Note: I’m writing this column with the assumption that Apple does not plan to significantly alter the Mac lineup during its March 21st media event. Or at least there are no indications of such plans from the rumor sites, from the supply chains, or from the usual offenders when it comes to possible new products and services. So I feel reasonably confident that I’m right.

If you want to buy a new Mac, you’ll find a decent number of options. Not all the possible options compared to the Windows platform, but enough for most people to find their ideal personal computer. Despite the fact that Microsoft is making a big deal of it, a Mac with a touchscreen doesn’t appear to be in the cards.

In my case, I took a calculated risk back in 2009, and went from a Mac Pro to a 27-inch iMac, and found the perfect companion. A close friend bought a Mac mini and a cheap 19-inch display. That, to him, was computing bliss. He didn’t need anything more powerful to write email and hang out on his favorite sites.

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One sure way to criticize Apple, even if it’s of questionable validity, is to complain when they aren’t first to market with a new product category. The theory goes that the originator of a market must be destined to succeed and dominate, but those who come later have no chance. They might as well give up. Maybe that means that only Mercedes-Benz should be selling cars, since they introduced the first gasoline-powered auto in the late 1890s. Forget that Ford delivered what is regarded as the first car that was affordable by the masses in 1908 with the Model T.

So does Ford deserve the honor to dominate the market since they made cars affordable?

Remember that Apple didn’t make the first personal computer with a graphical user interface, nor did Microsoft develop the first text-based PC operating system. What about the Xerox Alto and the Xerox Star developed in 1973? Nowadays, I think of Xerox as a manufacturer of printers and printing presses, although the first Xerox product I ever owned (or leased) was a copier back in the 1970s. They first announced a plain-paper copying machine in 1959, and to this very day, people still refer to making copies as Xeroxing.

So the Mac wasn’t the first computer with a GUI by any means, and a relative latecomer, Microsoft, ultimately dominated the operating system world with Windows after dominating the command line world with MS-DOS. So that defeats this oft-repeated contention that only first movers can succeed.

Indeed, I could go on with lots of example, but I’ll cite just a few. Even where the originator might have overwhelmed a market at first, keeping that status is not guaranteed. Market forces, failure to innovate, poor promotion and other reasons may conspire to lead another manufacturer to take over a market.

So look at the first iPod, which was launched in 2001. You could put 1,000 songs in your pocket for a “mere” $399, and some felt this was just a silly indulgence on the part of Apple. The real magic occurred not with regular iPod updates that offered more capacity and lower prices, but when Apple decided to release a Windows version of iTunes. Legend has it that Steve Jobs first opposed that move, but was finally shown the logic. Indeed, there were soon more iPod owners using Windows than Macs, and the same is true for the iPhone and the iPad.

But the iPod could not have succeeded if it didn’t improve on the user experience. Existing digital music players were clumsy to use, with arcane interfaces, and were dead slow about downloading tracks to the device. Some used their own licensed versions of music player apps too, so the iTunes advantage wasn’t part of the process.

With the iPhone, the situation was somewhat similar. Existing smartphones, such as the BlackBerry, were great tech toys for power users and businesspeople. The physical keyboard and the user interface were both awkward, but you could get used to it. Well, maybe you could. I never felt comfortable with that gadget.

Regardless, Apple rethought the smartphone, and went all touchscreen except for a lone Home button. They basically made it a miniature personal computer. There was plenty of skepticism. What business did Apple have trying to enter a market where there were already well-entrenched players? Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer was among the key detractors, but how often has he ever been correct about much of anything anyway? Microsoft’s mobile market share is barely a blip these days.

So, despite being late to the party, the iPhone became one of the most popular tech gadgets in the world. Yes, Samsung sells more units, but most are in the lower-priced tiers. Apple pretty much owns the profits for mobile handsets despite being the latecomer to the market.

One of the most blatant examples is the iPad. Microsoft had been touting the arrival of tablets for years. But the first Windows tablets were very much like the convertible PC notebooks now, only heavier. They’d work as normal notebooks, but featured touchscreens, sometimes movable, sometimes detachable. They went nowhere except in so-called vertical markets. The current crop is more popular, they are much lighter and thinner, and the OS is better able to manage the two functions. But they aren’t overwhelming the market.

Apple’s iPad solution was essentially a large iPod touch. The iPad used iOS, but lacked a cell phone. There are some models that do handle cellular data, however. After some pretty rapid growth, sales flattened and have fallen in recent quarters. Not that the rest of the industry, other than the really cheap models, has done much better. Still Apple was years “late” to embracing tablets, and they are still doing extremely well.

With the Apple Watch, it’s the same old story. You had the Pebble and Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatches first, among others. But the Apple Watch sucked the air out of the room. While Apple doesn’t admit to actual sales, the estimates put the Apple Watch into the number one spot.

So what other market will Apple enter, late as usual, and conquer? While there aren’t any predictions about any major new product initiative for the March 21st media event, it’s foolish to believe they aren’t working on lots of great stuff.

Long ago, when you bought a black and white laser printer, it was a major purchase. You might spend several thousand dollars even for the entry-level model. But over the years, printers have become cheap commodity devices. Nowadays, replacing consumables and other spare parts can quickly exceed the cost of the printer and then some, and they are the main sources of manufacturer profits.

Unfortunately, printers are built far cheaper, and getting even a few years of service is not something you can always depend on. Stay with me and I’ll give you an example of what I mean.

A close friend, a retired businessperson owns several printers, including an HP LaserJet 8150, one of those huge HP office printers that weighs roughly 112 pounds. It probably dates back to the early 2000s or even older. It’s rated  at 100,000 copies per month, and has received nothing more than routine maintenance over the years. I’m not sure the current HP printer drivers are fully compatible, but it seems to run OK on his iMac, which runs a recent version of OS X.

Well a few years back, I realized I needed to save money on printing, and lots of other things. So I bought a fairly inexpensive black and white laser printer. The plan was to only use the color multifunction printer when I needed to print a color document, send a fax, or copy or scan something. Using a well-rated recycled toner, the per-page cost on that printer is less than a penny a page plus the cost of the paper. If one is judicious about which documents are printed, the monthly cost is negligible.

Until, of course, the printer requires a major repair.

The printer, a Brother HL-5450dn, cost roughly $200-225 at retail when I bought it. It’s still available for that price, although it has mostly been supplanted by later models. Still it promises up to 40 pages a minute print speed, with up to 1200 x 1200 dpi resolution. Print quality of text is first rate, sharp, crisp, even at the default 600 dpi printer setting. Even tiny text is pretty clear, which isn’t always the case on a cheap laser printer. Graphics are decent, nothing to shout home about, but that’s fairly normal for cheap lasers.

The HL-5450dn offers both Ethernet and USB ports, and it supports Apple AirPrint so you can print from an iOS device.

Everything worked just fine until just a few weeks ago, when print quality nosedived. Sometimes small amounts of toner would splatter on a page, and when it didn’t random parts of a text document were blurry. I changed the toner and the drum without success, so I contacted Brother’s chat support for help.

They diagnosed a failed fuser assembly. Technically, the fuser consists of heat rollers. Paper moves though these rollers, the toner melts and is fused with the fiber on the paper. Until it doesn’t, and evidently those rollers wore prematurely. The part is rated for  up to 100,000 copies, but they failed after 28,000 copies.

Now Brother rates this part as dealer installable, although you can buy one yourself. The installation process is of moderate difficulty. But the price doesn’t make sense. Amazon lists one for $189.49 plus shipping. I saw prices of $125-130 at eBay for fuser assemblies labeled as new. Remember, this printer sells, new, for $200-225. So why would anyone pay nearly that amount to replace a single part? At this point, it’s better just to buy a new printer, which may be what Brother prefers.

Clearly Brother support knew something when I told them about my problem. Without a word of protest, they said they’d replace the fuser free and recommended a nearby authorized repair shop to perform the service. Within a few days, the part had arrived, and I dropped off the printer. The next day I took it home, ran some test copies and found everything worked perfectly, as if the printer was brand new.

Now why would Brother be willing to provide such an expensive part free for an out-of-warranty product? Well, the service technician explained to me that the quality control on these parts wasn’t terribly robust. It was common for rough spots and other defects to develop on these fusers well before the rated lifecycle, and that Brother routinely authorized warranty service.

As I said earlier, printer makers earn all or most of their profits from the consumables. Assuming I’d be buying regular supplies of toner and occasional drum replacements (these are rated for 25,000 copies), they’d have enough profit leftover to cover the cost of fuser replacements on a certain percentage of these products.

No doubt the bean counters at Brother have calculated the cost of doing occasional fuser replacements versus the cost of beefing up quality control so the parts don’t fail so quickly. I suppose they expect most customers to simply give up and buy a new printer, hopefully another Brother.

They say you get what you pay for. Expect a laser printer costing $100-300 to be built cheaply, with questionable reliability. Brother is supposed to be one of the best, and it ran great for me until the fuser assembly failed. Maybe it’s a candidate for an extended warranty, because I wouldn’t depend on Brother always agreeing to pay the repair bill after the manufacturer’s warranty expires. SquareTrade is offering a 3-year warranty for $19.32 in the Amazon listing I consulted for the HL-5450dn. That seems to be worth it — and then some.

As you might expect, whenever a new Apple product is anticipated, there will be speculation about the spec and features. That’s fine as far as it goes, although nothing is confirmed until Apple makes the official announcement. So Apple’s March 21st event will likely include the launch of a new 4-inch iPhone.

The rumors suggest it’ll have specs similar to that of the iPhone 6s, only in a smaller case. That means an A9 processor and a pretty decent camera. What few know outside of Apple is whether 3D Touch will be part of the picture. That’s designed to give you extra context-related choices if you just tap harder and even harder than that.

None of this has stopped some alleged tech pundits from criticizing Apple for real or imagined slights. So The Macalope, the house critic of all things anti-Apple at Macworld, has an article about the sins of reviewing products that don’t exist. It’s an area I’ve also covered often. In one particular column, the horned one rips apart the complaints of one blogger about the lack of 3D Touch on that unreleased iPhone.

So what’s wrong with that? Well, as I said, the product hasn’t even been announced yet. So while some of the rumors suggest that 3D Touch isn’t included, perhaps to save on manufacturing costs, we really don’t know. So what sense does it make to attack Apple for the lack of such a feature? Why waste words?

It reminds me of the foolish blog I wrote about in yesterday’s column, in which someone claims that the jig is up about Mac security because of the first successful ransomware attempt; another occurred some years back but evidently wasn’t “perfected.”

But complaining about missing features in a product where the features have yet to be announced is only one example of foolishness. How about reviewing gear based on specs alone — or expected specs? That’s even more foolish, since relying strictly on those numbers, real or imagined, doesn’t tell you how fast it’ll perform or how fluid the user interface will feel. It won’t help you decide how the various features work, or if they work.

You see, hard specs are only a rough indication of a gadget’s potential. Compare that to a motor vehicle, where rated horsepower only gives you a rough idea of how fast it’ll go from zero to 60 miles per hour. There are loads of other factors that determine performance, and that includes vehicle weight and engine torque, and sometimes the car with less horsepower accelerates faster, but this isn’t a car column.

I’m particularly concerned when you see lists of specs compared to other lists of specs. I’ll just focus on articles published after a product is released, so you have the hard numbers of a sort. Consumer Reports, the magazine that claims it is incorruptible and balanced because it doesn’t take ads, often falls for feature-itis. So an Android smartphone will often rate better than an iPhone because it does more things. How well it does those thoughts ought to be just as important, but that isn’t always the case.

In the case of CR, I always assumed that hard testing carries the day, but not always. Superior specs and longer feature lists have too much influence.

If it does appear as rumored, Apple’s 4-inch iPhone will inevitably be compared with the latest products from the iPhone 6 lineup. Some will compare it to smaller Android handsets, but it would have to be by specs alone until the product actually ships and undergoes testing.

Superior specs are often cited to demonstrate performance potential. But you can’t do that with Android and iOS, simply because Apple’s mobile operating system is better mated to the A-series processor. So the iPhone and iPad will often, with fewer cores and less RAM, match or exceed the performance of supposedly faster Android gear. Canned benchmarks help, but they cannot tell you how fast and fluid the OS might feel, how quickly it’ll start and shut down and how fast apps launch.

Some years back, Samsung pulled a really silly stunt, pushing a Galaxy smartphone’s processor to a higher clock speed when the benchmark apps were run, so it would appear faster. Supposedly these apps were modified to prevent that from happening.

It vaguely reminds me of how VW cheated on emissions tests with its diesel engines. The onboard smog controls worked when the tests were being run, but in normal use and service were disabled to allow for better performance and fuel economy. It didn’t matter to VW that more pollutants were spewed into the air.

Of course, setting up a tech gadget to display inflated benchmarks isn’t necessarily going to harm anyone’s health, but it may fool a customer into expecting better performance than the product can actually deliver in the real world. That might be regarded as fraud to some; I don’t know whether any laws are necessarily broken, or if anyone would care if they are.

In any case, I look forward to learning the facts about the next iPhone, if that’s one of the products we’ll see at the next Apple event. But that won’t stop some tech commentators from trying to review it anyway. Or maybe they’re jumping through time and they already know the future. Sure. Right.