Although mostly in line with expectations, Wall Street freaked for a time when it was announced that iPhone sales dropped in the March quarter. It was the first time since Apple’s smartphone debuted in 2007. After a steady pace of growth, a pace that few competitors could match, the tide had turned. To some, it was the beginning of the end of Apple’s rise to the top, that reality was setting in.

In essence, predictions that Google’s Android platform would grind iOS into niche status only grew. Of course, it’s hard to call a platform niche when tens of millions of units are sold. That’s true even if sales are lower than historic levels. With regular declines in iPad sales, and lower sales reported for the Mac, where’s Apple’s next growth segment?

Some speculate it might be the Apple Watch, which continues to expand and remains the number one smartwatch on the planet by a huge margin. Of course, critics try to squeeze it into the same “wearables” category as the less expensive Fitbit, which still outsells Apple. But putting the Fitbit in the same space as an Apple Watch would be similar to comparing an iPod, at its peak, with the iPhone. This scheme might also be similar to the decision, by some, to deprive the iPad of a PC label, thus reducing Apple’s apparent overall sales in that category.

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When I wrote yesterday’s column, I really expected that Apple would wait until the next beta release of macOS Sierra and iOS 10 to make the public betas available. Well, they didn’t. They came out on July 7th, as hundreds of thousands of people were able to download prerelease versions of the two operating systems.

While these releases, which I presume are all or mostly the same as the second developer betas released earlier this week, are more robust and snappier than the original release, they are nothing to trifle with. The entire operation of your device depends on the OS doing its thing properly. If things go wrong, you can lose data, or, at the very least, find it difficult or impossible to do routine tasks.

At the very least, if you’re going to try a public beta, you should take precautions. Have a backup of your stuff, and try not to install macOS Sierra and iOS 10 on production gear. Some of my readers have older devices to test software on, so that they don’t have to worry if they have to wipe out their data and start over.

Now even if you already have OS X El Capitan or iOS 9 installed, that’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to run these betas.

So for macOS Sierra, you need the following:

iMac: Late 2009 or newer
MacBook: Late 2009 or newer
MacBook Air: Late 2010 or newer
MacBook Pro: Mid 2010 or newer
Mac mini: Mid 2010 or newer
Mac Pro: Mid 2010 or newer

That may seem restrictive when you consider that El Capitan worked on other Macs from 2007 through 2009. But it’s likely some of the new features, particularly Siri, aren’t compatible. At least all of my Macs, going back to a Mid 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro, will run macOS Sierra. Lucky me I suppose.

When it comes to iOS 10, the list is, again, more restrictive than iOS 9:

iPhone

• iPhone 6s & 6s Plus
• iPhone 6 & 6 Plus
• iPhone SE
• iPhone 5s
• iPhone 5c
• iPhone 5

iPad

• iPad Pro 12.9-inch
• iPad Pro 9.7-inch
• iPad Air 2
• iPad Air
• iPad 4th generation
• iPad mini 4
• iPad mini 3
• iPad mini 2

iPod

• iPod touch 6th generation

So my iPhones and my wife’s iPad will run just fine. My sister-in-law has a third generation iPad, which already drags with iOS 9. She is as far from a power user as you can get, so she will miss little or nothing in never being able to upgrade to a newer OS except for maintenance fixes for iOS 9, if there are any.

Now I suppose some Apple customers — and Apple critics — will attack Apple for the reduced lists of compatible hardware. It’s five or six years for macOS Sierra, and three years, more or less, for iOS gear. In the scheme of things, that’s a fairly wide list, and, other than the last couple of years, a more extensive list than Apple’s norm.

Still, there will be charges that Apple has restricted the list of gear that will run the new operating systems not to deliver a good user experience, but to force you to upgrade. On the surface, there may be a point to such complaints. After all, iPad sales are down, and it appears people are keeping their gear longer. So if suddenly forced to upgrade to continue to use the latest and greatest OS, perhaps they will be more inclined to buy new iPads. Maybe.

When it comes to iPhones, that’s not as clear-cut. Most people reportedly upgrade after two years, so getting an extra year of support for a new OS might not have as great an impact. Maybe.

Obviously your gear doesn’t suddenly stop working because the OS is outdated. If you like the way it works now, you can continue to use it that way. Most app developers will continue to offer backwards compatibility to a somewhat older OS release. At some point in time, that may change, but nobody forces you to stop using the app either because a new version is available.

It’s also true that, if you use the oldest compatible gear, it’s likely not going to perform the way you expect. Consider the plight of the iPhone 4s user who upgraded to iOS 9, or the iPad 3 user for that matter. Although it got better as maintenance updates appeared, performance was measurably slower than iOS 8.

Is that part of the great Apple plot to force you to buy new stuff, or just a symptom if adding features that require more CPU and graphics horsepower to work properly? Should Apple hold off developing new features because older gadgets can’t use them? That would seriously slow advancements in the platform. To be blunt, it’s illogical!

With Google the situation is considerably different. Due to rampant platform fragmentation, only a tiny percentage of devices can be updated to a new OS, ever. The most popular Android operating systems are two and three years old. Last year’s Android 6 Marshmallow still has a market share low enough to be in the “Other” category.

That said, it may be a little early for you to consider trying out the new public betas from Apple. Give them a little time unless you’re fully prepared to take chances, and fully prepared to deal with the consequences if things go bad. But the features are interesting enough that it’s worth a try if you observe the proper cautions.

You just know that Apple can’t catch a break. If new products have lots of new features, we’ll it’s too many. There will be lots of bugs, and customers will face plenty of aggravation as a result. But if it appears that things haven’t changed that much, Apple is criticized for having lost its innovation mojo.

So we have the stories — obviously unconfirmed — that the next version of the iPhone will not be impressive. It will look mostly the same, and the critics don’t seem to care about the components. So if, as expected, it has a faster processor, better graphics, and improved camera parts, that’s not important enough. It’s whether the case will be a tad smaller or larger, or whether it has a headphone jack.

Of course there are just so many ways you can take a rectangular case and make it altogether different; well, except for those silly designs where the display spills onto the side. And I think you can tell from my comments what I think of that. While Apple has given iPhones subtle physical design changes over the years, the variations are more about display size and square or rounded edges.

The real differences will mostly be internal, but the speculation doesn’t mention that very often, past the headphones, or lack thereof, and faster parts. Maybe Apple should release a rounded smartphone. No, wait, leave that to Samsung!

In saying that, handsets from Samsung and other companies are often touted as the next great thing. It doesn’t matter if flashy new features really don’t work, or are unimportant to most people under normal use. A few new features on an iPhone aren’t enough, a few features, some of which are useless, on a competing product must result in a serious conundrum for Apple.

I frequently observe this phenomenon in reviews from Consumer Reports and other publications where the proven negatives don’t quite match up with the total score.

Regardless, the real innovation was the first iPhone. Everything else has been iteration, and that’s the way things are supposed to work. When comparing the changes from one year to the next, don’t forget that most people don’t buy upgrades every year. It’s usually two years, and that may be moving to three years simply because the existing products are so good already.

So handset makers have to deal with a new reality. Even if this year’s iPhone is two or three times faster than the ones from two years ago, it may not be so obvious when running most apps. So what’s the point? With an iPhone 6, I would have to consider whether to consider the alleged iPhone 7, or save money and stick with what I have after it’s paid off.

That’s the question already being asked about the iPad and Macs. I still have a 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro. I’d love to have a MacBook Pro with Retina display if I could justify the expense, but the one I have, upgraded with an SSD and more RAM, is really fast enough otherwise. Maybe next year.

As it stands, the tech industry is, to a large extent, following Apple. The iPhone is obvious, as is the iPad. Before the iPad arrived, tablets were mostly confined to ugly convertible PCs, and manufacturers are still trying to push that form factor. Today’s PC notebooks designs are otherwise heavily influenced by Apple. There are MacBook Air equivalents, MacBook equivalents, and MacBook Pro equivalents, all based on Intel’s UltraBook reference design. But how many of the people attacking Apple for a lack of innovation would say the same about most PC makers? Don’t they by and large build essentially the same products with different case colors, slightly altered case elements, but little else that’s new or significant?

Yet another example is the Apple Watch. It’s not good enough, but it still outsells all other smartwatches, even the ones that cost a lot less. In order to put Apple’s product in a poor light, sales are also compared to the Fitbit, which barely plays in the smartwatch space. This is the same as comparing the iPhone with an iPod. But that’s no longer done, since iPods are yesterday’s news with declining sales.

Those who demand that Apple boost volume regardless of price, or cut the price to match that of the low-end competition, fail to realize that only one company is making large profits from all its gear. Most PC makers make very little profits as they descend to the bottom with loads of cheap junk. That may seem a proper way to do business from their standpoint, but it’s not Apple’s.

Even with lower iPhone sales, Apple still does far better than the Samsung Galaxy. Where Samsung hits high volumes is in the low-end smartphone or feature phone market. But those products rarely deliver decent profits. So why should Apple imitate another company’s failed approach? Even as fewer iPhones may be sold in the near future, Apple is in no danger of suffering from red ink, or facing irrelevance.

Then again, there was a certain tech pundit who claimed that calling the Mac operating system macOS would kill the platform. It’s hard to get wackier than that.