As most of you know, whenever Apple has a problem with hardware or software, it can make huge headlines. I said huge! One telling incident occurred last year, when the iOS 8.0.1 update essentially bricked any model from the iPhone 6 series. Apple had it up for maybe an hour or so before it was pulled, but that was quite enough to cause a furor, as if no other tech company had ever issued a flawed update.

More to the point, the small number of iPhones that were bricked could be fixed by running Restore. A corrected version, 8.0.2, was released the very next day, but I read fear-mongering articles about it for weeks after that. Few of those alleged journalists understood the problem or the fact that the faulty update was only available for a short time

Compare that to Windows, where Microsoft has released a number of buggy updates over the years, some of which would cause such symptoms as startup loops. You don’t see a rash of sensational headlines because Microsoft screwed up.

In any case, Microsoft has had a checkered past with hardware. Back in 2007, they allocated over one billion dollars to address what was described as “an unacceptable number of repairs” to the Xbox 360. The actual number of units impacted wasn’t mentioned, but that could be inferred from the amount set aside, since it would involve repairing or replacing the affected hardware.

Some of the failures were termed ‘Red Ring of Death” because the gaming console would display three flashing red lights on the face of the unit. While the problem was publicized to some extent, you didn’t have the tech media clamoring for Microsoft to shut down, or asserting the company was in a death spiral. I won’t even consider the cause, since it happened eight years ago. At least Microsoft made good on fixing the problem. The warranties were also extended to three years, another sign of good faith.

I’ve never heard of an Apple hardware glitch that had such a wide impact, and there have been a few. As with Microsoft, Apple offers to replace and extend the warrantees of the affected products.

This year’s problems for Microsoft involve the Surface Book and Surface Pro 4, the highly touted convertible note-books that are supposed to rescue Microsoft’s tablet division. Now before I get to the problems, consider the fact that the modest Surface sales are flagging, from $908 million last year to $672 million in this year’s September quarter. That is not too promising. Apple still sold $4.276 billion worth of iPads in the same quarter despite falling sales.

So while the Microsoft sycophants in the media have touted the Surface as a sure iPad killer, the facts don’t bear that out, and now Microsoft is admitting to loads of bugs in these machines.

So according to Laptop magazine, a publication that offers pretty balanced coverage of desktop and mobile platforms, Microsoft has issued an apology for Surface problems, stating, “For those of you who’ve had a less-than-perfect experience, we’re sorry for any frustration this has caused.”

What sort of problems?

Well, Laptop’s test samples exhibited “laggy performance,” meaning they ran slow, and issues with booting the units; the latter reportedly occurred after a Windows 10 update. Now that’s a problem that’s roughly in line with the issues that resulted from the iOS 8.0.1 update, and a glitch with the iPad Pro, where the unit might become unresponsive after receiving a full charge. In both cases, Apple fixed the bugs in short order. The iOS 9.2 update evidently makes the iPad Pro responsive again, but I’ve not seen any problems with the review unit I received from Apple.

As for Windows 10, it has been updated frequency since the original release last summer, and the update rate has slowed over time.

Now other Surface problems include poor battery life when performing a continuous web surfing test over a Wi-Fi network. The rear camera also exhibited artifacts and pixelation on two of the three samples examined by Laptop.

This is where you have to aske some hard questions. When a manufacturer sends a review unit to the media, you assume they are striving to make good first impressions. Sure, some Apple gear will have bugs, but not near as serious as the ones that impacted the Surface. You can hardly believe that a magazine would need multiple samples to get a unit that actually worked. This doesn’t auger well for Microsoft’s efforts to become a credible manufacturer of tablets or hybrid note-book computers.

These issues are especially troubling in light of declining tablet sales, and Microsoft has yet to demonstrate that it has delivered a credible alternative to other PC convertibles, let alone the various MacBooks with which it has been compared.

I’m not suggesting Microsoft isn’t capable of making reliable hardware. I assume the Xbox problems are history, and it doesn’t appear that the Lumia smartphones, which still aren’t selling so well, are buggy. But the smartphones are built on established production lines that were tested and proven by Nokia, so unless Microsoft has cut back quality control too much in an effort to reduce costs, it shouldn’t come back to haunt them.

Releasing flawed hardware is obviously no way to demonstrate credibility, particularly in a market where there are other PC makers who are direct competitors. Indeed, I wonder what Microsoft’s executives were thinking in getting into that business. Wouldn’t it have been better to follow Intel’s lead with Ultrabook systems by releasing a set of reference designs and letting other companies sort things out? Microsoft doesn’t do well to compete with its partners.

Call me paranoid — you wouldn’t be the first — but you have to wonder about people who claim that a certain company’s products are destined to be certain failures. Even when they’re not. But products from some other companies are taken seriously as potential “killers” even if the facts are otherwise.

So you just know that the critics have been salivating over the Apple Watch for months, and it’s not that Apple isn’t helping fuel the negative speculation. As most of you know, Apple hasn’t been exactly upfront in revealing the actual sales, other than to say they exceed their expectations, whatever they might be.

Of Apple’s recent products, I do agree Apple Watch has been more polarizing. Not everyone who has one loves it. Some find it useful, but not a must-have, not something they have learned they cannot live without. On the other hand, Apple dominates the market, if you accept sales estimates by outsiders as having some basis in fact. Of course, they are looking at the total sales in the “Other” category of Apple’s financials. Those estimates are that around six million were sold the first two quarters, and perhaps five or six million will be sold in the current quarter.

Not too shabby, and certainly better than Apple did with the first iPhone and the first iPad. No other smartwatch maker comes close. But it may be a year or two before this market settles down and we see the long term demand. So skepticism is not unreasonable, even if it’s overwrought. Saying that the Apple Watch is an outright failure, however, is just absurd.

Of course they said the iPhone would be a failure. No less than former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer — currently ragging on the performance of his successor — said Apple basically had no business getting into that market way back when. Maybe it was karma, but the iPhone remains highly successful, and Microsoft’s mobile handsets have low single-digit market shares.

While tech pundits weren’t so much predicting failure when Samsung was selling a good number of Galaxy smartphones, they still haven’t done near as well as iPhones, Apple is regularly castigated over the possibility of failure. The slightest clue, such as an alleged cutback in orders in the supply chain, can really force a negative outlook. Apple’s stock price in recent days has been down somewhat over such concerns.

Unfortunately, the tech media — and I suppose Wall Street analysts — haven’t learned the lessons of history. So this also happened a couple of years back. The same rumors with an iPhone 5s, and the same symptoms. In that case, the stock price dipped for months even though the iPhone remained successful. One argument was that sales could not continue to grow at a high rate. It had to reach a saturation point, as it has with Samsung, where high-end handset sales are lower than they used to be. And don’t forget those murmurings from the supply chain.

Now when the original supply chain rumors arose back then, Tim Cook educated financial analysts during a quarterly conference call that you cannot take one or two metrics of this sort and make assumptions about actual sales. I also wonder why these people didn’t realize that Apple often depends on multiple suppliers for parts, and is apt to move orders from one to the other not just because of inventory and demand.

Since this happened, both times, during a December quarter, it makes even less sense. Parts being ordered now would be used for products that are being manufactured for the March 2016 quarter, where sales would naturally be lower than a holiday quarter. But logic never seems to mean much when it comes to Apple.

The other theory has it that the stakes are high for Apple. Every single product or service must be a stellar success, or the company will be on a death spiral. But if you actually look at the company’s history, you’ll see there have been a number of failed or underperforming products over the years. When Steve Jobs took control of the company in 1997, he killed some products, not just to save money, but because they hadn’t realized their potential. Consider the Newton MessagePad, considered a forerunner to the iPad and, in part, the iPhone.

Despite striking looks, the Power Mac G4 Cube, released in 2000, never did all that well. Yes, we can argue that Apple priced it too high, and made it too hostile for upgrades. You can also argue that it really wasn’t needed, since existing Power Macs got the job done, even if they weren’t quite as sexy.

And don’t forget the ongoing reinventions of Apple’s online services. In the 1990s, they tried to ape AOL with a service that used AOL technology, known as eWorld. It never went very far, though some loved it. Apple’s iTools became .Mac, which became MobileMe, and finally morphed into iCloud. Features came and went, and some suggest that, despite the tighter integration with Apple’s products and services, iCloud is still troublesome.

But few suggest Apple will expire because they are still having problems with iCloud.

Now consider some basic facts before we deal with fantasy. The 2015 MacBook, with a low-power Intel processor, is eclipsed by the iPad Pro in performance. The newest member of the iPad family is about 50% faster. Apple boasts the high-end tablet is also faster than 80% of the note-books sold in the last year, although that number is somewhat deceiving. You see, most note-books are cheap and low-powered Windows PCs. And besides, the MacBook has been criticized for barely adequate performance.

Other than the MacBook, the iPad Pro is closer in performance o Macs of a year or two ago. Sure, this is a pretty remarkable achievement for Apple’s in-house processor design team. It’s also true that Apple earns far more revenue from gear sporting their own A-series processors than Macs, which come with Intel processors.

You can see where the other shoe is about to drop in a recent hit bait blog post about the future of OS X.

So this particular article, which doesn’t deserve a link, is trying to convince the reader that Apple is so focused on mobile that OS X is designed to become a “legacy” platform. Now let me make it very clear that I do expect that to happen some day due to market forces, but not in the near future. Selling five million Macs a quarter, with high average resale prices, is not a business to take lightly. Apple still makes a larger profit on personal computers than any other PC maker, even the ones that sell much larger quantities.

That takes us to that article’s theory, such as it is.

So we are told that, “Apple has made steady progress on custom ARM chips and shows no sign of stopping.” It’s also an extremely dumb statement, because it’s obvious Apple would continue to improve those chips. But it happens to be true that Intel didn’t just shut down its development labs, and their processors are also getting faster and more power efficient. Sure, perhaps Apple is catching up, but that is not necessarily justification to give up on Macs using Intel Inside, and that’s where the article is taking us.

The next argument is that it cost Apple far less for its ARM-based processors compared to Intel. No doubt, but that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t earning substantial profits from Macs. The blogger’s contention is that it makes no sense to have two platforms with two processor families,  but it does, since Macs and iOS gear are complimentary and one doesn’t necessarily have to replace the other.

So a personal computer can perform a much wider range of tasks that are only approximated on an iPhone or an iPad. While the new multitasking capability of iOS 9, best implemented on the latest iPads, does allow you more flexibility in running multiple apps, it doesn’t come close to a Mac. There are many things that you still cannot do even on an iPad Pro; there tens of thousands of Mac apps that have no equivalent on Apple’s tablet.. How does the fact that Apple’s processors might some day exceed the performance of Intel hardware change that?

The article also resurrects the OS X on ARM argument, failing to recognize the shortcomings, the first of which is forcing developers to undergo yet another processor migration. Sure, I realize Apple is perfectly capable of building an emulator as they did with the PowerPC and Intel transition. It would allow Mac apps to run on ARM with decent performance, but why?

To be able to sell Macs cheaper? Why assume Apple can’t walk and chew gum at the same time?

Remember that Apple’s chips are optimized for resource sensitive gear where saving power and working with less memory is as important as good performance. What would it cost to develop and scale up A-series chips to work on a traditional PC form factor? What would be involved in building that Intel emulator? What about the ability to run Windows on a Mac with comparable performance to a PC under Boot Camp? Or getting most of the way there with virtual machine apps, such as Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion? Believe me, this is an important sales incentive for Macs in the enterprise.

With ARM, the emulator may work just fine with minimal impact on performance, but we may be back to the days where running Windows would be a pathetic exercise, as it was with the PowerPC.

Other than saving money on chips, it hardly makes sense for Apple to replace Intel on Macs. Indeed, if Intel had problems improving their processor designs — and it’s true that recent chip updates have been late — I suppose Apple could consider AMD as an alternative. Maybe AMD chips aren’t quite as powerful as Intel, but they do offer good deals on lower-powered processors, and Apple already buys their graphics chips.

Remember, AMD hardware is compatible with Intel.

But even if Apple did another processor switch in order to reduce the cost of building Macs, that shouldn’t signal the end of OS X by any means. While iOS will continue to improve and become more productive, and OS X will integrate better with Apple’s mobile gear, it doesn’t mean convergence is in the cards anytime soon. Or even that it’s necessary, since that goes against Apple’s main argument for having separate computing platforms.

Ask me in another five years.

The other day, I saw a photo of actress Melissa Benoist, star of the TV series, “Supergirl,” wearing her costume while seated on the set crouching over her smartphone. I assume it happened between takes. I don’t know if it was an iPhone or not, but it leads me to the subject of this week’s lead article.

Now remember the edict: If you want lots of traffic for your blog, make sure it’s about Apple — or pretends to be about Apple. So there’s a story in a certain newspaper of record that complains about the downsides of ubiquitous smartphones. Now the main focus seems to make sense until it begins to go off the rails, and why must it be about the iPhone?

Indeed, the article itself doesn’t actually mention the iPhone or any handset specifically. It’s about the headline writer trying to add a little punch.

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