, but you don’t have the rich DVR options. So while it’s had some success, it’s just one of many choices.

Supposedly Apple tried to cut deals with the networks, without success. It may be that Apple’s demands were too stringent, or simply that it couldn’t come up with a marketing plan that made sense. Supposedly local TV broadcasts were to be included, and what about time-shifting, one of the more popular TV watching alternatives?

Well, that, too, has apparently gone by the wayside. In fact, having explored cord cutting, I haven’t found a way to do it that isn’t endlessly confusing — with different apps and interfaces — and less convenient than a cheap cable or satellite package. If you can survive with Netflix, or any single service, you can save lots of money. But when you start to add several, you’re not saving so much.

Well the new wrinkle is that Apple might just offer up the fourth-generation Apple TV as a partial replacement for TV Guide. So instead of using a DVR, you’d use the apps provided by TV networks for Apple’s streamer, and rely on that interface to provide smart TV listings, driven by Siri.

You’d still need to cut a deal with the cable/satellite services or the dedicated streaming services, but it would all appear within Apple’s unique interface. In other words, Apple might become a TiVo alternative. But how would time-shifting be handled? I suppose one could use a network’s on-demand system, and perhaps Apple could cut deals to store your recorded shows in iCloud for later viewing, with the same commercial skipping options you have now.

According to an article in recode, Apple’s first foray into providing intelligent TV listings came at the WWDC in June, where a single sign-on scheme was announced. This would allow you to login once and be able to take advantage of all the services to which you subscribe. Well, assuming the various services opt to support the plan, but why not? It would make it far more convenient for you to use their services, which means more business. That ought to be a good thing.

Now recode is well connected in the tech industry, so I wouldn’t doubt there’s a basis for this article. The only possible objection is that some of those services might object to a single sign-on, because it would tend to abstract the individual products into an amorphous whole where individual brand identity is minimized.

Indeed, I once thought that Apple might end up moving in that direction, offering a front-end to existing services. Is that the logic behind Steve Jobs’ claim of the best TV interface, a way to combine the listings from all or most services in a more convenient way? Anyone who frets over the poor interfaces used by some services — and has considered TiVo as an alternative — might just welcome an Apple alternative.

One reason often mentioned for the 11% drop in Mac sales was the lack of new Macs in recent months. Other than a modest refresh for the MacBook earlier this year, Apple has been silent about what Maca will be upgraded next, and two models are getting old in the scheme of things. The Mac mini hasn’t been updated since 2014, although faster parts are available. The Mac Pro received a major upgrade — or at least changeover — in 2013, and it’s been crickets since then.

Some critics suggest that Apple doesn’t care about Macs anymore. It’s all about iPhones, and, to a lesser extent, iPads and services. Well, perhaps the Apple Watch, although it hasn’t exactly been a barn burner, though I suppose its potential will be more apparent after another revision or two.

In recent days, Apple has enhanced promotion for the iPad Pro, offering an ad with elements reminiscent of the Microsoft Surface. In short, it’s a pitch for using the high-end iPads as substitutes for notebook computers. Indeed, for many users, this is a perfectly reasonable move. Years back, Steve Jobs described the Mac as the pickup truck, suggesting that the needs of many users could be satisfied with a tablet. Perhaps that’s come to pass to some extent.

But it doesn’t mean Apple will or should set the Mac aside. There are tens of millions of Mac users — including yours truly — who cannot use any iPad as a substitute for the work they do. Indeed, simply upgrading processors, graphics chips and other hardware shouldn’t involve any great R&D expenditure. So what’s going on here?

Now it may well be that Apple is planning on more substantial upgrades to the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro. It’s possible the former will gain a Retina display, and the open question would be whether the price will increase any, or a non-Retina version will remain in the lineup. For the professional Mac notebook, will it retain the same form factor, or something thinner, lighter, borrowing technology from the MacBook? That would mean moving towards USB-C, but one hopes with more ports, and Thunderbolt 3 is a must. Some suggest a special OLED-based touch bar above the keyboard for one reason or another.

While some rumors about new Macs are based, at least in part, on loose lips in the supply chain, or deliberate background leaks from Apple, it’s hard to say if the MacBook Pro upgrade report has any basis in fact. However, if Apple merely wanted to do a simple component upgrade, where is it? Perhaps Mac sales would not have dropped as much, but even that’s not at all certain. After all, the people who are most apt to buy new Macs have computers that are several years old, and the current hardware would represent a huge improvement. Still, with a new model perceived as late, some potential buyers are apt to remain on the sidelines.

But what about the older models?

Well, the Mac mini might also be earmarked for a more substantial upgrade. Or maybe Apple plans to discontinue that model, although it would seem that there is a market for a relatively inexpensive Mac. Indeed, the Mac mini has also found a place in datacenters or the back office, where it makes for a powerful server. Indeed, I ran all my sites on one for several months, and I dare say nobody could tell the difference. When it came to managing my sites, I couldn’t see any difference either, but there is one major issue if you depend on 24/7 reliability. The Mac mini doesn’t have redundant power supplies and other components that are part of a full-blown server. Should it fail, it would require moving the storage devices to another mini rather than just swapping out a few failing components. That’s why I returned to a traditional blade server.

Still, I do think you’ll see a Mac mini update, maybe by fall.

I’m more concerned about the future of Apple’s workstation, the Mac Pro. The 2013 model launch came with a lot of pomp and circumstance, earning a special presentation at that year’s WWDC. It barely shipped by the end of the year, so for most, it was a 2014 model.

But where’s the upgrade? Was it not as successful as Apple expected? Is Apple planning on a different sort of upgrade, perhaps a middle path from a small, round form factor and the original tower form factor? One of the big problems with the current Mac Pro is the fact that it wasn’t designed for internal expansion. Other than replacing RAM, a single internal SSD and the single processor, everything is external. While there are RAID drives and expansion card boxes that extend what a Mac Pro can do, what about the wiring nightmare they create? With the original Mac Pro, you could put enough parts inside to operate perfectly fine with wireless input devices, wireless printers, and a single display cable.

Apple clearly is making a reasonable investment for macOS Sierra, and the rebranding does appear to indicate a genuine commitment to the platform. But it would be nice if Tim Cook offered some new and encouraging hints about the state of the hardware.

Smart credit cards, or chip cards, were popular in Europe long before they debuted in the U.S. Here, financial institutions were complacent and believed that existing technology was secure.

Now chip cards use integrated circuits to provide greatly enhanced security. One common problem they are designed to circumvent is credit card skimming, a process that hacks a card reader and grabs your card information. It’s particularly vexing and the data even includes your debit card’s pin number, which grants access to all of the money in that account.

That situation began to change in 2014, when tens of millions of credit cards were compromised due to high-profile break-ins at a number of merchants, including Target. As an occasional Target customer, this was particularly disconcerting, and it so happens that one of my bank accounts was compromised, but not until the following year. The bank wasn’t terribly informative about where and how the intrusion occurred — so I’m not certain it was the result of the Target intrusion — and I didn’t lose any money as a result. Still, American banks are now rushing to incorporate the technology into their cards.

Without going into details, I have one debit card without chip support. But my wife, who has an account at a different bank that she shares with our son, received a chip card on the last revision.

The extra security is welcome, and I’m awaiting for my bank to replace my debit card with one that has the chip. However, the price of security means that transactions can be awkward. The price of safety I fear, and those of you in the U.S. with chip cards will understand. I’m not at all sure how well it works in Europe.

Take a typical purchase at Walmart, which recently upgraded its point-of-sale terminals to support both chips and Walmart Pay. The latter is their answer to Apple Pay and is evidently meant to replace the failed CurrentC mobile payment technology. It uses a QR code and a special Walmart app to make and record your purchases. Since I haven’t tried it, I cannot attest to its ease of use, but it does appear to be clumsier than Apple Pay, which requires an iPhone with an NFC chip or an Apple Watch.

In any case, on a recent visit to Walmart, I took my wife’s debit card with me. If you’ve used one, you’ll realize that you no longer swipe the card. Instead, you insert the left edge of the card into a special slot at the bottom of the terminal. Rather than remove the card once it’s read, the chip card must stay in the terminal until the transaction is concluded, and the processing steps can be fairly sluggish compared to a regular credit card.

When I went to my wife’s bank to withdraw some money via an ATM machine, I got to see further downsides to the process. While some banks swallow your debit card whole, other financial institutions allow you to insert the card and remove it as soon as it’s read. But not so with a chip card. Rather than withdraw the card, once again it has to remain inserted until the final step in the transaction. You have to wait extra minutes as the ATM slogs through the process. Worse, the bank my wife uses still has a message on the screen saying you should just insert and remove the card from the reader even though that’s not correct when you use the chip card.

Ah, the price of security.

While I welcome the added protections — who wouldn’t? — I do not welcome the clumsy way in which the technology has been implemented in this country. Even when a bank’s information menus appear to have been modernized somewhat beyond the 1990’s Windows-style interface that many display, it does seem as if the ATM’s microprocessors are barely able to cope with chip cards.

I would like to believe that this is just a first generation technology, that, as ATM interfaces, many of which are based on Windows, improve, things will get decidedly better. It does seem as if the chip card technology has been tacked on, rather than developed from the ground up. That will hardly convince customers to want to stick with the chip cards, not that they necessarily have a choice once a new card is issued.

Oh, and I checked my bank’s site, and they do offer chip cards. While I’m not enamored of the technology, or its lack of performance, having been bitten by fake charges a time or two, I would prefer to enhance the protection, so I plan to request one. True, the bank supports Apple Pay, and those transactions are reasonably swift, but few of the merchants I deal with have opted to work with Apple. I suppose that’ll change some day, since the Apple Pay user base and merchant support continues to grow. In saying that, though, it does appear that, after trying the system a few times, some customers prefer to return to the credit card since they prefer to pull out a card rather than schlepp an iPhone out of their pocket or purse. Well, there’s always an Apple Watch, but the user base is still quite small.

The message here is that extra security for your bank or credit cards is important, but when the process of using them becomes cumbersome, customer adoption will be slow. But this is a U.S.-centric view. I would love to hear from our readers in Europe about their experiences with chip cards.

The ongoing stories about the alleged Apple Car and Project Titan have conveyed messages of confusion. The alleged project to create a motor vehicle has allegedly been delayed by problems with personnel and technology. So people are leaving, deadlines are not being met, and maybe it’s all a mess.

Add to that the report that the original deadline to release an Apple Car has been pushed back from 2020 to 2021. If all of this is true, maybe it’s true that things aren’t going so well. After all, despite being five years out, it’s delayed a year, so wouldn’t it be possible for deadlines to slip yet again? Maybe it’ll happen in 2015.

But is any of this even true?

Certainly, Apple’s critics and competitors would love to make hay of reports that all is not going well. One commentary, after listing the problems, suggested that Apple is already in trouble. After all, iPhone sales are down, and the Apple Watch hasn’t quite matched expectations. While the former is true enough, it’s just two quarters, and the potential for the next iPhone is still up in the air, although Apple executives are clearly optimistic for its success.

The Apple Watch? Well, nobody outside Apple is aware of what its sales expectations were. The numbers are buried in the “Other Products” category, but that decision was made right from the beginning. It wasn’t a response to poor sales. I would not presume to guess what Apple is hoping to do, but it would seem that Apple is prepared to give it some years to percolate. Even if sales weren’t so terrific the first year, wait till the second year, or the third.

Again, we’re just whistling in the dark. Remember that, according to independent estimates, the Apple Watch remains at the top of the market. Well, unless you toss it in the “wearables” category that puts the Fitbit at the top of the heap. But how many Fitbit models are also smartwatches?

Of course, industry analysts subdivided tablets, and separated them from PCs, which put the iPad in a curious place even though some do use it to replace a Mac or a PC. Apple’s new “what’s a computer?” ad certainly exemplifies the flexibility of the iPad Pro.

In any case, with all the talk about the Apple Car, and Apple’s plans, let’s not forget this is an unannounced product, never officially confirmed by Apple. All the reports you read are based on indirect sources, such as news about Apple hires, and people who are no longer with Apple. That former hardware executive Bob Mansfield has reportedly been placed in charge of Project Titan clearly indicates a major commitment to the project’s success.

When it comes to reports of delays and disorganization, I suppose any major project involving an R&D expense in the billions of dollars would face confusion, mistakes, and changes of direction. It may even be that there is no final plan for how the project will end up. It may still result in building an electric car, no doubt with some level of self-driving capability. But it may instead focus on licensing such technology to other car makers, similar to what Google is working on.

Car or no, it stands to reason that software developers and executives would be hired. That explains why Dan Dodge, the former CEO and co-founder of the QNX division of BlackBerry, has joined Apple. Obviously, elements of QNX aren’t going to be part of the software package for Project Titan. Indeed, for competitive reasons alone, Dodge couldn’t use any of that code unless, of course, it was licensed by Apple. But that seems less likely. Project Titan would no doubt base its software product, whether powering an Apple Car, or as a standalone, on iOS or something based on iOS.

It has been widely reported that Apple has been busy hiring automative personnel from other companies. All right, call it poaching. At one time, there were stories claiming that Apple and Tesla were busy grabbing employees from each other. Elon Musk boasted that Tesla was getting the best of those efforts, but it’s understandable that Apple would want to hire the best and brightest from the industry.

Even though the speculation about concentrating on autonomous driving software has been getting more coverage lately, it may still be about building a car. That’s because of reports that two Ford engineers skilled at building car bodies, Todd Gray and Aindrea Campbell, are among the hires. Why bring onboard body structure engineers if a car wasn’t part of the plan?

Regardless of how it all turns out, though, speculation that the Apple Car exemplifies Apple’s desperation to create something to replace the allegedly dying iPhone, or the filing Apple Watch, is sheer nonsense. Whether it arrives in five years, six years, or longer, a lot can happen in that timeframe. At the end of the day, there may be no Apple Car or self-driving software package for the car industry. A final decision may not come until a year or two before an actual product is launched.

So if Apple is hot to trot to find the next iPhone, and maybe it is, Project Titan will not provide an immediate solution. So what else is Apple working on? Augmented reality? The rumors of Apple’s future plans are too narrowly focused, but it’s also true that it may be too early in the game to guess what else Apple might be developing.