How often do you read about the failed Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatches? How often do you read about the failed Android Wear smartwatches? Or even the Pebble? But you sure hear plenty about how bad Apple Watch is allegedly doing compared to — what?

Yet some unfortunately uninformed members of the tech media imagine that Apple’s goals, or their own goals, weren’t met. Thus, the Apple Watch is unsuccessful. Indeed, one of the turkey-of-the-year reports I read had it listed as number one. Why? Well, I suppose because it was unfinished, although there was no exact definition for that word. Or maybe because the Apple Watch can’t hold a charge for two or three weeks, at least not yet.

Regardless, the prevailing estimates of Apple Watch sales are six million as of the end of the September quarter, counting the abbreviated first quarter and the second quarter of sales. True, those figures are interpolated from Apple’s “Other” revenue category, since Apple Watch sales aren’t listed separately.

Before I go on, let me tell you that I think Apple is making a mistake withholding these numbers. That decision was made even before the Apple Watch went on sale, and one presumed reason was that competitors might benefit from knowing how many were sold. But since independent analysts are probably in the ballpark with their estimates — and Apple’s competition is perfectly capable of running their own calculations — the truth is, more or less, out there already. Refining it a few hundred thousand up or down shouldn’t make a huge difference.

I suppose you can take the Machiavellian point of view about Apple’s decision, but I’m sure they believe they had valid reasons for doing so. Remember that the smartwatch market is not yet a proven winner. It may take a few years to realize its potential, and no doubt Apple will be patient. I also expect that, five years down, the Apple Watch will be vastly different from the one you have now.

A key change may be untethering it from the iPhone, which currently makes it an accessory. It does some stuff without the iPhone, but not much. But in the next few years, it should be an independent gadget, and there might even a version with a cellular radio so you could originate phone calls on it. Battery life will no doubt improve greatly, so perhaps you’ll be able to use it two or three days before it needs to be connected to the charging cable or charging dock.

No, I do not expect to see millions of people bringing their wrists to they mouths to make and receive calls. In addition to using it as a speakerphone, meaning you won’t have to move your wrist, there’s always a Bluetooth earphone. It’s even possible that such an Apple Watch will carve out a decent portion of the mobile handset market one day, even though it wouldn’t necessarily replace the iPhone for most people.

It’s a potential that can only be hinted at today. And even if Apple Watch sales didn’t match Apple’s expectations, whatever they really are, there is too much invested in the ecosystem to kill it quickly. It’s not like the infamous Power Mac G4 Cube, which was just another Mac in a fancy case. Very little was lost when it was terminated with extreme prejudice.

In any case, with Black Friday past us, there are already estimates of how many units will sell this holiday quarter. Obviously you’d expect it would be much higher than previous quarters, since the Apple Watch is ideal for gifting, assuming you can afford the price of admission and care about watches.

So industry analyst Daniel Ives of FBR & Co. already has a prediction. He reportedly based it on checks with Apple’s retail stores on Black Friday. His conclusion is that sales could reach six million for the quarter, roughly the same as the previous two quarters combined.

Now to be fair, Apple has actually provided two clues as to how many units were sold. During the July quarterly conference call with financial analysts, Apple executives claimed that sales had exceeded that of the first-generation iPad and first-generation iPhone during the comparable period, the first 80 days. So that would mean it was higher than the three million iPads sold during that timeframe.

In a published report, Ives is also quoted as saying that, over the next three years, wearables will become a market that exceeds $20 billion, and if Apple retains its dominant position, that would be a significant contributor to its revenue base. Sure, there will be more competition, but even though the iPad’s dominance is less than it used to be, the iPad is still synonymous with tablets. What other tablets are people talking about beyond, say, a Kindle, with unknown sales. Other than Apple Watch, what other models are receiving much attention?

Well, I suppose Pebble because it’s much cheaper. I even saw them at a Sam’s Club discount warehouse the other day. But I didn’t see people lining up to buy them, or much of anything for that matter. Well, the TV shelves received some attention, and I did see a couple of large boxes being transported in carts to the motor vehicles of their new owners. I suppose the Pebble could gain a decent market share going forward merely as a result of being the lower cost alternative. Perhaps Pebble might even harness a spruced up version to go mano-a-mano with the Apple Watch. That might even be interesting.

Before I get started, I really wonder what Apple means by “Magic Keyboard.” I mean, what’s magic about it anyway? Is it any more “magical” than the Wireless Keyboard that it replaced for $30 more? What’s so different to demand a higher price? Will your keyboarding experience be so much better? Or is it all about the embedded lithium-ion battery, charged with a lighting cable, which pairs when it’s charging for the very first time?

In my initial review, published earlier this month, I was skeptical. I couldn’t see much of an advantage. But I was also coming from a totally different sort of keyboard, the Matias Quiet Pro, which uses a traditional mechanical switch close in feel to the original Apple Extended Keyboard II. The keys have a long travel, and feel fairly similar to the electronic typewriters of old. It helps that Matias has managed to managed to tame the noise, so the incessant clacking is mostly subdued.

Indeed, it was sufficiently quiet as to not qualify in a movie or TV product placement, since computers, Mac or PC, must always have loud keyboards to draw attention to themselves when used as a plot device. It’s also curious that the onscreen interfaces seem largely to descend from DOS and the early graphical operating systems. I suppose it’s intended to drive home the point that this is a computer doing computer-type things. Take a look at the visuals in the CBS crime drama, “CSI: Cyber.” In that show, instead of cutting up dead bodies — and that is still done on occasion — they cut up computer code to catch nasty online criminals.

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Once upon a time, anyone who wanted a powerful Mac would choose the top of the line. So in the days before Apple went Intel in 2006, it was the Power Mac G5. It was a huge beast, weighing over 40 pounds, but it was extremely expandable. You could add multiple hard drives and PCI cards, and changing RAM was a snap. But keeping it running cool was a chore, as this computing workstation — you could hardly call it a personal computer — was outfitted with multiple fans and, in the more powerful models, liquid cooling. That was the shortcoming of the G5 chip that never realized its potential for Apple.

If the cooling ever leaked, you could kiss that expensive Mac goodbye.

When Apple moved to Intel processors in 2006, the successor to that Power Mac, the Mac Pro, debuted. Externally it looked about the same, but the innards were more efficient because Apple didn’t need so much cooling hardware. It was expensive, powerful, and content creators loved them.

Things began to change in the last quarter of 2009, when Apple introduced a 27-inch iMac, complete with 4-core processors and speedy graphics. It was also far cheaper than a Mac Pro in its standard configurations, and a number of power users, home and business, opted for the more practical alternative. I did, and managed to sell my 2008 Mac Pro, with a 30-inch display, for a high enough figure that allowed me to buy the new computer, customized with a faster processor and graphics hardware, for cash, and get a few hundred dollars in change to cover the cost of an external backup drive and the electric bill.

Clearly it had its impact. After the release of a 2010 Mac Pro refresh, it took another two years for a very minor update to appear. Changes were mostly confined to somewhat more powerful Intel Xeon processors, and some speculated that Apple was poised to give up on the product and concentrate on the iMac as its most powerful computer.

In early 2013, Tim Cook promised a major Mac Pro upgrade, and, sure enough, the spectacular “trash can” version was demonstrated during the WWDC keynote that June. It didn’t show up until December of 2013, and volume shipments didn’t start until early in 2014.

Aside from a totally different look, the late 2013 Mac Pro was smaller than it first seemed, less than 10 inches high, and weighed a mere 11 pounds. While you could open the case easily enough, there was no room for any internal storage beyond the single SSD drive. RAM upgrades were simple, but there were no PCI expansion slots.

It was a sea change, and not necessarily one that was welcome. In place of the previous model’s internal expansion possibilities, there were loads of external ports that included four USB 3.0, six Thunderbolt 2, two Gigabit Ethernet connections, and HDMI 1.4 with support for Ultra HD for 4K. It didn’t even come with a keyboard or mouse, unlike previous models, and Apple has yet to add a 4K or 5K display to its lineup. For a higher resolution display, you have to rely other manufactures, such as Dell and HP.

Now if your expansion needs extend beyond a few hard drives to elaborate RAID assemblies, having six Thunderbolt 2 ports may be a good thing. There are also external PCI expansion boxes to serve your needs, but the lack of internal expansion has to be frustrating. Rather than have a clean work environment, power users are saddled with nightmares of intertwining cables and extra, usually ugly, expansion gear.

Having a small, sexy computer surrounded by loads of ugly hardware isn’t a terribly welcome solution for some. Yet the Mac Pro has its joys. Users running heavy-duty scientific software, or doing content creation, have a powerful workstation to manage those chores. While you could load up a Mac Pro with more RAM, a drive with higher storage capacity, and a more powerful multicore Xeon processor and end up with a machine costing close to $10,000, comparisons with Windows hardware of similar capabilities brings surprising results. In most cases, the Mac Pro is noticeably cheaper, even when compared with a home-built system.

But it’s catering to a smaller user base. A customized 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display can provide more computing power for single-core and four-core operations than the Mac Pro. Only the smaller number of apps that take better advantage of multicore processors, and/or the more powerful graphics hardware, benefit if you choose the Mac Pro.

So is it worth the extra expense? Well, if you need more than two Thunderbolt 2 ports plus extra displays and some PCI expansion cards, sure. If you’ll save a considerable amount of time running rendering chores that benefit from up to 12 processing cores, sure.

The reaction to the Mac Pro has been polarizing. Other than the relatively small number of people who benefit from its performance and external expansion capabilities, today’s iMac is more than capable of performing the work you need with really great performance. It is also coming on two years since the refreshed Mac Pro first appeared, so you wonder how much love it’s getting from Apple.

I’m far from alone in expressing skepticism about the direction of the Mac Pro. The Mac Observer and Kirk McElhearn’s Kirksville blog have both expressed their reservations.

Ideally, if there must be a Mac Pro, maybe Apple could develop a different version, still relatively compact, which restores the internal expansion capability of the original Mac Pro. With Apple’s penchant for miniaturization, I bet they could deliver all that in a computer that weighs no more than 20 pounds or so.

But is there enough of a market for such a machine — or the present day Mac Pro? That’s a question only Apple can answer.

So it has begun. For the next few months, you’ll be seeing loads of best/worst listicles. The choices may be based on reader surveys, editorial preferences, personal preferences, or just by shooting darts at the wall and hoping a few will hit their targets. In other words, there are no standards, and anyone’s opinion is as good as anyone else’s.

But if you’re talking about the tech business, might as well put Apple on the top of a list of the year’s tech turkeys. Not that it necessarily deserves to be there, but it’s certain hit bait. So the only thing lacking in a report published by a certain national newspaper was to use Apple in the title. But maybe someone will get the clue and change the headline.

First and foremost, the Apple Watch must be a “turkey.” Unfortunately the reasons are incoherent, such as referring to “useful apps that can be easily accessed on the phone…”

The what? Does the writer mean that Apple Watch apps need to be accessed on the iPhone too? For otherwise, the phrase is scrambled eggs. Other complaints are about getting through the day on a single charge, which it does. The reviews mostly report that the advertised 18-hour average battery life is pretty much on the mark. But the main complaint is that it is a “work-in-progress” that will require improvement.

So?

What about the first iPhone, which didn’t even work on the then fastest 3G network, and had no third-party apps, app development system or store? Was that also a “work-in-progress,” or is it simply the fact that any version 1.0 product will get better over time? Forgotten in this foolish turkey award is the fact that the Apple Watch reportedly outsells all other smartwatches combined according to a reasonable range of estimates.

The next presumed “turkey” is particularly naive. It’s about poor battery life, which is really nothing new, since battery technology hasn’t really advanced that much in recent years. The main complaint echoes the one about the Apple Watch, about phones not lasting a full day. But many do. My iPhone does. I suppose if you run YouTube videos at full tilt without letup, maybe not.

Unfortunately, the writer doesn’t really seem to grasp battery technology or what might be required to extend life. Certainly the iPhone 6 Plus usually lasts more than a day without need of a recharge for many customers. Handset makers can optimize power use and eke out better battery life, but it’ll take new generations of batteries to improve things significantly. It’s not something Apple and Samsung can just decide to do.

Yet another complaint is about subscription music and TV services, ranging from Apple Music to Netflix. The author is “sick” of them, complaining that you need a detective to figure them all out. But if you have so many that the bills are mounting fast, that’s your fault, not the fault of the content providers who are merely trying to make a living.

After all, just what is the alternative to charging a subscription price? Oh sure, it’s running ads. Well, you do get ads on Hulu Plus, even though you pay a monthly fee, but there are less ads. Indeed, the reason you have these services in the first place is that they give you unlimited content mostly without the ads for a single fee. It doesn’t matter how much you consume. It’s still the same price. With cable or satellite TV, you pay flat fees for your chosen bundle of channels, but you still have to endure the ads on most except for “premium” channels.

So how does the author expect these companies to pay the bills? Does he believe that they can just stream all that content free of charge without ads? What about the production companies, the music and movie producers, who create that content? What about the artists, the actors, musicians and production staffs? Someone has to pay the bills, or does he believe that governments should fund the arts so entertainment is free to everyone?

Well, I suppose you can make that argument. And in some countries, there is such government support, but it doesn’t happen in many and not everyone wants it. But asking you to pay for the content you consume is not a turkey, and giving you a fairly wide choice of services to which you can subscribe at fairly low rates is by no means a turkey either. It’s a tested and proven way of doing business.

Yes, I understand that things might get confusing if you select a number of services. Maybe there ought to be a clearinghouse of some sort, where you can use a single login, pay a single bill, to choose the services you want. Of course that’s done to some extent with the cable and satellite providers, but they aren’t filling the gaps served by Apple Music, Spotify, Netflix and all the rest.

After all, what about services for those who choose to cut the cable/satellite cord?

There are actually good and bad turkeys listed in that article. But much of it represents complaints from someone who seems to be unsatisfied by a lot of things that don’t bother most people. More than likely, the list is deliberately controversial to attract comments and traffic. But since I won’t identify the writer, the publication, or the URL, he won’t get any help from me.