Should you believe corporate spin over personal opinions or experiences? Well, in a recent interview with Apple executives Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi, as carried on a podcast from John Gruber, they were asked about Apple software quality. The conventional wisdom has it that software quality has declined, that new operating system releases are riddled with bugs, and that it often takes several maintenance updates to set things right.

However, the Apple duo mounted a vigorous defense, claiming that they know that software quality is actually better, but because there are more people using Apple gear these days, bugs are given far more prominence. In other words, it’s not that there are more software defects, but that more people are talking about them. So it seems worse than it really is.

Or at least that’s what they say.

This is one of the claims that is really impossible to prove objectively. Apple holds the cards, the data that demonstrates how many serious bugs exist and the priority for fixing those bugs. For clear competitive reasons, Apple wouldn’t like other companies to know, yet merely using Apple gear in a variety of settings with the latest OS installations would or should reveal the worst problems.

So perhaps what they said is true and we can all relax with the knowledge that Apple is on the case. I mean, it’s not as if they’ll admit that, yes, we know that we can do a better job of making sure OS releases are as reliable as possible before release. That will never happen, although Apple will sometimes admit to a serious problem, particularly if it impacts a large number of users.

In saying that, impressions mean a lot. So if each bug is telegraphed in importance because of the sheer number of users of Apple gear, it puts more pressure on the company to get more things right, not just stay the course or do a little bit better.

To be fair, I’m not necessarily saying that Cue and Federighi are lying about the state of Apple software quality. It’s possible they are spinning it as fewer serious bugs, or just toeing the company line as good soldiers. It’s about sales and marketing, the assurance that Apple products are the most reliable on the planet, and so long as you report the problems you encounter, the’ll get to them — eventually.

But it’s clear to me that Apple has a problem of perception. Customers do believe software quality has declined, and they might list specific areas where things that should have been fixed aren’t being fixed. It’s not about apps needing updates to support new operating system features. Indeed, the venerable Open/Save dialog box enhancer, Default Folder X, had to be completely rewritten to be made compatible with OS X El Capitan due to significant changes that Apple made to enhance security. That update was released a few weeks back, and it’s not the only app that needed serious work.

However, it’s clear that El Capitan isn’t getting the love over at the Mac App Store. More than four months after release — a long time in the software game —  OS 10.11 still only earns a three-star rating. While many report smooth upgrade experiences — and mine were mostly without incident — others report all sorts of problems. Of course, you can’t take individual reviews as demonstrating a trend, but when lots of people are unhappy about slower performance, spinning beachballs and various glitches of one sort or another, you wonder if Apple reads those reviews and makes an effort to follow up.

True, people with problems are more apt to complain than those for whom an OS upgrade is smooth. So reviews will tend to be weighted towards negative reactions.

What’s important is whether there are specific trends towards certain problems, or whether they are just all over the place, or too general to isolate specific issues. One review called it “the worst update from Apple in forever.” In what respect?

Now over the years, Apple has made more than its share of big mistakes. I remember one or two releases back in the 1990s where the OS was so unstable I could barely work for more than an hour or two before some sort of system error appeared, or apps started to crash frequently.

In the early days of OS X, actually being productive was difficult because it was rough, unfinished. The first releases didn’t even support hardware acceleration for moving document windows around, so it got pretty ragged except on the fastest Macs. But once OS X reached a more advanced state of development, say by OS 10.3 or OS 10.4, it all came into its own.

I have never had to revert to an older OS release because the new one was too buggy, except for a few prerelease versions. Other than a rare Safari crash involving a specific site, I don’t see serious problems with El Capitan. Well, except for one thing. Since the earliest betas, I’ve noticed random freezes in Mail. It happens every day or so, where it stops dead in its tracks for 30 seconds or so before the situation clears up. While I had heard that the forthcoming OS 10.11.4 update might have fixed the problem, that doesn’t appear to be true.

Is it serious enough for Apple to give it priority? Does it only impact people with huge mailboxes and multiple accounts? Good question. If you want to know if the problem has been reported, I can tell you it has been. But I suppose Apple could still say that OS quality is better nowadays and still tolerate a bug of this sort since nobody is losing data and the inconvenience is minimal.

Over the years, Apple has had a hard time being taken seriously as a company, even as it rose to the number one spot in terms of market cap. The Mac was regarded as little more than a toy in the old days, and I suspect some still don’t take it seriously. The iPhone? Well, the competitors were too busy aping its looks and feel, so perhaps there wasn’t enough time to claim it couldn’t possibly work.

But that didn’t stop Steve Ballmer, then Microsoft’s CEO, from calling it essentially a worthless product. Famously, Microsoft has been unable to come up with a mobile phone platform that has a ghost’s chance of succeeding. Today, Microsoft is struggling to persuade customers to upgrade to Windows 10. Despite the boast of over 200 million installations, compared to 1.5 billion Windows users, that’s a drop in the bucket. Remember that Windows 10 is a free upgrade as part of a curious program where it may or may not carry a price tag after a year if you don’t get with the program.

Now the main point of this article is not skepticism about Apple, but about people who should know better writing foolish stuff. So there have been recent examples suggesting whether it makes sense for Apple to continue to build Macs. When I read such absurd suggestions, I have to wonder whether to laugh or cry, because the implications are just plain absurd.

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When outspoken CBS CEO Les Moonves essentially confirmed the existence of a pending Apple subscription TV plan last spring, that was all it took. It confirmed speculation that all this talk about Apple doing something marvelous to conquer the living room seemed to be coming together.

Or maybe it implied too much. But when someone suggests that, “Apple TV is trying to change the universe a little bit,” it gave everything far more weight. Maybe it wasn’t just a slim TV channel package, but something more.

Later quotes from Moonves made it clear Apple was talking to the key players in the entertainment industry to attempt to put something great together. Everything seemed to be coming up roses, until it wasn’t.

So those talks appeared to have stopped at some point in time. Moonves is quoted by CNN/Money as saying that, “we haven’t had recent conversations with them.”

First the hopes, then the dashed hopes. So is that all there is?

Well, all this TV related action actually dates back to Steve Jobs’ comments in his interviews with the author of his authorized biography about cracking the secret to the greatest TV interface ever. Aha! So Apple was planning to get into the business of making TV sets, smart TV sets with an Apple twist. But would they be sold at Apple Stores, or big box retailers? You’d think the latter, because TVs can get mighty big nowadays.

At the time, it appeared the other TV makers were freaked. I recall an announcement at a CES where no less than Lenovo, a top Asian PC maker, decided it must build a TV too, or at least it demonstrated one, but it doesn’t appear to have gone anywhere. The value proposition of getting into the TV business is questionable. As with PCs, TV makers are racing to the bottom with larger sets at cheaper prices. Profits can be slim to none. There are large entrenched players who sell most of the volume product at different price levels. Is there room for another player?

I suppose there might have been with Apple, since the company builds premium gear at somewhat higher prices, and thus earns large profits. But if there was ever going to be an Apple smart TV set, maybe it was stillborn. After rumors kept leaping other rumors about what was to be, the chatter seemed to fade away. Perhaps Apple built some prototypes, but didn’t find the value proposition in taking them to production.

For 2016, TV makers are making a huge 4K push, to entice you to buy a new set with the promise of four times the resolution. Unfortunately, it takes a large set to really reveal the difference, unless you look fairly close. But 4K, and higher list prices, are meaning more profits for the struggling TV industry. This year, picture quality improvements may be easier to detect with the arrival of Ultra HD Premium, which adds superior contrast and color rendition to deliver a picture that pops even if the screen size isn’t large enough to otherwise show a 4K advantage.

Add to that Ultra HD Blu-ray, and perhaps enough content to satisfy people who are buying the new sets, and maybe it’ll come into its own this year.

But what about Apple? Well, I’ve been somewhat skeptical about the new Apple TV, and disappointed the first model came with a few features that were lacking, such as support for Bluetooth keyboards, but the software continues to improve. Alas, it doesn’t support 4K, but maybe a firmware update will switch it on. Or perhaps Apple doesn’t care, or doesn’t feel the standards are yet fine-tuned enough to fully embrace the technology.

So where does that leave the so-far stalled Apple TV subscription service? Well, it’s clearly not just a rumor. The CEO of CBS is clearly a no-nonsense executive who isn’t going to talk out of turn unless he knows exactly what’s going on. It’s not that he’s actually released any details, just that plans existed and were talked about, and then not talked about.

What Apple wanted to offer — and maybe still wants to offer — was supposed to be a slim package of TV channels. But what’s so unique about that? There’s basic cable/satellite and there’s Dish Network’s attempt at streaming known as Sling TV, which would seem to fit in the mold of what was expected from Apple. But I’ve not heard of it doing great guns. Indeed, I wonder about TV streaming services in general outside of Netflix, or perhaps Hulu. HBO NOW, launched with great fanfare last summer first on Apple TV, hasn’t done so well. So far, there are 800,000 subscribers. HBO wanted, and was expected, to attract more subscribers.

So is there even enough business out there? Are there enough cord cutters who are willing to sign up and give a new Apple TV service a try? Besides, what does Apple offer that you cannot already get with a slimmed-down cable/satellite plan? If you sign up for one of their 12-month or 24-month introductory bundles, you can get a lot of content for not a large amount of money. Until the offer expires, of course.

How does Apple make a difference? A prettier interface? Some new ad-skipping scheme? Well, no wonder they had problems striking deals; at least if that was the case. Was it true that local channels would also have been offered as part of the package?

Cable/satellite growth has stalled. More and more people are rejecting high prices and rigid plans. The catch-as-catch-can cord-cutting schemes will save you some money if you don’t add too many services. Saving money is good, but how much great programming are you giving up to be thrifty? Can the cable/satellite companies find a better way to reignite growth and, for once, offer customers a better experience?

Where does Apple fit in all of this?

As I read the list of new features for tvOS, which is designed for the fourth-generation Apple TV, I really wondered what Apple has been selling up till now. According to published reports, the latest tvOS 9.2 beta adds support for dictation and Bluetooth keyboards. It should be released soon.

In December, a tvOS 9.1 update added the ability to use Siri to search Apple Music, and support for the return of Remote from iOS, along with similar support from your Apple Watch.

Before we even got to the pending enhancements to text input, you had to wait until just two weeks before Christmas to have a new Apple TV gain support for the Remote app and Bluetooth keyboards, two features available in previous models. In short, you had to take two steps back to get the other new features that may or may not have any advantages for you.

Is it fair to suggest that the long-awaited fourth-generation Apple TV may have hit the market not quite ready for prime time, although that may be going a little overboard?

Certainly the reviews indicate a typically well-designed Apple product. But hardly the living room game changer you might have once expected. But it’s also clear Apple is quickly fixing things and adding new features, so maybe there’s hope.

The issue on the table is whether Apple rushed the thing out, expecting you to be tolerate the situation as missing features were added and the user experience was smoothed.

It reminds me of the Apple Watch. When it first hit the streets last spring, reviewers by and large praised its sexy looks. Apple clearly wanted to make a fashion statement, and few dispute that it’s first effort at jewelry was successful. But the gadget’s performance was somewhat ragged, and apps launched slowly, The reason for the latter was that they were loading from your iPhone and the data was beamed to your Apple Watch via Bluetooth. Native app launching arrived with watchOS 2, which arrived six months later.

Obviously, Apple didn’t hold back on adding features and making things run better over time, but buying a product with a price tag that can run as high as $17,000, only to wait weeks or months for everything to work, might have left some customers feeling a little let down. They paid a bundle for a product that should have been mostly perfect out of the starting gate.

Imagine a corollary in the car business. You spend $17,000 for a brand new compact. But why isn’t the cruise control working? No matter, it will be activated with the first over-the-air software update in a few months.

In passing, some buyers of new cars may also have to wait months for CarPlay and Android Auto to be supported, but at least the cruise control, brakes and the onboard systems are fully functional when it leaves your dealer’s showroom.

Now I understand that new operating system features on a tech device might require a revision or two to bake in, or that a new computer or other gadget might require a firmware update or two to repair some glitches. This is a regrettable condition that has long existed, but you understand that what may seem perfect when it begins production may fail in unexpected ways in regular use.

Obviously, if you look at the millions of car and truck recalls, you’ll realize that things often have to be repaired or replaced months or years after they leave the factories. Except for a few cases of outright neglect or brazen attempts to escape government regulations, and we know about such situations, perfection is just not possible. You have to accept that, whatever vehicle you buy, there’s always a chance that a defect will appear that will require further work beyond routine maintenance.

But in the tech world, we have been asked to take clearly unfinished products and tolerate incomplete, imperfect or missing features on the promise that a future update may set things right. In the meantime, you just — cope. Now maybe not having the ability to use a Bluetooth keyboard with an Apple TV isn’t such a big deal. Sure, you endure an annoying process when you have to enter text, which usually occurs when setting up a new in-app account. It’s just a few minutes after all, and once it’s over, you can use it normally.

In the scheme of things, the inability to use the Remote app is just a matter of extra convenience. The Apple TV comes with its own remote that’s supposed to be just wonderful.

It comes across, however, as a matter of marketing outvoting engineering when it’s determined whether a product is ready for production. Marketing says October, production says give it until March of the following year. Guess who wins?

The customer? Well, even though you paid hard-earned money to buy that gadget, clearly Apple — and other companies — are more concerned with getting the product into your hands and collecting your payment than making 100% certain everything worked properly.

At least new cars should — and usually do — receive a redelivery shakedown from the dealer that ought to require more than just removing the shipping materials and sending it through the wash. With a tech gadget, open the box, set it up, turn it on and hope for the best.

Maybe that’s another reason people are reluctant to replace their tech gear. They’ve already endured the bugs, the missing features, and the maintenance updates. They don’t need anymore aggravation.