When it comes to satellite radio, I go back a long way. I first interviewed someone from XM Radio around 2004 or 2005. In exchange, they gave me a press account for a few months. I later converted this to a paid account and, when my personal finances hit the skids, my son picked up the bill, so I continue to keep satellite radios in the home and in the car.

After XM and its lone rival, Sirius, merged in 2008, the 150 or so channels each offered were more or less combined. I say more or less, because some channels, such as the two that carry the Howard Stern show, were placed in an extra-cost package for XM users called All Access.  But you don’t have to pay extra for Stern if you have the standard Sirius Select package.

So despite the promise that they’d be combined, eventually, you still have separate Sirius and XM radios and subscription plans.

Unfortunately, unless you buy from the aftermarket, you don’t have a choice of which service is available for your car. The auto maker chooses for you. In recent years, I’ve ended up with Sirius in the car, but home radios, such as they are, usually offer XM except for a model known as Lynx, which supports SiriusXM, which I presume includes the combined version of the service and Wi-Fi.

So why pay for radio when you can tune in to your local broadcast stations or choose from thousands of channels online — all free? Well, if you travel a lot it may make sense to want to listen to the same programs from the same channels throughout most of the U.S. and Canada. I say most, because the satellite signals have to be enhanced by terrestrial repeaters in some areas, particularly where there are long sections of forests, mountains and tunnels. So some places, you can enter a tunnel and still listen to your favorite stations, because SiriusXM has invested in a repeater network.

The system works fine for cars, and drop-outs are usually infrequent. However, home reception usually requires being within range of a repeater, even if you aim the antenna carefully. And there’s the problem. Similar to satellite TV, you have a tiny antenna or dish that needs to be oriented roughly south, free of obstructions. So it’s not as if you can just carry around a portable radio and receive a consistent signal. Now I suppose they could develop a radio with an embedded Wi-Fi base station that would push the signal to portable radios or speaker systems around your home or office. If you opt to subscribe to the Internet streaming version of SiriuxXM, the Lynx radio can pick up the signal anywhere in your home via your router.

But home radios evidently aren’t key markets for SiriusXM, I gather. There are only a handful of receivers available, and they are modular, meaning that you have to buy a separate speaker dock for them. Internet streaming is a suitable alternative when satellite reception isn’t possible, or is inconsistent. You can login via your browser or, on direct from a mobile app that’s available for the major platforms.

Since SiriusXM is an online or satellite-based service, it is not tethered to the FCC or its regulations. Thus there are no restrictions about language, and it’s not uncommon to hear the “seven dirty words” on Stern’s show and other talk programs. The musical fare is excellent. The channels cover loads of musical genres and sub-genres, so you have a channel called “Classic Vinyl,” which is classic rock music sourced on vinyl for analog fans. There are dedicated channels for special artists, such as Elvis Presley and Tom Petty.

While many channels have the usual radio advertising clutter, music-only channels get special treatment. They are ad-free, and are often hosted by famous disk jockeys from the old days, such as “Cousin” Bruce Morrow, a mainstay decades ago on WABC-AM radio in New York City before it went all-talk, along with a selection of former MTV VJs, such as Nina Blackwood.

There are also channels for comedy, entertainment, news, talk and religion. For news junkies, you can listen to the audio from your favorite cable news channel.

That’s the good stuff.

The digital audio is heavily compressed. So the signal via satellite doesn’t quite match FM in sound quality, but it’s clean and relatively clear except on complex musical passages, where it gets a little mushy. The Internet streaming version is usually superior.

Now about those repeaters. If they aren’t working in your city, your home radio may also be down for the count. A typical warning message on your satellite radio is “No Satellite Signal,” but woe to those who try to get a direct answer from SiriusXM support about dealing with such a problem. I have run into it for several days at a time in recent months. Unfortunately, SiriusXM support is mostly sourced overseas, which means you may be stuck with someone barely conversant in English trying to diagnose your problem.

When I encountered these issues, I was told to let them refresh the signal, which essentially means that your radio is reactivated, and that can cure some problems within a few moments. It didn’t for me, although the satellite radio in the family car worked just fine. After going through several support levels, I even persuaded them to replace the home receiver, twice, and finally the loudspeaker dock. Swapping out the satellite dish didn’t help. Unfortunately, support apparently receives infrequent updates of service outages, usually once a day, and that database may be out of date, or inaccurate. So the outage affecting your city may not even be listed.

My resolution, sort of, was to contact SiriusXM corporate support, which is not easy to reach. You have to ask a customer service rep nicely a few times before they’ll connect you or give you a separate phone number to dial. In my case, they investigated the problem and confirmed there was a repeater outage impacting the metropolitan Phoenix area. Shortly before I wrote this column, I was assured service would be restored within three business days. When I protested, they offered a service credit and a temporary subscription to the Internet streaming service.

Is satellite radio worth paying for? That depends. You may receive a trial subscription when you buy or lease a new car. They usually last from three months to one year depending on the make and model. Before the free service lapses, they might offer you a six-month discount deal. After that, it’s usually $10.99 per month for “Mostly Music” and $14.99 per month for the standard Select packages. Internet only service is also $14.99 per month standalone, but only $4.00 extra if you opt for another subscription package. There are discounts for multiple radios.

In order to boost business, SiriusXM might temporarily turn on inactive car radios en masse for a few days to entice you to sign up and join the more than 30 million listeners to the service.

For a car, it may be worth the price, but it’s hit or miss for your home. The best bet is probably the Streaming option. But remember that you’re using up Internet bandwidth. The audio-only signal may not be so draining for your home, but on the road it will be less expensive to stick with a car-based satellite radio if your vehicle has one. You won’t have to worry about a wireless carrier’s bandwidth restrictions.

As much as I’ve come to depend on my satellite radios, if I didn’t have someone paying for it, I’d be inclined to put it on the chopping block, along with all the other stuff I’ve given up in recent years.

Update: XM service was restored to my home radio on Wednesday afternoon, six days after it failed.

The Apple Watch first began to ship on April 24, 2015. It was launched with lots of fanfare, and its arrival had been predicted for months before the initial demonstration. At first the rumors referred to it as the iWatch, but as Apple moves away from new products with an “i” prefix, the name Apple Watch was inevitable.

As was the case with the iPod, iPhone and iPad, the Apple Watch was far from the first of its kind to market. As usual, however, Apple offered a superior solution, and, within short order, began to dominate a nascent market. Getting a buzz as a piece of jewelry, rather than just another fancy tech toy, put Apple in a different category from the likes of Pebble, Samsung, and all Google Wear gear.

Pebble, at least, managed to carve out a place in the market for itself as a cheaper alternative, but with reports that the company is laying off 25% of its staff due to tight money concerns, its future is less certain. Sure, successful companies have their ups and downs, and perhaps this too shall pass. But it may also be that, regardless of price, the Apple Watch has sucked the air out of the market for most competitors.

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There are lame theories about how Apple updates its products. A frequently voiced cultural meme is that Apple often upends the tech industry by dint of a brand new product that takes things in a new direction. Year after year, or close to that, amazing technologies emerge from some magic place. You’ll see shortly how misleading this contention is.

So as we close in on the first third of 2016, just how has Apple changed the tech industry? Well, I think I could have written this article last year, where the new products didn’t seem so spectacular.

We have the iPhone SE, which is basically an iPhone 5/5s with mostly new innards. The new components take it quite close to an iPhone 6s except for the lack of 3D Touch. All right, the Touch ID sensor is from an older generation, but most people won’t notice.

Rather than advance the technology, Apple filled a gap in its product line to serve people who wanted a cheaper iPhone, an up-to-date one with a smaller display, or some combination of both. But there’s nothing wrong with that, and I think Apple should have built it last fall. A lot of people have yet to upgrade to new iPhones, and price and the inconvenience of a larger display are two factors. The other, that their existing gear works fine, means they won’t upgrade regardless.

So Apple’s critics complain that the iPhone SE won’t sell lots of copies. But a few million per quarter can mean the difference between flagging sales and modest growth. There may be a small indication of where it’s going when Apple releases its quarterly financials later this month. But it may be telling that supplies are said to be short at Apple Stores in the U.S. Does that mean that Apple has production difficulties, or was demand larger than expected?

To someone buying one of these handsets, the question of whether the technology is all-new won’t matter. Only some tech bloggers are concerned.

The other new development is the 9.7-inch iPad Pro, which largely matches the bigger model with some changes and additions. So there is a new wrinkle on color matching called True Tone, which adjusts color temperature based on sensors measuring ambient light. The benefits are modest for the most part except for sunlight, where it is said to make a world of difference.

In the scheme of things, the new features in the smaller iPad Pro won’t alter the tech industry in the way the first iPad in 2010 did. It’s iterative, and the only concern is that it’s $100 more expensive than its predecessor, the iPad Air 2, which was given an additional $100 price cut.

That, however, is how Apple really works. Rather than deliver major upgrades or all-new gadgets every year, the new product initiatives are years apart. So we had the first Mac in 1984. I will suggest the first Apple LaserWriter, introduced in 1985, was a major innovation. By introducing Adobe PostScript to the masses, and paving the way for such apps as PageMaker and QuarkXPress, Apple created a new industry. Within a few years, desktop publishing mostly replaced traditional typography.

Apple no longer makes the LaserWriter. That market was taken over by traditional printer makers, but Apple’s willingness to introduce a desktop printer, with technology to match the finished page seen on your Mac’s display, was revolutionary.

You might not regard the Newton MessagePad, introduced in 1993, as particularly innovative. But it sported a touchscreen of a sort and was powered by an early version of the ARM processor. Sure, it was overpriced for its modest pretensions, and handwriting recognition was perfectly awful, but it helped paved the way for a market that eventually led to tablets and smartphones.

In 2001, people laughed at having 1,000 songs in your pocket for a “mere” $399 — until the iPod took over the fledgling digital music player market. Nobody came close. Even Microsoft, thought to be destined to take over every market it entered, couldn’t deliver a worthy competitor.

The critics laughed at the first iPhone in 2007, but such companies as Google and Samsung were working overtime developing imitations. Certainly no subsequent iPhone has added as much new technology as the original, but it took the smartphone market in a new direction. The previous standard for the industry, BlackBerry, never recovered.

Just four years later, the iPad arrived. Maybe it was mostly a phone-less iPhone with a larger display at first, but it was the first truly successful tablet computer. For years, Microsoft promised a tablet revolution, but its hardware partners mostly delivered clumsy notebooks with touchscreens that required a stylus. The most successful competing tablets from Samsung and other companies are in the iPad mold. Microsoft is still trying to promote convertible notebooks, just slimmer and lighter.

The Apple Watch, which arrived in 2015, doesn’t seem to have the potential of an iPhone. At least not yet. But it has become the most popular smartwatch out there. It may take a few years to realize its potential. But it’s more than just an expensive tech toy.

So you see that Apple doesn’t necessarily overhaul a market every year or two. Most product improvements are simple refreshes, evolutionary and not revolutionary. Other companies do that all the time and few complain. But Apple? It has to meet a fake standard or it can’t the successful due to the misguided perceptions of some people.

To briefly refresh your memories: For days earlier this year, the FBI made loud claims that Apple needed to help unlock an iPhone 5c used by a terrorist. Based on a court order, Apple asserted it would have to build what it called a “govOS” that defeats brute force protections, to allow unlimited login attempts to accomplish the task.

On the day before a scheduled court hearing pitting the U.S. Department of Justice and Apple, the DOJ requested a postponement. The reason? A “third party” came to them with a solution to pluck the data off that iPhone. A week later, and they announced they had achieved success. But as we move through April, the FBI remains coy about what, if anything, they might have retrieved. Well, at least to the public.

Now if they actually had discovered even one bit of actionable intelligence, they’d shout it to the skies. Not necessarily the information, mind you, but that they had achieved success. Instead, they are reportedly still looking over the material, which doesn’t convey optimism that anything useful was found. This seems to argue in favor of my ongoing skepticism.

After all, this was a work phone. The San Bernardino terrorists were smart enough to destroy their own tech gear, but the office iPhone was left intact. Since it was a work phone, one that could be retrieved by the employer with a simple request, it would hardly make sense to put something incriminating on it. After all, the refusal to turn it over would rouse suspicions and might have helped the authorities to thwart the act. I’m assuming a basic level of intelligence, since Syed Farook, one of the deceased terrorists, was a well-educated health department employee. All right, a highly deranged well-educated person, but I would assume he had a reasonable amount of intelligence.

So I don’t expect anything to come of this successful attempt. But it still leaves a big elephant in the room, which is the method by which the authorities were able to unlock that iPhone. Did the third-party, which some believe to be Cellebrite, an Israeli mobile forensics company, exploit a security leak in iOS? If that’s the case, certainly Apple should know so that they can shore up the system and protect customers.

But that’s only if there is a security leak. Indeed the FBI is now admitting that this method doesn’t work on any handset newer than an iPhone 5c.

So the core debate remains. Few would deny that police have the right to obtain evidence that might prevent or solve a crime. But there are constraints to that authority that, in many cases, it requires a court order in the U.S. I am not going to research how it’s done in every advanced country, but the process is reasonable.

However, Apple’s decision to encrypt data on iOS gear has changed the equation. In the old days, a search warrant could be easily executed on someone’s home, office or personal property. But when it comes to encrypted data from a mobile handset, can a suspect be forced to unlock it by a court edict? What if the suspect is dead?

But if a mobile device is locked to protect customers, can the authorities demand the manufacturer build a backdoor, thus opening the platform to possible exploits? How does that benefit a customer’s right to privacy?

Now if the method used to unlock that iPhone succeeds when it’s used elsewhere, the secret is bound to come out when and if it’s used to get evidence for someone on trial. The defense would demand to know how it was done as part of their right of discovery. Once that happens, the method can be discussed during the course of a public trial, so everyone would know what to do and how to do it.

Indeed, the DOJ may have already begun to share details of how the data was extracted with the Senate Intelligence Committee and other high ranking Senators, according to a published report. Such briefings would be held as the committee develops legislation to deal with law enforcement requests to retrieve data from encrypted devices.

So at some point, Apple should be given the information they need to deal with a potential security problem. If there is a security problem. Some reports suggested that the iPhone was opened due to a trick, by loading the flash memory into a PC’s RAM, testing up to 10 passcodes, reloading the memory image, and repeating the attempt. Eventually the efforts would succeed, in theory. The DOJ said it took 26 minutes to accomplish the task without, once again, explaining just how it was done.

Now I suppose the DOJ can keep doing things this way, hoping that third-party company will get them out of a jam, for as long as it works. If it fails, we might be back to square one. To avoid repeated conflict, one possible solution would be for the DOJ and tech companies to get together to devise a workable method that fulfills the needs of law enforcement without comprising your security. But that may be an impossible dream.