Do you know of anyone who doesn’t have a smartphone? I thought so. It’s hard to walk on any American street and not see someone staring down at one. Well, unless you happen to be strolling or jogging real early in the morning where there aren’t too many pedestrians about. Indeed, the number of smartphones in the average U.S. household is closing in on the number of TVs.

To be specific, according to the Consumer Technology Association, a market research company based in Virginia, each household has an average of 2.4 smartphones. They also have 2.8 TVs. So it’s getting close, and as you probably know, growth in the TV industry has stalled. With the HD transition complete, sales are flagging in this country, and the TV makers are rushing to the bottom with cheaper and cheaper sets.

No doubt the move to 4K has helped somewhat. But the share of Ultra HD sets is still low, and, as you might expect, the higher resolution models are getting cheaper all the time. Indeed, you can find plenty of worthy 4K TVs for less than $1,000. One of my colleagues bought a 49-inch 4K set last year for about $500, and it wasn’t a low-end model by any means.

Just to bring this close to home. I have two iPhones; one for me, one for Barbara. But we only have one TV set, in the other bedroom. Well, if I don’t count the 27-inch iMac, which can be used as a TV set too for a lot of programming. I lived for years with sets having smaller displays.

As you might expect, Apple and other smartphone makers are looking overseas for growth. For Apple it was China until the last quarter, where revenue dropped by 26% year-over-year. In addition to economic headwinds, makers of cheaper gear are evidently grabbing sales from makers of high-end gear.

Apple, in turn, is trying to boost sales in India and other countries. Indeed, a key reason why the iPhone SE is relatively cheap, at least for an Apple handset, is the attempt to grab sales in countries where existing iPhones are too expensive. Well, and for people who still prefer four-inch displays. As you may have heard, Apple underestimated demand for the smallest iPhone, and it is still backordered.

Some might suggest that Apple should have made a better guess at potential demand. I have no idea about the process that was used, but you know that political polls are occasionally way off the mark. So it’s possible that even the best projections may be inaccurate, not because the research is bad, but you cannot read everyone’s mind. Potential demand, no doubt, but not when those final purchase decisions will be made and acted upon, except with a margin of error.

Meanwhile, since most people who want smartphones no doubt have them, at least in the more developed world, what can manufacturers do to entice them to upgrade? Certainly they aren’t going to last near as long as a TV set, where people keep them five or 10 years before replacing them, or just pawning them off to a child’s bedroom.

It has been normal for people upgrade smartphones approximately every two years, the length of those mostly-abandoned carrier contracts. A relatively smaller number upgrade every year, and that’s easier now with these special buying/leasing programs, such as AT&T Next. Depending on which plan you select, you can upgrade to a new smartphone without a financial penalty — other than local sales tax — every 12 or 18 months with most plans.

Now that wireless carriers have pretty much gone a la carte — separating the price of service from the price of the equipment — when you wait till the handset is paid off, your bill gets cheaper. If the unit is still meeting your needs, maybe you don’t care so much about the latest and greatest. So you hold off for a while. Maybe next year’s refresh will have a feature that is attractive enough to convince you to buy it.

I’m sure all smartphone makers are confronting this dilemma, a situation sparked in the U.S. by T-Mobile’s “Uncarrier” promotion, and the decision of other carriers to follow up with their own unbundled pricing schemes. Apple’s iPhone Upgrade Program is part of this trend.

It also puts more pressure on handset makers to concoct features that customers will find exciting, must-haves, and that’s more and more difficult. What’s left to add that anyone cares about anyway? Look at the iPhone 6s, which got off to a fast start, but the pace quickly tapered off. So how many people care so much about such frills as 3D Touch and Live Photo? I find it hard to think of a need, and I wonder how many buyers of the new models really gave a damn!

That’s the dilemma facing Apple with the iPhone 7. Although rumors say it’s not going to be such a compelling upgrade, Apple won’t reveal the new features until September if it follows the past upgrade schedule. Maybe there will be something compelling there, or perhaps the people with handsets two or three years old will decide it’s finally time for something new.

Until the next great thing arrives, however, the era of double-digit smartphone growth is probably over.

As many of you regular readers know full well, there has long been an overemphasis on Apple’s real or perceived flaws. Why do this when they can do that instead? Why can’t Apple be more like other companies? Why is Apple acting too much like other companies? Wait! Isn’t that just a little contradictory? It should be one or the other, except for being a bit of both.

In any case, it’s easy to find people who will happily rant about what Apple could or should do, and why it’s making a huge mistake not to do thus and so.

Take the early days of the Mac, where Apple tried to carve its own space against Microsoft and the traditional PC. Many of the original complaints were about Macs using a pretty graphical interface, and the PC using a text-based interface, usually MS-DOS. Thus came the theory that real computers were supposed to be difficult to operate. If you believed in simplicity, you weren’t a real computer user. You were using a toy.

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Amid all the comments about Apple’s less-than-stellar sales performance in the last quarter, there have been suggestions on how Apple might fix things. Some were dumb, such as suggesting that the iPhone 7 needs to be a more compelling update. It’s dumb because we do not know what features or performance levels an iPhone 7 will offer, other than a few guesses from rumor sites and unconfirmed supply chain leaks. Sure, once we get closer to its debut — and I’ll assume the product name will be correct — there might be sufficient information, but not now.

I mean, the rumor sites haven’t settled on whether or not there will be a regular earphone jack, or whether Apple will insist you use Bluetooth or the Lighting port. It hasn’t even been explained why Apple would do this, other than the fact that this jack is very old in terms of technology, and Apple wants to make the phone thinner.

Other complaints might have more traction, that neither the iPad nor the Mac have seen compelling updates. Sure, an iPad Pro is better than other iPads in all or most respects, but it’s not as if the Smart Connector appeals to anyone unless they want to do real work on one. The speed differences are significant, but largely unnoticed in normal use with most apps. No wonder people aren’t upgrading in large numbers.

Macs also last longer than ever — the use of SSDs eliminates one common cause of trouble, the hard drive. Improvements are otherwise, at best, incremental, so it takes several years for the 10%-15% performance boost to count for much. Even then, if your existing Mac is up to the task, how much incentive is there to switch? I have a 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro that works well. There is no direct equivalent in the current lineup, since the larger displays were discontinued the next year. Still, the new models offer much faster performance, lighter weight, not to mention a Retina display. So there is significant reason to want to buy a new one if a maximum display size of 15 inches does the trick.

Well, being a lot lighter makes a difference if you have to lug a notebook carrying case for long walks across an airport terminal and other places.

But I suspect most people just don’t care and may want to use their Macs till they drop. My son, Grayson, has the same 2008 black MacBook we bought him as a graduation present in 2008. It has had most everything replaced on it during the now-expired AppleCare policy. So in a sense he has a mostly new computer, and he doesn’t feel inclined to want to buy a new one. True, operating system compatibility ended several releases ago, but he’s not at all concerned.

Now when it comes to Macs, the NPD Group’s Stephen Baker, who appeared as a guest on last week’s episode of The Tech Night Owl LIVE, suggested that the lack of significant new features was an important reason why Mac sales are down. But it’s not as if you’re seeing much in the way of innovation on the Windows side of the fence either. Windows 10 is clearly no reason to upgrade since it’s free — or will be for two more months more unless Microsoft changes its confusing upgrade policy.

So does this mean that Apple needs to deliver new MacBook Airs and new MacBook Pros that are more than minor refreshes? That’s implicit in Baker’s comments, but where does that take Apple? Does it mean going all Retina display on the MacBook Air? Can Apple do that without increasing the price? Perhaps. What about the MacBook Pro? Must it be lighter and thinner, more in tune with the MacBook? What is Apple to do?

However, there is one area where Apple may have to improve, and that’s initial product reliability, fit and finish. Maybe. So the Apple Watch supposedly still outsells other smartwatches, though sales are only rough estimates since Apple isn’t talking. But there’s a perception that it had an unfinished feeling when it arrived last spring. Apps launched and performed slowly, in large part because they had to be hosted on a paired iPhone. The arrival of true native apps helped, as did the ongoing watchOS updates. But if Apple waited a few months to release the Apple Watch, would it have received a more favorable impression when it was released?

When it comes to iOS and OS X, the perception appears right on. It may take several updates to fix a host of problems that may cause frustration for early adopters. Some feel the quality of Apple’s new products has suffered in the rush to get them out the door as quickly as possible.

In other words, is Apple releasing too many products that are unfinished?

But don’t forget that virtually all operating system upgrades from Apple and Microsoft over the years have required bug fixers to set things right. When you refer to an unfinished product, what about the first iPhone in 2007? That original iPhone had no support for native apps, only web apps. Indeed, the story goes that Steve Jobs had to be dragged kicking and screaming to accept a full app ecosystem, and that’s where the iPhone really took off.

That first model didn’t support 3G networking either.

Don’t ask me about the original Newton MessagePad and its pathetic handwriting recognition. Some feel it never worked properly for the relatively short life of the product.

I agree Apple can probably do better. But, if you consider the entire product history, you’ll see it was always thus.

As most of you know if you care about the subject at all, Apple’s iOS migration rate is many times that of Google’s Android. So less than eight months after iOS 9 was released, Apple lists an 84% adoption rate; it’s over 90% at Mixpanel Trends.

These numbers are somewhat better than iOS 8, but you can’t say the upgrade rate wasn’t high for that release too.

On the other hand, users of Android gear don’t seem so inclined to use the latest and greatest operating system. So six months after Android 6.0 Marshmallow arrived, only 9% are using it. But that’s nothing unusual. Normal first-year upgrade rates for Android tend to be in the single digits.

One article I read claims that, ‘The problem is that given Android’s current update model, no one wants or cares anymore about yearly Android releases.”

The article goes on to explain that the newest releases tend to be installed on high-end Android gear, but not always immediately. It may take a few months for the new release to be deployed, and it would tend to be installed on newly released gear, not existing products, and only a small portion of those.

The article goes on to claim that, “Android users don’t care about updates (even security updates),” but provides no evidence that this is so. It may be more about the fact that they aren’t being made available. I cannot imagine many customers saying they’d rather not install a security update that made their experience in Android-land safer. Are there such surveys? When I went online to check, I found an blog post calling the claim “dumb,” and I would tend to agree.

The real issue is that the process of pushing Android updates is sadly broken. Despite promises to do better, Google isn’t really doing what’s necessary to make it happen, to simplify the current schemes.

So the updates are first sent to the handset makers. They will have to merge and test it with their own customized version of Android, which includes lots of changes and junkware. If and when that is done — and it’s rarely a given — the update would have to be submitted to the carrier. In turn, the carrier will test it and integrate it with their own customizations. After this process they may push it to the customers, but not too often.

This is the sort of multistep process that’s rarely done, which means users of Android gear have a fairly low chance of being able to upgrade, even if it’s to fix a critical security problem that could result in their hardware or data being compromised.

Notice, that the FBI isn’t going after Google or Samsung, or LG or HTC or any other Android handset maker to demand that they unlock a handset in connection with a criminal investigation. More than likely, they’d have no problem breaking in.

In any case, clearly operating system upgrades are important to Google, since they hold special developer conferences to show off the new features. They must want developers to deliver apps that exploit those features.

But that would be a waste of time. If over 90% of Android users don’t have an upgrade six months after it’s released, it makes more sense to support prior releases, which may have a larger user base. So more than 45% of Android users have handsets on which 5.0/5.1 Lollipop, released in 2014, is installed. Or the previous version, Android 4.4 Kit Kat, which has a reported 23% of the user base. Both are based on Mixpanel Trends figures.

So maybe Google should be telling its developers that they love to see them support the new OS, but maybe next year or the year after.

Apple’s key advantage was in obtaining permission from carriers to push its own updates. So wherever you buy your iPhone, you will receive support and OS upgrades direct from Apple. Sure, you may sometimes see a carrier update being fed to your device, but it’s mostly about the OS. Apple relies on its own servers to send updates to customers. If something goes wrong with any of these releases, and iOS 8.0.1 is an example, it can be quickly withdrawn and replaced with a fixed version.

Imagine that happening on Android. Even if you are able to upgrade, if something goes wrong, it may take weeks or months to get a fixed version, assuming it’s ever made available.

Part of the problem results from allowing manufacturers and carriers to customize the OS. That puts them in the middle of a process that ought to be the province of Google. It might be better to install the same core OS on current handsets, and put the customizations in a separate package as a collection of apps. That would separate them in a way that would make it easier to get the needed updates to customers.

More to the point, Google should be allowed to push its own updates as they are made available. That would no doubt require renegotiating agreements with carriers and manufacturers. But it would benefit customers, and aren’t the customers Google’s main product? Otherwise, nothing changes, despite Google’s empty promises to do better next time.