While financial and industry analysts aren’t all predicting doom and gloom for Apple, the word “blowout” doesn’t appear to apply to most estimates. That said, it doesn’t appear as if sales will decline either, but that will be known in short order.

Meantime, regardless of the final numbers, there will be recriminations from the media about Apple’s perceived shortcomings. Chief among them is no doubt the alleged overreliance on iPhone sales, as if Apple planned it that way and doesn’t have a clue about introducing or expanding other product lines. One commentator referred to it as “iPhone fatigue.”

But any company would be delighted to have a single product become so popular, so this ought to be a badge of honor, but not to Apple’s critics who have for years been hoping and praying for changes they can believe in — the failure of Apple.

Don’t forget that it wasn’t many years ago when Apple’s main product was the Mac. Of course, that’s when the critics pronounced it a niche platform, and fated to remain a niche platform. Some said Apple might as well give it all up. Once upon a time, Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell, suggested Apple close up shop and return the money to the investors.

I wonder what he’d say about that statement today.

In any case, if iPhones weren’t here, Apple would still have a large revenue base. That would include the iPad which, as is reported, was actually first conceived before the iPhone arrived although it wasn’t released until three years later. It’s not that Apple has been rushing things.

Understand, I have no clue what Apple will report when those financials are announced, so this article will have a relatively short shelf life. But it’s clear to me that attempts to make Apple seem unsuccessful are a little overwrought.

Even if iPhone sales are flattening, there’s nothing to apologize for. It had a great run, and sales will remain pretty high for some years yet. But the stock price will suffer.

Compare that to Google’s situation, where roughly 90% of its income comes from just one thing — targeted ads. If there’s an advertising slowdown, what’s Google’s backup plan? It’s not that Android is filling the coffers, since the OS is given away free. It’s intended to spread the joy — or whatever you call Google’s ads — so that hundreds of millions will tap at least some of them. Since Google is paid on a per-click basis, that’s what rings the cash registers.

So maybe the critics should be fretting about Google’s one-act play. Yes, they have other businesses, but hardware hasn’t been profitable, and many of their services are in perpetual beta. They come, they go. Gmail? Quite popular, but revenue is mostly about the ads. There’s not a whole lot from Google’s apps and services.

Samsung is under pressure from both ends of the smartphone market. Apple dominates for premium smartphones, and there’s so much cheap gear out there, it’s not that Samsung stands out although they move loads of units. Profits are lacking.

Indeed, with Apple earning 94% of global smartphone profits, where does that leave the rest of the industry? If Apple fails, will Samsung pick up a piece of the action? Or if Apple simply stays put with existing revenues and profits, it is still number one in the area that counts.

Now even if Apple reports records sales for the December 2015 quarter (their fiscal year 2016 first quarter), all eyes will be on the guidance for this quarter. Apple already has over three weeks of sales under its belt, so it should have a fairly good idea where things are going. If they predict flat sales or a slowdown, that will count for a lot, since the company tends to be conservative about such matters.

To be sure, the financial industry’s perception of those results may be fairly obvious by the nature of the questions asked during the quarterly conference call. Then again, questions are usually highly technical or softball, and key concerns are rarely addressed except in the most general terms. Follow-up questions are hardly illuminating.

Meantime, speculation will grow over what new products Apple plans for this year. Will there be a new 4-inch iPhone to fill a demand the larger handsets cannot address? What about a Mac Pro revision? The first of the new design appeared at the end of 2013, and two years is a long time in the tech industry. Intel has faster Xeon chips, and there are better graphics out there. And what about Apple’s moribund display line? Does many people even buy Thunderbolt displays at a time where Retina displays are dominant?

Will there be a MacBook with a larger — or smaller — display? What about the aging MacBook Air? Will it gain a Retina display with the next revision, and can Apple do it without increasing its price? Imagine a Mac note-book with a Retina display for $899.

Meantime, I’ll have lots to say about the financials in Wednesday’s column.

Officially, Apple is interested in cars. For now, however the only actual auto-related product is CarPlay, which essentially brings portions of your iPhone’s interface to the car’s infotainment system. What this means is that you’ll see a subset of your iPhone’s apps in the LCD display usually located in the center of the dashboard, plus tight integration with functions related to those apps.

The core features include, naturally, the phone plus such apps as Maps, Messages, Music, Podcasts and Audiobooks. A handful of other apps are available, with more being added. In order to access CarPlay, the usual practice has been to attach your iPhone via wire, although a wireless capability is being added.

Most of the major auto makers have announced plans to ultimately install CarPlay in their new vehicles. Many will also support Google’s competitor, Android Auto, so you aren’t locked into one company’s mobile platform or product line. Regardless, Apple boasts that over 100 car models will support CarPlay beginning with their 2016 and 2017 models. So where does that leave that alleged Apple Car?

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When you read the current chatter about iPhone sales for the December quarter, it doesn’t appear so favorable. If there’s going to be any sales increase at all, it’ll be slight. But whatever that figure, there will be a larger percentage of sales of cheaper gear, meaning Apple’s high average sale price will be a little less high.

Where is the source of this information? Well, supposedly some of it comes from the supply chain, where leaks indicate Apple has cut back orders, meaning fewer iPhones are being built perhaps to satisfy a lower demand. That information is taken as gospel. What’s not being considered is what Tim Cook said a couple of years back, that the metrics from a few of Apple’s suppliers can’t be applied to the total sales picture. The long and short of it is that Apple’s ordering patterns, and the reasoning behind them, may not be at all obvious to an outsider. So it’s wrong to take a little bit of information and make assumptions.

But that’s precisely what’s being done, as various so-called industry analysts are reaching all sorts of conclusions that aren’t terribly favorable to Apple. Of course it’s not that Apple is suddenly going to respond. This is the quiet period ahead of the announcement of the financials for the December quarter next week. At that time, Apple will give projections, expectedly conservative, for the current quarter. So we’ll know what’s really going on, including the company’s outlook for the near term. Will, for example, the financial headwinds in China, where slower growth is a certainty, impact Apple? Or will it all hit other companies first?

It’s not that that other company that got so much press as a leader in the industry, Samsung, has done so well. Revenue and profits haven’t matched the level the company projected, which should fuel speculation that Samsung is in trouble. Instead, after some initial coverage, it’s mostly the sound of crickets since then.

The main focus continues to be on Apple.

As the stock market goes down amid all the problems of declining oil prices, the financial situation in China and elsewhere, Apple’s stock price has understandably taken a beating; the same is true for the rest of the market. It’s been running in the mid-to-upper 90s in recent days. That may not seem so favorable, but it’s not that Apple has said or done anything to warrant stock market skepticism.

If you track the growth of Apple’s stock price, you’ll see that it’s always been interrupted with downturns. It then resumes the upward path and often reaches a record price. But once a plateau is reached, whatever it might be, the stock price goes down again.

So where does that leave iPhone sales.

Well, the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus are in somewhat the same situation as the iPhone 5s, the previous occasion where customer demand was said to be tepid. In both cases, they were alternate year upgrades were the iPhone looked the same, but newer features were added. Since they weren’t perceived as huge upgrades, it was assumed sales must be bad. After all, why should people upgrade anyway? Wait for the following year where major changes would occur, at least externally.

Unfortunately such conclusions ignore the facts, which is that most people aren’t buying new iPhones every single year. The upgrade cycle might be two years or longer, in which case someone who currently owns an iPhone 5s would find the iPhone 6s and its bigger brother to present huge changes. Of course, the critics were skeptical about the iPhone 4s too; you know, the one where Siri was introduced.

I agree that it’s really difficult to predict what’s going to happen with iPhone sales in the last quarter and this one. There are too many financial whirlwinds to track, and certainly Apple can’t grow sales by huge numbers indefinitely. Sure, even if sales are growing at a good clip in China, it has to taper off inevitably. The growth curve will inevitably slow down before everyone on the planet owns something with the Apple branding on it.

There is other news that’s more positive. Despite the slowdown in PC sales — and Windows 10 isn’t helping at all — Mac sales reportedly rose in the last quarter. That comes from both Gartner and IDC, both of whom routinely underestimate Mac sales. So it does show promise.

As to the iPad: Will the arrival of the iPad Pro, and the possible start of an upgrade cycle from folks who bought the very earliest models, mean that sales will resume the upward path? I haven’t seen much meaningful speculation about it, although I read one estimate that sales of the iPad mini topped the other models. But that doesn’t tell us about the totals.

As it stands, those who expect relatively flat iPhone sales may be right after all, or Apple might do noticeably better. In the latter case, it’s a sure thing the critics won’t apologize for getting it wrong. They never do.

So not so long ago, it seemed that Apple was poised to launch a TV subscription service. No less than Les Moonves, the outspoken president and CEO of CBS, stated, according to a Bloomberg report, that they had conversations with Apple about such a service. Indeed, he remarked that Apple was “having conversations with everyone” about it.

Some weeks later, the news turned bad. Despite all the talk, there was no action. Apple had yet to come to a deal for the new service. While nobody is being quoted officially — and Apple would be last to comment on a perceived failure to reach a deal — the rumors claimed that the entertainment companies didn’t want to agree to a slim package that would offer a dozen or two channels for prices that started at $20 or so. Instead, they wanted to offer up larger bundles of channels.

How many?

Well, if you’re accustomed to the standard cable or satellite plan that offers up to several hundred channels, you are no doubt familiar with content clutter. But having 300 channels and nothing to watch is a very common phenomenon. Why pay up to $150 or more per month only to end up sitting there watching a blank screen, or being forced to dig through the Netflix catalog to find something, anything? What’s the point of having so much with so little?

It’s not that the prices are getting any lower. Each time the content providers negotiate a new deal, they want a raise. In some cases, the cable/satellite people can’t reach an agreement, and thus some channels are no longer available for a while. So if you’re a fan of a particular show, you may find yourself missing an episode, or a live sporting event, hoping that you’ll be able to catch it via on-demand later when the contracts are finally signed.

At the same time, it’s not that customers are flocking to the cable/satellite providers. They routinely offer special bundles featuring Internet/TV and maybe telephone for a lower price to attract your business. You only have to agree to keep the service for a year or two. At this point, the price goes up. Well, unless you call, threaten to cancel, and they find a new deal for you.

Indeed, I recall spending several years as a DirecTV customer forever in search of a better deal for them to keep me as a subscriber. I finally found a cheaper 24-month package at Cox Communications, the cable company that serves this area. And you just know, if you’ve followed my ongoing financial odyssey, that I really strive hard to survive on a budget.

In any case, I’ve been skeptical of cord cutting because you still have to pay for several services if you want variety, and the price begins to add up. Indeed, one of those introductory cable/satellite discount packages might just be cheaper — well as long as the discount lasts. You’ll also get more content, except for the exclusives from such services as Amazon Instant Video and Netflix.

So far I’m not impressed with one effort to offer a streaming TV subscription service known as Sling TV, from Dish Network. So it seems that you get little more than what a basic cable/satellite package would offer. Picture quality is said to be inferior to what Dish provides to its satellite subscribers, so where’s the advantage?

If Apple is merely going to offer a tiny package at a tiny price, how does that advance the state of the art?. I suppose if local stations were included, that might be acceptable. But how would that differ from what you can get now without worrying about consuming too much bandwidth on your Internet connection?

Now I once thought Apple had more in mind, a new interface or overall plan to conquer the living room. In Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography of Steve Jobs, Apple’s late co-founder, was quoted as saying that they had developed an amazing interface for TV sets. “It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”

The TV industry was freaked. During one CES event, Lenovo, a PC maker, launched a smart TV, which was supposed to first appear in China. Only the set doesn’t seem to have actually made it past the prototype stage, but that’s nothing new at the CES, where many products are demonstrated that somehow never make it to market.

But there is no Apple TV set, no evidence of “the simplest user interface you could imagine.” Perhaps Jobs, knowing his time was short and the impact that book would have, said this merely to drive the competition crazy. They’d invest heavily in improving their designs, or trying to match what they imagined Apple would do.

And it did nothing.

The fourth generation Apple TV has a spiffier interface, Siri, search and apps. But no 4K support, and there’s nothing about the look and feel that spells revolutionary. An Apple TV set may have been planned at one time, but it doesn’t seem to have gone anywhere. Even if a subscription service shows up, that’s hardly unique. So if Apple has a plan, it remains unfulfilled.