This is an old story. In the mid-1990s, there were so many Mac product variations, even executives couldn’t tell them apart without a cheat sheet. I’m serious. So you had the consumer lineup, the Performa. There were minor model differences with various memory or processor configurations, and sometimes a model would be exclusive to a specific chain store.

The decision was unfortunate, and represented Apple’s foolhardy desire to emulate the PC world with loads of barely distinguishable models, and don’t forget the Mac OS clones. So supposedly customers would have a rich selection of Macs or Mac clones, but most of the time it was about choosing confusion, and it wasn’t pretty.

With Apple deeply in the red, Steve Jobs returned and, in 1997, assumed the title of iCEO, and put a hacksaw to kill products that weren’t producing, killing the clones and reducing the Mac desktop and portable lineups to consumer and business machines. While customers didn’t have the same choices, the ones they had were presumably adequate for most purposes.

When Apple’s online store arrived, there were ways to customize a Mac with different memory and drive combinations. While the prices for the upgrades were higher than a third-party alternative, there was a matter of convenience and the feeling of security. After all, Apple guaranteed everything, and your new computer was already preconfigured to your tastes. This is not dissimilar to what such companies as Dell offered, except that there were fewer choices for Mac users.

Unfortunately, Apple has sharply reduced your ability to upgrade a Mac after you buy it, by making RAM and drive upgrades near impossible on most models.

With the arrival of the iPod, there was only one, but over time the lineup split among the “classic” hard-drive equipped model, a mid-priced version with flash memory, and a really cheap version, the shuffle, which didn’t have a lot of storage for your music library, but was great for attaching to your arm for use while jogging. The high-end iPod today is the iPod touch, which is essentially an iPhone without the phone.

The first iPhone came with different flash memory options, but the lineup gradually started to splinter. So when a new model came out, Apple would offer the previous model for $100 less, and when there were enough, the model before that for an additional $100 discount.

The iPhone 6, debuting in 2014, came in two ways, with a 4.7-inch display and a 5.5-inch display. Two previous models were offered, an iPhone 5s, and an iPhone 5c, if you preferred four inches. And it appears many did.

For 2015, the lineup consisted of the iPhone 5s at the low end, the 2014 iPhone 6 in the middle, and the iPhone 6s at the high end. That changed this past week, with the iPhone SE, a brand new but cheaper 4-inch handset, replacing the iPhone 5s.

So today’s iPhone catalog consists of products no more than a year old. Each comes with multiple memory configurations and various colors. There are also models customized for specific wireless carriers, or an unlocked version if you prefer to choose a carrier without any restrictions. The last option comes in handy at a time when many cell phone providers no longer offer 2-year contracts and actually sell or lease mobile handsets.

In theory, it shouldn’t be that hard to pick which iPhone is best, but it gets a little muddy with iPads. As of last week, there are five distinct models. The legacy products consist of the iPad mini 2, starting at $269 for 16GB RAM, and the iPad Air 2, starting at $399 for 16GB. The other three models are current.

With five separate models, you have a choice of two, three or four colors, plus two or three memory options with or without cellular data capability. Add it all up and it comes to 77 choices. There are more with the iPhone, but some of those choices depend strictly on which wireless carrier you want.

I’ll be brief about Macs. There are plenty of models there, too, but the use cases are very distinct, with the iMac being the mainstream desktop model for consumers and the enterprise, and the MacBook Air serving the volume position for notebooks. The MacBook may be a bit of a fly in the ointment, since it appears to be essentially a slimmed down MacBook Air with Retina display. Perhaps it will replace the Air in another generation or so.

While some may feel that Apple should lean the product lineups a little, I’m not altogether sure that’s a good idea. Right now, Apple has a decent selection of options for customers. Maybe the MacBook is a bit of an outlier, but it also showcases a design for the future, and I actually find the concept attractive, but wouldn’t consider it unless a 15-inch version was built.

Compared to all or most consumer electronics companies, the choices Apple offers aren’t that complicated. Indeed, the selections are far less confusing than what Samsung offers in the smartphone space, or what Dell or HP offer when it comes to personal computers. There is a good argument to be made for each product, and it’s nowhere near as confusing as the Performas of old, where it was just essentially the same product duplicated with minor and confusing distinctions.

I suppose you can argue that the Apple Watch is far more confusing, what with so many with bands. But it’s as much jewelry as a gadget, and tastes in such merchandise are going to vary considerably. All in all, I’m happy with the choices that exist now, but if Apple fleshed it out any further, I’d be a little concerned.

A while back, an Apple executive, in response to a question about declining software quality, asserted that quality had actually improved in recent years. But since there were more people using Apple gear, each problem received more coverage.

I suppose that’s quite possible, except that there’s no way for anyone outside of Apple to know whether that response is accurate or just corporate spin. Certainly the common perception is that software quality has declined. Even after four maintenance updates, OS X El Capitan rates no better than three-and-a-half stars. All right, that’s up from three stars, so it’s progress. And maybe it is true that people with problems are more apt to write reviews than those for whom the OS works just fine.

But it’s still true Apple has had its problems, and being on the front lines of worldwide publicity doesn’t help. So don’t forget the iOS 8.0.1 update, which bricked iPhone 6-family devices. It was withdrawn within an hour or so, and a Restore via iTunes could fix the affected handsets, which amounted to a fairly small number. Indeed, Apple released a fixed version, iOS 8.0.2, the very next day.

Apple never heard the end of it. The mainstream media painted it as a major catastrophe, even though the damage wasn’t permanent. However, perceptions, even if they are a little off from the truth, are difficult to correct once they become embedded in the media’s reality. More to the point, why did it even happen?

One Apple executive attributed it to a bad “wrapper,” whatever that is supposed to mean. Maybe the installer, but I would have expected Apple to test the update a little more carefully before it was released. This sort of thing is inexcusable.

All right, Microsoft has had more than its share of flawed releases, but still.

That takes is to iOS 9.3. Next to the reference release, 9.0, this got extra promotion by Apple for adding a few important new features, such as Night Shift, which changes the color temperature to a warmer setting at night to relax your eyes. Maybe it’ll make it easier for you to go to sleep, I gather, and I suppose it’s a far better option, if it helps, than sleeping pills. I, for one, tend to be jittery at night after a long day dealing with all sorts of stuff, and I find it difficult to fall asleep. Maybe it’s better, slightly, or at least that’s my perception since I configured Night Shift.

iOS 9.3 also has enhancements for education that will put the iPad in a better place against Chromebooks, at least if school systems are willing to pay more for the privilege.

All right, you get the picture.

iOS 9.3 received extensive testing by developers and regular people, since it was posted for public beta testers. You’d think that after weeks of seeds, the most serious problems would have been massaged out of the release, that there were no serious bugs.

Or at least that’s a theory, but theories don’t always pan out in the real world.

So we have a problem with iOS 9.3 that impacted older iPhones and iPads, and another problem that might affect lots of users. The first problem resulted in activation glitches for older gear.

Here’s the first problem, as explained in an Apple support document:

“Updating some iOS devices (iPhone 5s and earlier and iPad Air and earlier) to iOS 9.3 can require entering the Apple ID and password used to set up the device in order to complete the software update.”

For some users, however, this process doesn’t work, so there’s yet another support document that attempts to sort it all out:

“After you update to iOS 9.3, you might see this message on your iPad 2 (GSM model): ‘Your iPad could not be activated because the activation service is temporarily unavailable.’

It goes on to explain how to Restore the device via iTunes on a Mac or a PC. Evidently other vintage iPhones and iPads are susceptible to this bug.

Apple has since released a fixed version of iOS 9.3 that should cure this problem. That’s fine as far as it goes. But there appears to be yet another bug, one that results in a crash or freeze when you try to open a hyperlink in such apps as Safari, Mail, Messages and third-party browsers, such as Google Chrome, all of which use the same rendering engine in their iOS versions. That’s an issue Apple is investigating, apparently.

All right, in a matter of weeks, these problems should be sad memories. But that’s not the point. Apple fed iOS 9.3 builds to tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of customers and developers. Surely at least a few of them encountered these bugs and took the time to report them. If Apple didn’t listen, the beta test process is seriously flawed. If they knew about it, they should have held off the release to fix it, even if that meant that iOS 9.3 wouldn’t ship with the 9.7-inch iPad Pro and the iPhone SE.

Well maybe that was it: Marketing set a deadline, and the heck with bugs. Or maybe the bugs were somehow overlooked or not given the proper level of significance. But when Apple asserts that there are fewer software bugs nowadays, forgive me if I don’t believe them.

The story came out of the blue. In February, the U.S. Department of Justice requested and received a court order to unlock the iPhone 5c used as a work phone by a deceased terrorist in the San Bernardino, CA shootings. In short order, Apple filed a petition to overturn the order, claiming such a move would create a dangerous precedent. Although the FBI and other authorities asserted that it was all about a single handset, it soon became obvious that prosecutors were just waiting for a court precedent to be set, so they could go after Apple too and use the same scheme to unlock other iPhones seized in criminal cases.

In various public statements, interviews, and guest editorials, Apple made the point crystal clear. Creating what they called a “govOS” would leave a backdoor open for even criminals to exploit. It would thus compromise the security of hundreds of millions of Apple customers who used iOS gear protected by data encryption.

The very public back and forth continued for weeks until March 21st, the day before a scheduled hearing to consider the issue, when the DOJ requested that the presiding judge vacate or postpone the order. It seemed that a “third-party” had approached them, in the nick of time, with what appeared to be a workable method to retrieve the data from that iPhone. Some cynical observers suggested the FBI decided it might lose in court, and thus worked harder to find another solution.

So the hearing was postponed and the DOJ was given two weeks to present an update. In the meantime, published reports named an Israeli software developer, Cellebrite, as the company contracted by the FBI to use its “mobile forensics solutions” to unlock that iPhone. However, this was never confirmed.

So the DOJ made a court filing on Monday to vacate the order:

Applicant United States of America, by and through its counsel of record, the United States Attorney for the Central District of California, hereby files this status report called for by the Court’s order issued on March 21, 2016.

The government has now successfully accessed the data stored on Farook’s iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance from Apple Inc. mandated by Court’s Order Compelling Apple Inc. to Assist Agents in Search dated February 16, 2016.

Accordingly, the government hereby requests that the Order Compelling Apple Inc. to Assist Agents in Search dated February 16, 2016 be vacated.

Not revealed is what was done to bypass or guess that passcode to unlock the iPhone or what, if anything, was found on it. While I do not expect the DOJ or the FBI to reveal the method that was ultimately successful, there has been some speculation.

So one possibility was to mirror the unit’s flash memory on a PC. This would result in a file that could be accessed with attempts to unlock the four-digit passcode. Apple sets a limit of ten tries, after which the data is deleted. But if only nine efforts are made and not successful, the file could be reloaded into memory, and nine more attempts would be made. This process would continue until a successful result.

As a work phone, however, I’d be skeptical there was anything useful. The terrorists were smart enough to destroy their own gear. A work phone could, at any time, have been retrieved by the authorities in San Bernardino before the shooting, if only to apply software updates, and suspicions would have been raised if the terrorist refused.

What this means, though, is that this method may not be available for any agency in the DOJ, and possibly local and state police departments, to similarly recover data from locked iPhones. Now just consider a public trial in which evidence against one or more criminal defendants was obtained from an unlocked iPhone. The defense would surely request details on just how it was done, and that would mean that outsiders would know, assuming the request was granted. And no doubt it would be.

So Apple doesn’t quite get off scot-free. They are no doubt already considering schemes that might be used to unlock iPhones by police and even criminals, and are actively working on methods to enhance security. So maybe the next time someone tries to use this method on a new or updated iPhone, it won’t work.

That would mean Apple could be hauled into court yet again to deliver a solution, and this sorry episode repeat itself.

Regardless, the critical issues raised aren’t going away. Ultimately it may mean that new laws need to be considered to balance the needs of law enforcement and individual privacy. President Obama warned against an “absolutist” approach, but that position may avoid the implications. It doesn’t address the core issue, which is how the authorities can hold onto a method to unlock iPhones, and other encrypted gear, without that method eventually getting into the hands of criminals.

For now, however, this legal skirmish is over. But if and when Apple tightens iOS security, there may be more legal demands to answer.

The 9.7-inch iPad Pro’s arrival was anticipated with speculation that it would be all or mostly a smaller version of the original 12.9-inch model introduced last fall. That was close to the truth, although the smaller tablet has some enhancements that would cater to people who actually try to do work on them. Key examples include True Tone, which adapts the display’s color rendition based on ambience light plus a wider color gamut. The iSight camera is closer to an iPhone 6s in terms of specs and capabilities, and that better serves both consumers and the enterprise.

Clearly development didn’t stop with the release of the larger iPad Pro, which will probably gain these and other features when it is refreshed. But the key is that Apple could have saved lots of development dollars with a basic transplant, rather than continue to develop components and product features to perform better and faster. Indeed, the mid-sized iPad Pro, despite the higher price, may become the go-to tablet for businesses who don’t require something larger.

Well, at least that appears to be the hope, since it is being equipped in ways that people watching Netflix may not be so concerned about, even if it does deliver a better picture. Apple is touting it as a potential PC replacement, and it does seem the hardware is quite capable of handling that chore with benchmarks close to that of the larger model. Those benchmarks put it within striking distance of Mac notebooks of a few years ago, and, according to Apple, most of today’s PC portables.

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