I have been using Macs since the 1980s, first at the office, and a few years later, at home. By the early 1990s, I really got sucked in, by providing support for Mac users on AOL as a forum leader. It didn’t take long before I became a writer focusing on Apple gear.

My background is not being mentioned to pat myself on the back, but merely to show that I’ve lived in this environment for quite a long time and have encountered all sorts of problems to solve. I’ve seen Apple on the upswing and Apple on the ropes, and I’ve even had a fair amount of exposure to Windows.

So I think I have a bit of perspective as to how things work, or ought to work, and what might be needed to allow things to work better. Here’s where I think Apple, despite touting simplicity, sometimes makes things more complicated than they need to be. This is the argument often made about Windows, that Microsoft hasn’t a clue about how best to structure an operating system so that it gets out of your way and lets you get some real work done.

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The speculation about Apple rebranding OS X as “macOS” intensified this week when some developer documentation mentioned a new revenue split for subscriptions via in-app purchases. So for the second year and beyond, it would be reduced from 30% to 15%. If that holds true, developers are getting a much better deal.

That should have been the story, until someone with an eye for details noticed that, instead of using OS X to refer to the Mac operating system, they used macOS. Aha! So therein lies yet another clue that Apple will rebrand the OS come the WWDC. It’s right there, clear as anything, and it’s consistent with their current approach with iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.

Well, until Apple changed it back, clearly after this curious move — or mistake — got lots of publicity.

In times past, there have been reports about Apple accidentally releasing specs for a new model of something or other; again it is removed once the word is out. You wonder if the people who designed the site did something stupid, and perhaps they did. Or maybe, just maybe, it was all a deliberate marketing maneuver to keep us talking about what was coming next.

All those hints. Sometimes you see telltale clues, possibly, in an invitation to a media event, and sometimes you’re just not sure.

Indeed, by rarely revealing the details about a new product or service, Apple gets more publicity simply because the rumor sites — and the mainstream media — can’t stop speculating about what the company might be up to.

Now there are reasons — valid ones — why Apple won’t give advance notice about a product upgrade. One is that sales will suffer on existing gear. True, Apple has tended to follow a rough schedule about product refreshes, but it doesn’t happen till it happens. Another reason is to keep the public guessing, and leave fewer breadcrumbs for the competition to examine in order to come up with something similar.

Sure, a company such as Samsung might already know. Apple has component deals with Samsung, so even if there is a nondisclosure contract with severe penalties, the word may still get out somehow. But the major marketing push comes under Apple’s terms.

When it comes to those little “mistakes” on price lists and in postings on Apple’s site, I suspect they aren’t mistakes after all. Employees are not going to be disciplined because it happened. It’s all part and parcel of a carefully crafted marketing leak to create anticipation and sell product. The more you talk about Apple, the more you’ll visit an Apple Store or the company’s site when you are in a buying mood.

That takes us to those background briefings, stories from unnamed but informed sources “close to Apple,” and other reports about what our favorite fruit company might be doing. You see stories of this sort, frequently at major news outlets, such as the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. But it’s not a matter of distilling and digesting rumors and trying to come up with something meaningful. These reports are all about creating anticipation. The informed sources are Apple executives and marketing people who reveal the news on the condition that they are not directly quoted, or identified. This is a traditional practice in the industry. Politicians and other officials also do it often, as a way to control the message.

This doesn’t mean that every Apple rumor is necessarily true. There may be leaks from the supply chain that end up being wrong or misleading. Details about a new product may represent a prototype that isn’t finalized, or will never be released. Stories about supply chain order patterns, less or more, may be accurate about one supplier, but it doesn’t reflect the total number of suppliers that Apple is using. More than one contractor may be involved, and ordering patterns will shift depending on supply and demand, and ongoing product changes. As Tim Cook has said on several occasions, you cannot take a few supply chain metrics and get the entire picture of how well a product is doing.

Now I’m sure you’d like to see a detailed product roadmap from Apple. Certainly businesses would love it, but so would Apple’s competitors. The practice of creating anticipation and demand for something new has proven successful even if people are often frustrated about the lack of clear details.

As I write this article, we’re days away from some major product launches from Apple. I’ve kept my predictions to the minimum and focused on the consensus of speculation about the WWDC and beyond. More important to me is what I would like to see, even if those hopes and dreams aren’t part of Apple’s product planning. At the end of the day, what ends up in new hardware and software is a matter of compromises. It’s a matter of what works and what doesn’t, and what features just don’t make any sense even if they sound really cool.

One thing about Apple is that they aren’t always first to jump on a new feature, which means others will do it first, but not always very well. So if Siri does end up on the Mac as predicted, it will, one hopes, be a far better Siri, so Apple doesn’t come across as just following Microsoft’s lead with Cortana on Windows 10.

I realize some of you are aching for Siri’s arrival. As I’ve said before, I don’t really care, but I’ll give it a try if and when it shows up.

There seems to be a meme playing out in the media in recent weeks that Apple updates gear and operating systems too often. This feeling is supported by the fact that many product refreshes, particularly Macs, are quite minor and barely discernible. The last iOS and OS X (or whatever it’ll be called next week) shipped with loads of lingering bugs. By the time they are resolved, it’s time to start all over again with a new release.

A blatant example was OS X Yosemite. It shipped with irritating Wi-Fi glitches involving connectivity and other ills. Well, not for me, but my iMac is hooked up to a wired Ethernet network. My notebook, a 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro, seemed to run all right. But the Wi-Fi hardware since then changed considerably. Unfortunately, Apple went through several maintenance updates to set things right, which was finally done by reverting a system file to a previous version. What Apple tried to do technically didn’t survive real-world experience.

iOS updates have traditionally arrived each year with a new iPhone, and I’ll get to the latter shortly.  Apple has opted to make OS X updates annual too, and they are delivered free of charge. That, plus watchOS and tvOS, represent the core of what’s expected from next week’s WWDC keynote.

Free operating system upgrades are just terrific. Having new features to enhance your experience is also great. But when things just don’t work as advertised — and you have to wait long months for a fix — that’s not so great. It appears to indicate that Apple is pushing too many OS upgrades too quickly, and something has to give.

S0me tech pundits are suggesting Apple doesn’t have to issue a new OS to coincide with new equipment. While those upgrades might contain some new stuff, changing the schedule to every two years shouldn’t hurt sales of new gear. I just wonder, if you polled Apple customers, they’d tell you that they bought their new iPhones or Macs because the OS did something brand spanking new. Besides, ongoing feature additions over the year, perhaps with a press release, will continue to drive attention to the OS without having to push a major upgrade.

Sure, there can always be a minor update with a new feature or two to match a product upgrade, but the rest of the OS doesn’t have to change.

Google holds an I/O conference every year to launch a new version of Android and I can see the pressure on Apple to be competitive. But the new features in an Android upgrade aren’t always so significant and, besides, it may take a year or two for a decent number of end users to actually get that update. And most won’t, so it really doesn’t matter. Even a new handset or tablet may come with an older OS version. At least with Apple gadgets, if the new hardware has the previous OS — never older — upgrading is not difficult.

That takes us to the hardware. Macs used to get annual updates, but some slide for two or three years. The last Mac mini arrived in 2014. The last Mac Pro arrived in 2013. So far in 2016, only one Mac, the MacBook, received a refresh with newer parts. Most Mac upgrades — except for the Mac Pro — have also been minor, with the newest Intel hardware. Things have slowed down since Intel’s new chips are coming later and later, but, yes, I’ve seen the speculation that a new version of the MacBook Pro is expected next week.

So far as the iPhone concerned, it’s pretty much in Apple’s hands since they develop the processor. The iPhone has been updated on a tick-tock schedule. One year the case is redesigned to some degree (the last time this happened, larger displays were added), and the following year there is a standard hardware refresh and a few additional features. Siri debuted this way with the iPhone 4s in 2011. Otherwise, it looked almost the same as the iPhone 4, but the antenna system was improved, so it would be less vulnerable to signal loss if you held it the wrong way.

Unlike new Macs, an iPhone release is a special event. It always merits a media launch, and customers routinely wait outside Apple Stores for hours — or days — to buy one. Well, not the iPhone SE, which was essentially an upgrade of the iPhone 5s with new parts.

Now some suggest the next release will still be an iPhone 7. But the case will be almost the same as the iPhone 6 series. There will be faster hardware and some other minor enhancements, more in line with a “tock” release. But if it was presented as an iPhone 6x, some customers would no doubt balk. Well, maybe not, because most of them will be using handsets they have had for two years or more, so they may be ready to buy new gear.

The regular group of Apple critics will complain, because they don’t live in the real world, or understand the needs of individual customers and why they buy or don’t buy. Unless you abuse your iPhone, it should last more than two years. My wife’s iPhone 5c was released in 2013. It is in perfect condition, hasn’t had heavy use, and I expect she’ll keep it a year or two longer before asking for something new.

What this means is that customers aren’t as apt to upgrade as often as before. This is certainly true with the iPad, where some are using gear that’s three or four years old. My sister-in-law has a third-generation iPad from 2012. It seems somewhat sluggish to me, but she isn’t complaining. That’s also the dilemma Apple is facing. Customers aren’t rushing to buy the new models.

I’m not about to suggest that Apple’s product upgrade policies are wrong. Clearly customer tastes are changing, but it’s also true that a larger percentage of customers are considered potential iPhone upgraders this year than last year. That ought to indicate the iPhone 7 will be more successful, even if the critics don’t think — despite having little information to go on — that it will have enough changes.

As you might expect, the tech pundits are now working overtime trying to guess what the next operating system for Macs will contain. Notice that I’m avoiding discussion in this column on whether it’ll be branded macOS, or Mac OS, or remain as OS X. I really don’t care all that much what it’s going to be called. I’ve mentioned it on the radio show, but only in passing.

So what can we expect from the big event June 13, when Tim Cook and his lieutenants reveal all to a waiting public during the WWDC keynote? Whether any of it means anything also depends on your priorities.

First among equals in expected tentpole features is Siri. I can see, from a marketing viewpoint, why it’s there. Microsoft added its virtual assistant, Cortana, to Windows 10 last year, so Apple may seem to be behind the curve not to have a similar feature for your Mac.

The details don’t matter so much unless you care about talking to your Mac. I don’t. Don’t forget that you can already perform dictate functions on a Mac, and that’s a feature that has existed for a while. I suspect some people will play with the Mac version of Siri for a while and give it up, and a smaller number might agonize over every feature and every failure if things go wrong. Or I might just be totally off the mark on this, but that depends on the degree to which it’s touted by Apple, and what advantages it’ll offer over the competition. Will, for example, VocalIQ technology acquired by Apple last year fuel a Siri on steroids?

In any case, you should expect that the core apps for OS X will be upgraded, and that includes Calendar, Maps, Mail, Messages and Safari.

For now, I’m perfectly happy with Safari. I settled on it as my preferred browser years ago. I keep Chrome and Firefox around for compatibility, plus whatever Microsoft is pushing in the Windows 10 environment that runs with Parallels Desktop. I need to know that my sites are all working properly or at least reasonably well regardless of which browser or computer you’re using.

Mail is a very mixed bag. It is simple, fast, and does most things well. But the El Capitan version was notorious for stalling for a 30-second timeout from time to time. I’ll let you know if the 10.11.6 betas helps; the second beta shipped this week to both Mac developers and public beta testers.

Other than that timeout issue, Mail can be aggravating because it is stupid at performing some basic functions. Take setting up an email account. If you use a standard free email system, such as Gmail, iCloud or Outlook, the setup process is fairly seamless. Microsoft Exchange support is also pretty good. But when it comes to adding a standard private IMAP email account, Mail is brain dead.

I’ll single out the email accounts I’ve used on my web server and a third-party provider, Polaris Mail. The DNS settings for my domains include features known as “autodiscover” and “autoconfig” that allow an email client — well a smart one — to automatically select the incoming and outgoing servers and, usually, map the local folders with the server’s folders for Drafts, Junk and Sent. Except for Mail, which does none of this. Mail for iOS is equally brain dead, meaning I have to engage in wasted manual labor whenever I configure an account of this sort.

What about the competition? Well, Microsoft Outlook for Mac is somewhere in the middle. It continues to create bogus folders for the standard three. So instead of mapping the local folder to Sent on the server, it creates a folder called Sent Items and the Mac versions of the app doesn’t let you change it. At least not for me.

Are you with me so far?

Thunderbird, however, seems to guess the “autodiscover” and “autoconfig” settings and it gets all the IMAP folders correct. Maybe Apple’s developers should talk to the Mozilla people about this. Why Mail hasn’t been fixed is anyone’s guess. I’d rather have a solid, workmanlike feature of this sort then being able to annotate messages in Mail, which doesn’t even seem to work anymore.

To put things in perspective, Mail dates back to the NeXT days.

When it comes to instant messaging, I use three apps on my Mac, because of the lack of interoperability among various systems. So there’s Messages, which also manages such extras as the original AOL/AIM system, plus Jabber, Google and SMS messaging courtesy of my iPhone.

It used to handle Facebook messages until the powers-that-be at that company decided to discard Jabber support. So I use something called Messenger for Facebook, which is not actually published by Facebook. The third is WhatsApp, largely because a few of my contacts, including my son, Grayson, use it. But since Facebook owns WhatsApp, why not integrate both systems in a single app? Is that a branding or marketing issue?

Ideally, I’d like all these messaging systems to work in a single app. It’s about efficiency, which is what Messages used to be until things changed for the worse. Whether Apple can manage this is anyone’s guess. I suppose it depends on the company’s relationship with Facebook and the latter’s intentions. Clearly the customer comes last.

Then there’s the potential for Touch ID support. Future Macs might have a fingerprint sensor, but what’ll probably happen is that there will be a Bluetooth link with an iPhone so equipped, and it will be able to wake up your Mac. One hopes Apple will keep it simple.