The news might have come as a shot across the bow. In the last quarter, notebooks featuring Google’s Chrome OS — or Chromebooks — outsold Macs, but not everywhere. But this is certainly being touted by Google fans as evidence that the Mac is on the way out, that Chromebooks are taking over.

But it’s not that easy.

Now just to put things in perspective, this data is based strictly on U.S. sales as estimated by IDC. I will not dispute the numbers, although IDC is notorious for underestimating Apple’s sales. Nonetheless, it’s true that Mac sales were off some worldwide in the March quarter, so this might give the report some level of credence.

Thus, I’ll assume it’s true for the sake of argument.

Overall, Chromebooks aren’t necessarily taking sales away from Apple, although some of that may be true in one market segment. Don’t forget that Google’s Chrome OS is basically a browser and web apps. For many people, that might be enough, particularly if you use Google products and services. Indeed, with a decent online connection, it might be perfectly satisfactory, as is the fact that Chromebooks can be had for as little as $150. So if you want a cheap notebook computer, with entry-level parts and the rudiments of an OS that isn’t from Microsoft, it might be a perfectly serviceable solution. That ought to give companies who depend on the sales of PC notebooks conniptions, because they have been racing to the bottom for years. The Chrome OS is free, but so is Windows for real cheap gear with very small displays.

However, there is one market where the Chromebook has taken control, and that’s the K-12 education market in the U.S. A main reason is price. Cash-starved school systems may not be able to justify spending upwards of $849 for a MacBook Air. Even thought the price will be lower for volume sales, it won’t be that much lower.

So despite all the extra tools Apple offers for the education market, and its past history, it all comes down to money. School systems in the U.S. have really been hit hard since the 2007 recession, and the moves by local school boards to cut frills as much as possible. I suppose a proper notebook computer is a frill.

That said, a Chromebook is a pretty simple affair, with very little software, and, I suppose, easy control on the part of system admins because of the app limitation. These boxes can’t do much beyond the basics. Students can’t waste time with high-powered games and such, since the OS and the hardware wouldn’t support such pursuits even if students could install regular apps, which they can’t.

So faced with being able to hand students a cheap notebook computer or no notebook computer, you can see what decision is being made. Still, I cannot see where any company can make a profit from a PC selling for $150-250. Apple’s profit margins on any Mac sale are higher than that.

Now with the promised ability to run Android apps, it’s quite possible there will be more Chromebook sales in the consumer market. Right now, they haven’t done so well, so this apparent conquest of a single market shouldn’t be taken as an indication of the future. On the other hand, students who are exposed to specific products in school are apt to insist that their parents buy them the same gear to use at home.

So I’ve heard of one Mac author whose kids wanted Chromebooks for that very reason. So that could prove a harbinger of the future for Google. As more and more students become accustomed to Chromebooks, they would be apt to choose one for themselves.

As personal computers go, however, they are quite limited, and the things our kids do may not work so well beyond Facebook and Twitter. Being able to run Android apps, if they could be modified to work reasonably well on a notebook computer with a trackpad, would certainly help.

That said, I can see where casual users might just adapt to a Chromebook. If you’re accustomed to the Chrome browser and Gmail, and spend most of your time checking your favorite sites and catching up on messages from your friends, I suppose you could make a good case for a minimalist notebook and operating system.

But with minimal profits, I can’t imagine what PC makers are expecting. Yes, there are more expensive Chromebooks with more powerful hardware, but the most expensive model I located during a casual check at Best Buy listed for $450, a mainstream but still pretty cheap price for a notebook. A customer who becomes accustomed to Google’s OS is hardly going to trade up to Windows. Even then, they might still choose a cheap box with minimal profits to the manufacturer.

So does this mean Apple has nothing to fear? Well, a lost sale is a lost sale, and if they are losing ground in the educational market to cheap stuff, compromises may have to be made. Perhaps more aggressive pricing, and building a more powerful case for Macs in education might help. Some day states and cities in the U.S. might decide to be more generous in budgeting for education and thus more willing to spend more for personal computers that do more. But that’s little more than a pipe dream.

You hardly think a single feature would be sufficient to hang a major operating system upgrade on, but it appears to be that way, at least based on the first predictions for the next version of OS X. Or will it even be called OS X?

If past is prologue, it’s a near-certainty that the next version of OS X will be demonstrated next month at Apple’s WWDC. That, along with iOS 10, watchOS 3 and other goodies. But it’s not at all likely there will be much in the way of hardware announcements, unless a new Mac Pro appears, and that’s certainly overdue. Some even doubt Apple’s commitment to its flagship workstation.

In any case, there is speculation, based on findings of some resources in recent OS X versions, that it’ll be rebranded. In keeping with Apple’s current approach with iOS, watchOS and tvOS, it’ll become macOS. In a sense the approach reverts to the original designation of Mac OS, or Mac OS X. Regardless, that’s just a minor relabeling.

In other words, switching to macOS isn’t going to sell more product. It is, after all, free, and I doubt anyone will be a Mac because of the branding. But it’ll get coverage, although the user experience remains unchanged.

Let me amend that. The Mac Observer’s John Martellaro suggests a capital “M,” because that’s what’s been trademarked, but nothing prevents Apple from applying for more trademarks.

Now each year, Apple demonstrates a set of tentpole features for a new OS. So far, the rumor mills are stuck on just one, and it’s not even that significant an improvement, particularly if you’ve already used Siri on a mobile gadget from Apple.

So if it is all about Siri, color me bored, but obviously it’s not.

No doubt Apple’s competition will decry that feature. After all, for better or worse, Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana, debuted on Windows 10 last year. So it would seem, at first glance, that Apple is late to the party. A similar complaint applies to OS X El Capitan, where the Split View feature, also available for some iPads in iOS 9, was evidently borrowed from Microsoft and Samsung.

So what does Apple come up with that will encourage Microsoft to start their copying machines, to recall banners at a WWDC some years back? What major features will Apple craft that will move macOS, or whatever it’s called, beyond the present?

Don’t forget that, other than Cortana, Windows 10 doesn’t have an awful lot that hasn’t been done before. There is a virtual desktop feature similar to Apple’s Spaces, for example. Other features include the return of the Start menu — mostly dispatched in a controversial move for Windows 8 — and features that integrate with Windows smartphones (of which few are sold) and PC convertibles. Hardly anything original, and that might explain why the temporary free upgrade program hasn’t quite been as successful as Microsoft hoped.

It may well be that computer companies are really running out of major features to tout until they can devise ways to revolutionize the experience. A voice assistant isn’t going to do that, nor will be integration with a company’s mobile gadgets. The fundamentals of OS X — excuse me, macOS — and Windows aren’t altogether different.

One possibility I will discuss on the May 21st episode of my syndicated radio show, The Tech Night Owl LIVE, is whether Apple might someday — probably not now — consider changing the personal computing metaphor from app-centric to task-centric. I’m thinking of the Star Trek computer that you command to perform certain actions without concerning yourself as to how it’s done.

Now this may not come as a terribly pleasant concept to app developers. After all, they want you to buy their products, upgrade their products, and be delighted by their products. Well, the first is most important, the second is important when there’s a paid upgrade. But it doesn’t hurt to like what you use, rather than being forced to run an app because you need it for a certain project.

I’m not going to argue the concept of app branding. This is nothing that will happen in the near future, and even if it does, there will be compromises.

Say you want to prepare a book, so Siri would load the apps you need in the background to research, write, edit and compile the print and eBook versions. As you complete one step, it would bring up the apps you need for the next step. So it might launch Safari, and keep it running as you move through the task of research. For writing and editing, perhaps it’ll launch Word, and transfer the content to Adobe InDesign to create print/eBook ready documents.

The task might be divided into different parts with different app sets, depending on your work routine.

But would you be expected to configure the specific apps you want? At first, because, of course, developers want you to use their software, not someone else’s. Over time, however, a smarter Siri would make the selection for you based on your needs and tastes, something it’ll learn over time.

So I might be a proper candidate for Firefox — Siri would have to be agnostic about its selection or otherwise be accused of favoring Apple. But my particular writing needs with advanced search might best be served by Nisus Writer Pro. As an old hand at desktop publishing — I was doing it in the 1980s — Siri would decide I should use QuarkXPress rather than InDesign. And, by the way, Nisus Writer Pro can save your documents in Word format, which is supported in both desktop publishing apps.

When it comes to my radio shows, the act of starting a project would, if it’s not running, launch my preferred browser, plus Audio Hijack and Skype. When my shows are ready for post-production, it would launch Sound Studio and Amadeus Pro to create completed audio files. Once the shows are ready to post online, Feeder and Transmit would be at my beck and call. But I would also need to download completed MP3 files from the network, GCN, to post to my sites, iTunes, and other services.

Yes, I know there are utilities that can store automated keystrokes to launch apps, including Apple’s Automator. But a smart Siri would take over full responsibility to organize your projects for you.

I do realize that the ultimate goal of such a scheme would free you from concerns about individual apps altogether. But that’s not something developers would allow Apple to do for now.

It is the end of a long, annoying day, not made better by three large tech and telecom companies. As I write this column, I’m decompressing and wondering about the conventional wisdoms of some services.

So let’s start with Apple Maps and Google Maps. The conventional wisdom has it that the latter is much better than the former. We’ll see.

I planned a visit to a client in Peoria, AZ, a suburban community west of Phoenix. The trip would take from 50 minutes to an hour from my home, such as it is, in the East Valley. Now through force of habit, I called up Google Maps and entered my home address and the address of my client. As per my usual routine — and call me old fashioned — I printed out the route.

Most of the trip involved a path with which I was familiar, but the final leg of the journey continued along some small roads in a subdivision. Here’s where Google flaked out.

So I ended up at a cul-de-sac at least a mile from my actual destination. Evidently the street was interrupted in several places, and I should have gone a different way, but not according to Google.

Rather than give Google a second chance, I called up Apple Maps, and had Siri guide me to a location several miles away. Yes, I made doubly sure that the address was correct, but it didn’t help. I was still several miles from my destination, again at a cul-de-sac.

I was getting nowhere fast.

Well, I manually reentered the address, this time seeing a route displayed in Apple Maps that seemed to offer a chance for success, so I threw caution to the wind and hoped the third time would be a charm.

Ten minutes later I arrived at my client’s home. Having allowed for some extra driving time, I was only a few minutes late, and he didn’t notice.

Based on the correct destination, it’s clear that the actual route is quite straightforward. It involves exiting a state freeway, and making three turns. It’s less than three minutes from the freeway offramp, and doesn’t involve travel through new roads or construction signs. But why did Apple and Google miss it the very first time?

To its credit, Apple did figure it out on the second attempt, but I wasn’t interested in seeing how Google would manage the reroute. I had enough. Might as well blame myself for not asking the client to provide his own directions.

There’s not much to conclude from this episode other than the obvious fact that online mapping services are imperfect. Even though Google is supposedly much better than Apple at this sort of thing, they both screw up at an equal rate in my experience.

So much for Apple and Google.

AT&T’s faults are a tad more complicated, and one of the problems may have stemmed from an unsavory practice on the part of a company attempting to contact me.

It all started when I called up AT&T’s information number, the usual 411. In the past, if you couldn’t get a successful result from a voice menu, you could request a human operator to help. Not anymore. According to AT&T’s support people, the 411 service transitioned to an all-automated system in the past month, and I’m told other wireless carriers have made the same mistake.

What this means is that, if the voice assistant cannot find the address and phone number you want after several attempts, you’re stuck. At least AT&T informs you that you won’t be charged the $1.99 fee unless you actually get a phone number for the party you’re seeking.

Remind me never to use it again.

The other problem was far more confusing to all involved.

Now as an iPhone owner, I depend on visual voicemail to list the messages I’ve received. But I sometimes just dial the number when I’m connected to my iPhone from the car’s Bluetooth interface. It’s safer, but last December I was amazed to hear the voice assistant list nearly three dozen new messages, messages I had never before heard. The visual voicemail system listed none, but I was getting a prompt about the system being 92% full. Before I received the voice prompts about the new messages, I had placed a call to AT&T support, which failed to provide a solution even though the support person claimed that the deleted messages had been manually removed.

The call to the voicemail system happened only a few days later. So I manually went through all the new voicemails, manually deleting each one. Most were received before AT&T supposedly cleared the voicemail system. In passing, I noticed that the calls had all come from the same business.

AT&T was unable to figure out a solution, partly because they claimed I should not have deleted the messages after listening to them. Had I left them alone, they might have figured out a cause, and once a message is deleted this way, it cannot be recovered. Allegedly.

But on Monday, I confronted a similar situation, manually checking voicemail by dialing the number directly. This time there were 14 new messages. A fast check of visual voicemail — after I stopped the car at a convenience store for safety — indicated no messages were available. Again, I manually listened to all 14 unheard messages and, again, they all came from that same company.

This time, it took three support calls to AT&T before I learned, once again, that they had no knowledge of what had happened. Could someone have hacked into their voicemail system to insert all  these messages? It’s not that this was a robocall or some kind of sham promotion. This was a company with whom I’d done business; I was their customer. Still, I identified the company to AT&T and asked them to investigate the situation and block the number. That means they cannot call me again, ever.

Now most of you know that I also have a paranormal radio show, but I do not for a moment believe this problem is was the result of sort of X-Files or psychic phenomenon. Clearly the company is doing something that’s not kosher in pushing malformed voicemails to their customers, and they have now lost my business. If anyone has heard of this sort of thing, I’m all ears.

Once upon a time, Apple’s iTunes had a sidebar with colorful icons, the better to identify different categories and playlists. But some people at Apple decided we must all be color blind, so the icons were changed to shades of gray. The Finder inherited the same questionable simplicity.

And then the iTunes sidebar went away; well unless you chose Playlists in iTunes, in which case it appeared, until you chose a different option. All so confusing, all so unnecessary. The online forums, including Apple’s own discussion boards, were littered with complaints about the downward spiral of iTunes. Rather than attempt to make the app simpler over the years, as it inherited more services and features, it appeared that developers had taken a holiday.

Prolific author and long-time Mac advocate Bob LeVitus, sometimes known as “Dr. Mac,” wrote, produced and performed a song called, “iTunes Must Die!” In passing, Apple decided not to allow it to be posted on iTunes.

In a Macworld article about the last major iTunes upgrade, version 12, Kirk McElhearn, also known as the “iTunes Guy,” concluded, “Overall, I find the navigation confusing—it requires too many clicks to get around.”

It’s not good to have someone who has written loads of articles about iTunes to be so down on its interface. Is anyone at Apple listening to such complaints? To make matters worse, a few people, some with a fair amount of online presence, including The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple, reported that many gigabytes of songs were deleted from their iTunes libraries upon managing the somewhat confusing passage from iTunes Match, where tracks from Apple’s vast music library are matched with your own songs, and Apple Music.

This proved to be a difficult dilemma to resolve. A visit to Apple headquarters by Dalrymple delivered a solution, that perhaps he goofed when trying to manage his library, and he was able to recover what he lost. Supposedly it wasn’t Apple’s fault after all, but the fault of the customer for making foolish decisions.

Now a company, as matter of course, shouldn’t go around blaming customers when troubles arise, but it is nonetheless true that Apple did take the problem seriously, seriously enough to devise a solution, or at least a workaround, in this week’s iTunes 12.4 upgrade. At the same time, some of the peculiarities in the app’s interface were resolved, and, oh yes, the sidebar is back in most of its glory.

I say most, because it’s still in shades of gray, but at least that makes it consistent with the Finder.

In any case, clearly Apple has given the new design, or the somewhat reverted design, a little thought. I wonder about the reasons for the lame decisions that so wrecked the iTunes user experience. Was it a matter of taking an aging app and hoping to infuse a little sparkle into it despite taking a wrong direction? Such questions can be debated forever and never resolved simply because it’s quite unlikely Apple’s executives will have much, or anything, to say about it.

Among the new features is a Media Picker, a simple popup menu at the upper left that that you click to bring up a list of your media libraries, plus the ability to edit the menu or choose another, usually networked, library instead.

The Back and Forward arrows are now easier to spot and work with all iTunes functions that require some sort of back and forth screen navigation. Overall, these and other new and revised features make iTunes more intuitive, and easier to use.

Unfortunately, even if you haven’t opted to subscribe to Apple Music, there are relicts of its presence, such as For You, the better to remind you that it’s available. But Apple is entitled to sell its services, and nobody forces you to use that otherwise useless feature.

Now I’m sure some of you can deliver more wide-ranging lists of the things that ought to improve in iTunes. It’s certainly not bug free, considering that I discovered five identical playlists that I never configured in the sidebar. One was labeled “Classical Music,” and the remaining four were labeled “Classical Music1.” Yes, identical. Each contained an identical smattering of royalty free tunes that might be regarded as classical, but I never considered putting them in a playlist.

There was also a single Apple Music playlist, but since I never became a paid subscriber after sampling the service for 3 months, it must be the result of some form of data corruption. Oh yes, that shouldn’t be happening. In any case, the unplayable remnant consisted of a best of collection from Creedence Clearwater Revival. Wonder how that got there! After deleting this unusable playlist, the entire Apple Music category disappeared.

And, no, I did not find any tunes missing during the temporary transition from iTunes Match to Apple Music and back again, but I accept the fact that the problem has occurred for some people. Indeed, the most significant change to deal with a problem that Apple claims it can’t duplicate, is a set of more descriptive menus to explain the consequences of any act that might result in deleting something from your music library. Will it solve the problem? I cannot say, since it never happened to me. But if it is the fault of some users becoming confused over poorly explained features, maybe it will help you to avoid such mishaps.

There are published reports that a major iTunes upgrade may be announced during June’s WWDC. But Apple made a good start and, no, I’m not lobbying for the return of color menus. I know about lost causes.