Apple is interested in the living room. Apple wants to conquer the living room. That appears obvious from what Tim Cook has said on the subject. As soon as Apple expresses interest in anything, you know that loads of money are being poured into development for — well, something or other. But what that something might be has been the subject of plenty of guessing, and only one product has been released, at least so far.

When the late Steve Jobs boasted of having cracked the secret of the best TV interface ever, an Apple “Smart” TV set was widely expected, and expected. But it never arrived despite the rumors of prototypes and possible configurations. Eventually stories appeared that Apple decided to give it all up. All this about something whose existence had never been confirmed in the first place.

So just how was Apple planning to conquer the living room? Just another Apple TV? Well, that may have seemed the case in light of the release of the fourth generation model last fall. But in large part, Apple seemed to be playing mostly catch up with a more expensive product. So there were apps, and there was voice command, courtesy of Siri. But that wasn’t especially unique. What’s more, two other streamers, the Amazon Fire TV and Roku 4, supported 4K video. But not Apple.

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Amid all the concerns about flat and falling iPhone sales, Apple has seemed somewhat predictable in recent years. This is particularly true with the iPhone, where there’s a major refresh with a new case design one year, and a “minor” refresh with internal changes the following year.

Although the actual improvements in an off-year iPhone may have been more extensive, the general perception is that, if it looks the same, the changes don’t amount to much. Other than economic headwinds around the globe, is the lack of compelling new features one reason that sales of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus aren’t growing as fast as their predecessor? I suppose, but it’s also true that most people don’t upgrade smartphones every year. The traditional two-year contracts have resulted in comparable cycles.

That’s changed with such marketing schemes as T-Mobile’s “Uncarrier” plans, in which the price for the phone and the service was essentially unbundled. You bought the handset upfront, or the payments were extended. They do not remain the same once the phone is paid off. In contrast, when you signed up for a traditional two-year contract, you may have paid an upfront fee, equivalent to a down payment, but the remainder is paid and paid regardless of whether the handset is paid off.

The Uncarrier scheme is actually better for the customer. When your handset is paid off, you can continue to pay and get a new one, or see the price drop. There are alternative “upgrade” payment methods, or leases, where you can upgrade every 12 or 18 months and always pay exactly the same rate ad infinitum. Or until they change.

If your mobile handset is paid off, meaning you own it lock, stock and barrel, and it’s working just fine, you might be tempted to use it till it stops working. You want to ask yourself whether the new features are must-haves, or whether you can stick with your present equipment for a while longer. iPhone users who don’t care about larger handsets may just be staying put until Apple produces an updated 4-inch version. That’s rumored for this spring, and that may be the reason, to jumpstart sales and satisfy a customer base that didn’t want to be forced to buy a two-year-old model to stick with a smaller handset.

If that spring — or March — media event occurs as predicted, Apple may also introduce an iPad Air 3 with some hardware enhancements. For some reason, Apple avoided the refresh of the mid-sized iPad this last cycle. Was that the result of the expectation of tepid sales? Or did Apple have a more expansive refresh in mind and needed more time to make it happen?

It may also be that Apple will consider more frequent product refreshes to goose sales. A full year gap between iPhone and — up till now — iPad refreshes, may not create enough demand to move product to people who don’t just upgrade without a lot of persuasion.

Now Mac upgrades have already occurred year-round, so there’s nothing new expected there. In a climate where PC sales are down, Apple has sort of held sales at a fairly constant level, plus or minus a few points, which is actually a good thing.

Another question, or concern, is whether last year’s product releases were compelling, and that’s a huge question. The MacBook was an interesting product, and it may truly point in the direction of future note-book designs. Maybe. a 4K 21.5-inch iMac was a nice upgrade, but otherwise there was nothing particularly notable. The new input devices are more expensive, but the higher costs don’t seem justified, not even the Magic Trackpad 2. Is Force Touch so important? What about the enhanced version, 3D Touch, which premiered on the newest iPhones?

The Apple Watch has been a mixed bag. Customers seem satisfied, but the product may not be pacesetting enough to attract loads of buyers once early adopters are satisfied. That Apple said December quarter sales were the best yet means little without actual figures. They could have sold a few hundred or thousand more, and still hit a record.

Does the Apple Watch make the grade as a first-generation product? Well, you could use the first iPhone as an example of a promise without fulfillment. But just about everything worked well on the 2007 iPhone. The first Apple Watch had software limitations that resulted in sometimes poor performance and glitchy behavior. Within six months, there was a major OS upgrade.

The fourth-generation Apple TV may also have had unspecified record sales, but it doesn’t stand that far apart from existing gear, except for the higher price. Both the current Amazon Fire TV and Roku 4 support 4K; the Apple TV doesn’t. Yes, there may be valid reasons for the lack of support. 4K standards are evolving, and Ultra HD Premium, with improved contrast and color, promises a far better picture than the resolution advantage would offer by itself. The other streamers don’t have it, and that might be one reason why Apple didn’t jump into that segment.

Or maybe it was the lack of 4K content in the iTunes Store. A fifth-generation Apple TV with the promise of relatively inexpensive 4K movies and TV shows, along with Ultra HD Premium support, would be a compelling product. But would it be possible for fourth-generation units to be upgraded via the OS and firmware? If not, wouldn’t customers who paid up to twice the price of the previous Apple TV be upset?

Does Apple have a game plan to deal with the limitations of the current Apple TV without forcing you to buy another? That remains to be seen.

Apple clearly understands the problems. I’m curious to see how they resolve them.

All right, so maybe Apple isn’t walking on water. But it was a close call. Over the past few weeks, there were loads of predictions that iPhone sales weren’t quite up to snuff, that maybe they’d be flat or there’d be a drop. While it was easy to dismiss those predictions in light of the fact that the critics have been wrong before, this time they were right on. There was a sales increase, all right, but it was real slight.

Now the reasons were many, and vast currency fluctuations and economic headwinds were certainly part of it. It’s also true that smartphones are, in a sense, similar to TV sets. Most everyone has one, and Apple is strictly catering to high-end clientele, or at least people who aspire to have great quality and are willing to stretch a little here and there to pay for it. On the other hand, how much can Apple improve iPhones each year, and aren’t the reasons for users to upgrade becoming less compelling?

The fact is that other handset makers are having even more trouble moving high-end gear. Certainly Samsung Galaxy smartphones haven’t sold in the quantities they used to, meaning sales have dropped. So with relatively flat sales, Apple did mighty well against the competition.

It’s not a good thing that revenue for the current quarter will drop, and you can look at all the excuses, but that means that Apple will have to look long and hard for where the market is going. Is that it? Are things going downhill from here? Well, it’s also true that Mac sales dipped a few percent, although other PC makers reported even larger sales decreases.

The iPad? A 25% sales drop is obviously disappointing. Some might have hoped the release of the iPad Pro would stem the erosion, but it came late in the quarter, and I suspect sales will be higher in the business market, where adoption will no doubt be slower.

Even if Macs and iPhones sell in greater numbers through the year, where does that leave the iPad, and will sales ever stabilize? And will that be at a far lower level?

No doubt, Apple has lots of information about the customer base and the potential for iPad upgraders. That might be what fuels a new growth cycle, when and if it occurs. With many still using iPads from 2010 and 2011, the question is — when? Apple didn’t even bother upgrading the iPad Air 2 last year, as if minor refreshes really don’t count for much.

Besides, tablets are down across the board, and Apple still remains dominant in a market that is no longer growing. So was the iPad a flash in the pan, or does Apple need to refine the product to reach more potential customers who might be interested in a note-book replacement?

After All, the 12-inch MacBook may be the perfect compromise. If you don’t need to connect lots of things, and can suffer through somewhat less performance, and don’t mind paying $1,299 for the privilege, it may be the perfect note-book. Sure, the iPad Air 2 weighs half as much, and the iPad Pro is between the two. But neither can accomplish close to what a MacBook can accomplish for road warriors.

If you just need to stay online, and catch up on email, the iPad may not be so bad. But as soon as the workload becomes more complex, even the presence of a well-featured Microsoft Office on the iPad may not be enough.

Economic downturns aren’t necessarily permanent, and Apple is no doubt working on fleshing out the feature sets for the next iPhones, iPads, and Macs. So it’s quite possible the sales slowdowns will all be history when Apple’s 2016 overall revenue is considered.

By the same token, Apple had a great run, and its sales are still the envy of most companies, even as revenues and profits begin to dip. The company is far larger than it was just a few years ago, and if future growth is slow and steady — meaning barely — that’s nothing to apologize for.

But the critics who have been proclaiming doom and gloom for years will have reason to feel they might have been right after all, even if those concerns are overwrought. Sales would have to crash for real concerns to arise, though I realize the 25% iPad sales dip is fairly significant.

It might have been better for Apple to offer more information about Apple Watch and Apple TV sales. It’s not that sales haven’t been revealed for the latter in recent years, though it’s discouraging that the latest speculation about an Apple subscription TV service conveys the image of failure. If there’s decent growth for either or both, that might satisfy the skeptics and give people more confidence in Apple’s future. It is promising, though, to see services rack up nearly $20 billion in revenue. That’s more than enough for most companies.

Amid reports of problems developing an Apple Car, just what will the company’s next act be? It may be that the auto project, if it is what many suspect — an attempt to develop an electric car — will ultimately come to fruition. Few would assume it’s easy to do, but a few more hints here and there, and more information about Apple Watch and Apple TV revenue, might better convey the image of a company that has it all under control. Surviving indefinitely on products that are past their peak won’t reassure the market — or stockholders and customers who might rightly be concerned that Apple’s star has lost its shine.

Before you begin to dismiss Apple’s prospects in light of its tepid quarterly financials for the first quarter of fiscal year 2016, and an expected drop in iPhone sales for the current quarter, there are some amazing numbers to be found. First and foremost is the fact that Apple has activated over one billion devices so far. So the mind boggles. That leaves loads of customers who can upgrade existing gear, or buy other Apple products and services. That installed base has to be the envy of the industry because it strictly represents paying customers for a single company.

In contrast, there may be more Android handsets out there, but Google’s primary source of earnings is targeted ads. Yes, a lot of Android apps are being downloaded, but a high proportion are free. Actual hardware sales are spread among a number of manufacturers, and few of them earn much in the way of profits.

As I said, there’s a huge upside to what Apple’s is delivering despite the disappointing quarterly numbers.

Meantime, speculation about Apple’s first quarter financials for its 2016 fiscal year was all over the place with an emphasis on the negative. It also appears as if the bears had it, since the iPhone’s sales totaled 74.8 million, an increase was a mere 0.4% over the same quarter last year, the lowest increase since it first appeared in 2007. That’s about a million units less than the conservative projections of how Apple would do.

But the average sale price was $690, up $3 over last year. That’s actually better than predicted. Skeptics assumed sales had moved towards the lower-end models, such as last year’s iPhone 6, since the perceived changes in the new models were’t considered to be extensive.

Still, revenue in China rose 14% for the quarter, though Apple is seeing the economic headwinds in Greater China. This is quite obvious in the remarks CFO Luca Maestri delivered for a Reuters interview, “As we move into the March quarter it’s becoming more apparent that there are some signs of economic softness. We are starting to see something that we have not seen before.”

In other words, Apple is not accustomed to seeing its growth slow down after so many years of walking on water.

Still, there were record numbers to be found. Revenue totaled $75.9 billion for the quarter, with a net income of $18.4 billion, or $3.28 per diluted share. That’s a tad ahead of last year, where revenue totaled $74.6 billion and a net income of $18 billion, or $3.06 per diluted share.

Industry analysts had projected revenue of $76.5 billon, or $3.22 per diluted share, so it was half and half in terms of meeting expectations. A record, yes, but as you see it was barely ahead of last year, which represents a serious slowdown in the company’s growth curve. As you might expect, Apple executives offered plenty of corporate spin to make it seem as if everything was so much better than the numbers show.

Meanwhile, the financial headwinds are growing worse for the second quarter, where Apple projects revenue between $50 billion and $53 billion. So in this case, it does appear that the cutbacks reported in the supply chain were right on the money. Cook agrees that there will be a decline of iPhone sales in the quarter, claiming that the comparable quarter last year included catchup sales because of inventory problems. Regardless, this would be the first time iPhone sales will dip.

In short, there will be no excuse that you can’t take a few supply chain metrics and get an accurate indication of total revenue. There was just too much reliable information not to take it seriously. Perhaps the industry analysts who got it wrong before have learned, from experience, which supply chain sources to use in estimating actual sales.

Now contrary to expectations about a Mac sales improvement, total sales were actually down slightly. Sales totaled 5.3 million units, a decrease of four percent over last year. Still, Apple continues to gain ground against PCs, where sales losses were usually worse.

Despite the release of the iPad Pro, which arrived quite late in the last quarter, iPad sales still fell 25% to 16.1 million units. There’s no indication when, if ever, sales will improve. But it may well take time for the iPad Pro’s potential to be realized.

Without mentioning numbers, CEO Tim Cook talked of record sales for the Apple Watch and the Apple TV. But without any actual totals to go by — and there will be unofficial estimates — true comparisons aren’t possible. Both are listed in the “other products” category in Apple’s financials, where sales were up 63% year-over-year. So that might give a clue.

Obviously, the financial analysts participate in the quarterly conference calls aren’t inclined to ask very many tough questions, or any. Most of the questions during this quarter’s session were fairly technical about business operations and results.

On a positive note, Cook said he was “blown away” by the number of Android switchers to the iPhone during the last quarter. He also pointed to Apple’s share in developing countries and the huge opportunities. But it may take until the June quarter — or later — for sales to resume the upward curve. Or maybe not even then.