When you hear rumors about possible future Apple products, sometimes the source can help determine credibility. Well, at least when a source is named. So you’ll see reports about a future product from such sources as DigiTimes, a tech publication from Taiwan, and you’ll also be correctly informed that they often get things wrong.

I suppose there is also good reason to suspect the accuracy of something that emerges from one rumor site or another without attribution, although, to be fair, at least some appear to be dedicated to providing good journalism. In other words, the rumors are vetted and rated for possible accuracy. It doesn’t stop them from publishing the rumors, but at least you might be able to apply the proper degree of skepticism.

In saying that, stories that Apple is working on a car of some sort have been around for a while, and they’ve become fairly consistent, other than, of course, some of those alleged butt ugly prototypes I’ve seen. It’s also reported that Apple has assigned hundreds of people to Project Titan, the code name for this endeavor.

Up till recently, Apple supposedly had settled on a 2020 date to introduce the Apple Car. But last week, published reports indicated the deadline had been moved back to 2021. That story appeared months after it was reported that the original head of Project Titan, Steve Zadesky, had departed for personal reasons. That may be so, except for other reports that Apple’s Chief Design Officer, Jonathan Ive, was unhappy with its progress, which might explain why a head had to roll.

But the latest scuttlebutt comes from a usually reliable source, the Wall Street Journal, and it claims that Apple has brought onboard a former hardware executive, Bob Mansfield, whose most recent assignment has been to serve as a sort of consultant, working on future products and reporting directly to Tim Cook. But in naming Mansfield to head Project Titan, you have to wonder the reasoning behind that decision. You see, when you look at Mansfield’s background, none of it appears to reflect experience in the automobile industry.

I suppose you could say the same about a recent Ford CEO, Alan Mulally, who came from Boeing, where he was CEO. But it’s still about transportation, though I grant there are considerable differences between building airplanes and building cars. On the other hand, Mansfield’s experience involves overseeing teams that build retail products, so maybe he was the right person to organize a car division and make it possible to actually build them.

Obviously, I wouldn’t care to guess at the actual reasoning behind this appointment, but organizational skills can account for a lot even if the executive isn’t skilled on the nuts and bolts of a specific product technology. With the right staffing, maybe it doesn’t matter. If true, obviously it doesn’t matter to Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive, which is why Mansfield is assuming such an important position. To them, he’s someone who gets things done.

I suppose it is also possible that this is a short-term assignment, designed to get the project moving towards production, after which Mansfield will gracefully retire and let a seasoned auto executive take over. Or maybe not. Even if this report is genuine, and there’s no reason to doubt it considering the source, that doesn’t tell us Apple’s ultimate plans for such a vehicle, nor does it set a deadline for placing this car into production.

Indeed, it doesn’t prove that Apple plans to build a car, but may only demonstrate Apple’s intense interest in exploring products that interact with cars. Certainly the company is large enough to take on an automobile project of some sort. There may even be enough room to innovate in the area in which the company is allegedly interested, electric cars. But to meet rapidly increasing fuel economy standards, most car companies are going to be looking into electric cars of some sort. With the failure of its efforts to mass produce cars with clean diesel engines in the U.S., as a result of that emissions scandal, even Volkswagen is going to spend billions to build electric cars.

So the larger question remains the same. If a number of auto makers are developing electric cars — and assuming Tesla overcomes its current production and quality problems — just what does Apple bring to the table? Other than refining the usually obtuse interface of an auto’s infotainment system, and CarPlay is only a beginning, where does Apple make a difference? Are they working on a new technology governing self-driving? A vehicle that eases the driving experience, for those who drive by themselves?

Obviously, those answers are won’t come for several years, and even if it’s real, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it postponed yet again. It’s always possible Apple will invest billions in R&D but ultimately come up empty. In 2016, it’s hard to predict that an Apple Car will ever arrive, or, if it does, what form it will take.

Perhaps the biggest source of suspicion about the potential success of the Apple Watch is the fact that Apple won’t reveal how many have been sold. It is placed in the “Other Products” category, so its level of success has to be inferred as a percentage of total sales. It does allow for rough estimates that may not be far off the mark, but it also fuel’s the complaints that it can’t be doing so well because Apple is keeping the numbers close to its vest.

That was a decision made early on, however, before a single unit was sold. Did Apple expect a failure out of the starting gate, or expect it would take several years to deliver meaningful results? Or maybe none of the above.

If you can believe the estimates, however, the Apple Watch is still far and away the number one smartwatch on the planet. Well, maybe sales have declined in the last quarter compared to the competition, but that, too, is a guess. Besides, competing companies are more into shipping loads of product to present the facade of high sales, even though actual sales to real customers are far lower.

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It’s a sure thing that, over the next few weeks, you will be reading more and more about the presumed iPhone 7. There have been plenty of rumors already, but one expects they’ll all coalesce into something close to the final product. It would be the result of the fact that it’s probably already in the early stages of production since it’s probably no more than two months from going on sale.

As a result, it’s easy to give those rumors credibility, and there are some that appear to be consistent.

So the next iPhone will allegedly come free of that old fashioned headphone jack. The 3.5mm jack dates back to the 1950s, when it first appeared in those small transistor radios. But the technology itself, based on the quarter-inch phone jack, was invented in the late 19th century. It would stand to reason, by logic alone, that it’s time for it to go.

Other than being old fashioned, some suggest it’s more susceptible to water damage. That’s beyond my area of expertise. It may also be true that it lacks support for certain digital audio features that would be useful to Apple going forward, which might explain why the Lightning port may be destined for an additional task. And, yes, there are headphones already available that require the Lightning port.

But with hundreds of millions — or billions — of traditional headphones using the standard jack out there, Apple will cause a load of grief if they do not provide some sort of convenient — and free — adaptor plug so the inconvenience is minimal. Indeed, there are rumors that the iPhone 7 might be capable of wireless recharging, which means you won’t have to tie up the Lightning port for double duty. I do not expect Apple’s adapter, if it exists, to support two connections.

I’m whistling in the dark, however. If the rumors are true, and they sure have been persistent for a long time, I am pretty confident that Apple will take steps to make the change as seamless as possible. Obviously, Apple is not reluctant to remove ports when deemed appropriate. But I can see where scare mongers might be having g a field day, particularly if the fears are spread by Apple’s competitors.

Past the headphone jack, the rumors suggest a form factor very similar to the current models. But any rectangle with a touchscreen is going to have a basic resemblance to other rectangles with touchscreens. It can have squared edges, curved edges with a different radius, and different amounts of space from bezels to edges. So it is possible to make loads of minor changes within the same structure. At the end of the day, all these variations will still appear to be very similar.

Now I suppose Apple can vary dimensions enough to point to distinct differences here and there. Maybe the next iPhone will even be a tad thinner, but if it mostly looks the same, that shouldn’t be the deal breaker. Do you expect something diamond-shaped to have it stand apart?

The major changes may involve LCD and glass, the Touch ID sensor, plus loads of internal components that include the processor, graphics hardware, camera parts, lenses, haptic circuitry, and loads of onboard sensors. You get the picture.

Apple could spend more than an hour of its media event outlining all the distinct improvements in the next iPhone, but if it looks mostly the same, the critics will say it’s a subpar upgrade.

While I have no direct evidence that this is so, I would not be surprised to discover that Apple’s competitors were, in part, responsible for feeding at least some of the unconfirmed stories about a disappointing upgrade. It would serve the interests of Samsung and other companies to lower expectations, in the hope that you might want to consider jumping to Android — or sticking with Android — when it’s time to buy a new smartphone.

Apple’s rivals are no doubt helped by the fact that there are breathless so-called journalists who are only too happy to post stories that diminish Apple’s products and services. In yesterday’s column, I mentioned a poll that, in asking about the future purchase plans of iPhone owners, included a question about the new model not being redesigned. That’s a question certain to discourage people who might be ready to buy the next iPhone, and that’s precisely what the results showed. Little more than 9% of users participating in the poll said yes, while it soared to over 25% in response to a question about a major redesign.

But if every single component inside the next iPhone receives a major enhancement, but the case is mostly the same, isn’t it still a “major” redesign? I’m wondering.

Obviously, this is all about a product that hasn’t been released. It hasn’t even been demonstrated, and Apple has not said anything about it, nor would one expect them to. Now it may be that some journalists will receive early information on background (meaning not for attribution), and perhaps you’ll see such stories in one or more major publications as it gets closer to the release.

But not now. Any claim that the iPhone 7 will be a poor upgrade should be suspect until there is a real product out there to consider.

You can use a poll to prove mostly anything you want. One way is to choose participants that would tend to favor the point of view you want to convey. So a poll meant to show a Republican candidate in the U.S. as having an advantage in an election might choose sneak more Republicans into the sampling pool to get the answer they want. Or perhaps add some Democrats who occasionally vote for a Republican with certain political leanings.

The sampling can be manipulated any way you like if you want to deceive.

Another way is to ask questions in a way that favors the point of view you want to convey. This may be done by asserting something that may or may not be true, such as claiming that someone is known to lie, and then asking if you’lle believe them on one issue or another.

But I will assume that the major polling organizations in the U.S. are fundamentally honest, and, while differing on sampling methodologies, do their best to perfect an imperfect process.

That takes us to a certain poll allegedly demonstrating very little interest in the next iPhone. But once you see how the question was framed, you’ll understand how the results went that way.

So let’s look at this online survey, which concluded that only 9.3% of iPhone owners in the U.S. were, in some way, considering upgrading to the so-called iPhone 7. But that depends on the question, which, in this case, was “If the iPhone isn’t redesigned in 2016, will you upgrade this year?” It’s based on a sampling of 525 people and claims that the demographics accurately represent the population at large.

For the sake of argument, I’ll assume that sampling is correct.

But just what does “redesigned” actually mean? Does it mean there will be no differences whatever? That Apple would be foolish enough to label an unchanged iPhone 6s as an iPhone 7 to fool people into buying one? If that’s the case, it’s no wonder the results are so pathetic. This is the sort of ambiguous question that conveys a misleading result. It may be that the iPhone 7 will look almost the same, but contain loads of hardware enhancements, in which case it will offer a minor or hardly visible external redesign and a major internal redesign. If that option were put before the participants, how would they react?

The closest it gets is the response to another question, in which 25.2% would upgrade if the iPhone 7 received a major redesign. Again, does that mean external? Probably. If Apple makes it look very different, while only making minor hardware changes, would that be sufficient to persuade people to buy one?

Understand that there probably won’t be a demonstration of the next iPhone until the first or second week of September, using the past as a guide. However extensive the changes might be, Apple will make it seem as if there’s a world of difference. As a result, people who might be on the fence or doubtful about upgrading now might well change their tune. Obviously, it’s hard to make plans about buying something that does not exist right now except for rumors. None of those rumors, however credible, have actually been confirmed.

So this is the sort of survey that can only be useful in a vague sense since there are so many uncertainties. But it does deliver a narrative that serves the needs of the skeptics.

Just as important, a growing number of iPhone users haven’t upgraded their gear in two or three years. This is a ripe audience for sales. To them, the differences will be vast even if they aren’t extensive compared to last year. Again, only Apple and their partners know, though it’s very likely the new models are already in production.

Clearly a lot is riding on Apple’s decisions for the next iPhone. I also suspect that at least some of the speculation suggesting a subpar upgrade may be fueled by the competition. Samsung would love for Apple to fail big time with an iPhone, hoping these customers will stay on the fence or consider a Galaxy smartphone when it comes time to upgrade. But it’s also true that Apple gains far more converts to the platform than they lose, so Samsung shouldn’t expect lightning to strike.

It’s also quite clear Apple is fully aware of customer expectations and what needs to be done to make the next iPhone a hit. That’s why I tend to disbelieve all those negative comments about a modest upgrade, that the “real” major changes will come in 2017. Even if the stories about switching to OLED displays next year are true, that doesn’t mean that the iPhone 7 won’t be worth your while.

Again, the target audience will consider what’s there to represent a major enhancement over their current smartphone, whether Apple or from someone else. Surveys in the middle of July, whether the results are accurate or misleading, won’t change that.