Reading the tea leaves around the Apple universe is pretty common. All sorts of rumors arise, and some of them are even true. One sure source of bits and pieces about future Apple gear is the supply chain, at least for those who have access. It’s been shown that it’s near impossible to keep everything hidden, despite Apple’s efforts to shut down leaks.

So before a new iPhone, or a new iPad, or a new Mac arrives, the outlines of the new product will usually be known, more or less. Sure, the fine details, such as processor speeds and other hardware attributes, may be a secret. Special features may not be fully fleshed out, but there’s enough solid information to feed fairly accurate speculation.

Less so are details about products that are all new and not refreshes. The new Mac Pro managed to escape detailed speculation largely because it is being built in the U.S. and thus managed to avoid the usual supply chain chitchat.

Now before the leaks appear, Apple watchers would love to know what the company is working on. The old mantra “we do not discuss unreleased products” is expected but not helpful. Not surprisingly, clues can be found in what Apple says about other products, even when a product category is denigrated. Here Apple executives might be following the magician’s playback, misdirection, to send you off in the wrong direction in search of a story.

So there have been moments when Apple made key comments that presaged new gear, although maybe it wasn’t so obvious that a new product was in the works.

In 2005, Apple tried to expand the joy of iTunes, already dominant even on the Windows platform, from the iPod to cell phones. Apple made a deal with Motorola, then a major handset maker, which resulted in the release of the ROKR E1. Now the idea was certainly promising, a mobile handset that also included iTunes. Very promising, until you actually used one.

Now Motorola actually made some pretty neat handsets in those days, most particularly the RAZR, which dominated the market for several years. I owned several, and if you ignored the poor interface and used it to make and receive calls, it worked just fine. The ROKR was a total misfire in nearly every respect beyond its phone circuitry . Recognizing reality, Steve Jobs was quoted as attacking the quality of wireless handsets.

Two years later, the iPhone arrived. Now I wouldn’t suggest that the ROKR was a test bed or a stalking horse. Apple evidently was working on what later became the iPad around that time, and managed to fork the project to the iPhone, now its most successful product. But Apple put down wireless handsets before they delivered their own solution.

During the quarterly conference call with financial analysts in October 2004, Apple was asked about a low-cost Mac. The answer was no. Apple doesn’t produce junk.

But three months later, the original $499 Mac mini was launched during the Macworld Expo keynote. Sure, it was inexpensive for a Mac, but Apple would maintain it wasn’t junk. To keep the price down, it didn’t come with a mouse or display. The critics pounced on its user hostile approach to upgrades. You actually had to use a putty knife or a similar implement to open the case in order to upgrade RAM. Then again, today’s Mac mini, once again $499, uses soldered RAM, so the upgrade is impossible.

Ever searching for ways to make cheaper PCs, manufacturers decided to build smaller versions. Netbooks appeared in earnest beginning in 2007 with the introduction of the original Asus Eee PC, which used Linux in order to avoid paying Microsoft license fees for the operating system. Eventually, Windows netbooks arrived, and Apple was, naturally, asked if there would be a Mac version.

Predictably Apple attacked the entire product category. Tim Cook bluntly stated that they weren’t powerful enough, and had cramped keyboards and small displays. But he also gave a telltale clue: “We’ll see. We are watching the space…We’ve got some ideas here.”

Those ideas became the iPad, which was first introduced in 2010. So while Apple wasn’t keen about a tiny PC alternative, they weren’t against a smaller computing device of some sort. Although sales have declined over the last year or two, the iPad set the standard for tablets. It didn’t take long for netbooks to become yet another failed tech gadget.

So we know that Apple isn’t happy with the living room entertainment experience, although the Apple TV may not be the final solution. Apple is also interested in the automobile space, but whether that means a souped up CarPlay or the rumored Apple Car is anyone’s guess. Maybe both.

Just watch what markets Apple expresses its interest in, or attacks. Either way, something may be in the winds with an Apple logo on it.

This may come as a surprise to some of you, particularly if you’ve purchased a new car in recent years in the U.S. But the average age of a car on the road is 11.5 years. That means that it would be a 2003 or 2004 model, such as the VW Passat GLX I once owned. To me that would be a pretty old car, ready for retirement, but I suppose I’m out of touch.

Indeed, Chris O’Brien, my co-host on The Paracast, the other day bemoaned the fact that he has a 10-year-old car, but that’s not at all unusual. Now if the vehicle is in a pretty good state of repair, you can probably get a great deal if you decide to buy one of those cars, since depreciation is no longer much of a factor in the purchase price. Indeed a key reason that cars hang on that long without breaking down is due to improved reliability. It’s no longer unusual for vehicles to deliver far more than 100,000 miles of relatively trouble-free service.

If you catch a new car ad on radio or TV, however, you’d think people are lining up to take advantage of all those zero down, zero interest auto loans, but those offers are only available to the few who have great credit. Either way, there are still millions of potential customers out there.

But what will you buy if you’re in the market for a new car? Or are you prepared to wait a few more years driving the old clunker just to see what the next generation of motor vehicles will be like? By 2020, for example, you might be able to buy a car with autonomous driving, which means the vehicle’s onboard computers and sensors will take over the entire driving experience, from origin to destination, without your direct intervention. Some of today’s cars have taken halting steps towards that goal with smart cruise control and braking, and lane change warnings. Add to that the ability to assist in parallel parking, or taking over the entire experience without your intervention, and you wonder whether the driver will eventually be obsolete.

We know that Google is working on a self-driving vehicle. Some of them are on the road, and  you’ve probably heard about the incident in which one of those cars was stopped by police — for driving too slowly. In addition, Tesla recently introduced a software update for the Model S that includes Autopilot. Again, this is a first step, and it allows you to take advantage of an advanced cruise control scheme that will let you drive long distances on a highway without direct intervention until you reach the off ramp. But until this scheme is proven, I wouldn’t trust it, and would treat it as just another cruise control setting, which means you should be ready to take over at a moment’s notice.

Tesla is reportedly going to add more self-driving features over the next few years. At least Tesla has a shipping product that garners great reviews, although the record for reliability is not very promising. That would appear to be a major obstacle towards relying on it for anything more than a regular driving experience.

I’m not at all certain there will be a self-driving car with a Google label on it. Maybe the technology will be available for custom manufacturing by a third party, or licensing to existing auto makers.

As to Apple, there have been rumors in the past year or so about Project Titan, which supposedly involves developing a self-driving electric vehicle that is being called Apple Car. Or is a hydrogen fuel cell a possibility?

While I have little doubt Apple is working on something automative, this doesn’t mean you’ll be able to buy an Apple Car by 2019 or 2020. It may be more about developing test beds to explore onboard management and infotainment systems for future versions of CarPlay. Maybe Apple wants to build what they regard as the ideal vehicle in which their hardware and software can be fully tested. But if that’s the case, they could purchase a sampling of cars from different makers to get a direct handle on how their technology would work in the real world.

Sure, it may be true that Apple is testing the waters to see if building a car makes sense. Prototypes of different designs might be built and road tested, which means it’ll be difficult to keep them hidden. Yes, I know about prototype vehicles being covered up to prevent identification of the actual design, but an Apple Car, if real, will eventually be spotted on the road. You can’t do all the testing on race tracks.

At the end of the day, Apple might still decide not to manufacture such a vehicle. Maybe it’ll be done in partnership with one of the existing auto makers, perhaps BMW, which is one of the rumors. Certainly it’s one thing to build a few prototypes and try them out. It’s another thing to commit to production, because that creates its own problems. Would Apple use an existing manufacturing facility, perhaps leasing a plant that is underutilized or has been shut down? Or would they construct one from scratch?

Tesla’s production facility, in Fremont, CA, is a plant that was once used in a joint venture between GM and Toyota that was formerly known as New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc.

Even if Apple redeploys a car plant, or builds one of their own, establishing a sales and servicing system would be a huge undertaking. Tesla sells direct. I suspect Apple would as well, particularly in light of the problems they had with third party dealers until the Apple Store chain was established.

And obviously you wouldn’t buy an Apple Car at an Apple Store.

If Apple could keep the purchase price to a reasonable level, car buyers would have something to look forward to. You can bet Apple will want to overhaul the current convoluted and frustrating purchase experience. Just eliminating that annoying visit to the finance department would be a great step in the right direction.

At the end of the day, nothing is final. When and if Apple submits vehicles for testing by the appropriate regulatory authorities, you’ll be reasonably assured it’s real. But we’re not there yet, not by a long shot.

Before the fourth generation Apple TV arrived last month, there were huge expectations. While the previous versions of the Apple TV were about testing the waters, the reason the product was referred to as a “hobby,” the 2015 version was supposed to be daringly different. This was the one that Apple was expected to use as the basis for conquering the living room.

Certainly Tim Cook’s statements fueled expectations. He would regularly denigrate the current living room entertainment experience, although he wasn’t terribly specific as to what was wrong. So leave it to Apple to devise a solution that would overhaul the TV industry, or at least that’s what you might have expected.

When Steve Jobs said, as quoted in Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography, that Apple had cracked the secret of the best TV interface ever, it was widely believed that a brand new smart TV was on the horizon. The tech industry was clearly spooked, and one of the larger PC makers even announced a TV, presumably in response. It’s not as if this Lenovo TV concept over made it to market, however.

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As many of you know, a week or two before Apple releases a new gadget, selected members of the press are seeded with samples so they can release reviews a day or two before it goes on sale. This early buzz, if favorable, can really boost sales from the starting gate. That’s particularly helpful with the iPhone, where Apple has records to break on the launch weekend.

Most of the recent reviews have been favorable. But the Apple Watch was got somewhat mixed ratings, as reviewers were concerned over whether what was basically a fashion accessory for the iPhone was an indispensable gadget. There were also troubling reports of software glitches, such as the inconsistent sensitivity to activating the watch when you flicked your wrist, or slow app performance. The latter was largely due to the fact that the apps were actually running on the iPhone and pushed to the Apple Watch via Bluetooth.

If you were skeptical about buying an Apple Watch, you’d come away with the distinct impression that this was surely a version 1.0 product, particularly the software. Forgetting the hardware limitations — and the advertised battery life of 18 hours may be a limitation — some might have decided to just wait.

watchOS2 fixed some glitches, and allowed apps to run native. But it also arrived five months after the product first hit the store shelves. While unofficial estimates of sales indicate an early success, that Apple is outselling all other smartwatches combined, having reviewers discover software bugs is not a good thing.

Before writing this article, I read a review of the iPad Pro from Time magazine. That’s a prestigious publication, and Apple should be pleased to have its new device labeled as the best computer Apple ever made. But the writer cited software glitches that involved such key elements as the touch keyboard and scrolling.

A serious problem reported by some users, and confirmed by Apple, involves the iPad Pro becoming unresponsive after charging, which requires a hard restart to set things right. But that’s just a quick workaround. Apple is investigating the situation to see what has to be fixed. This would likely involve an iOS update of some sort.

What is troubling is that the iPad is a product with sales in decline. The pressure was therefore higher on Apple to get it right the first time with its latest and greatest, and not ship something with assorted glitches. The charging misbehavior is significant, even if there’s a workaround. Remember that not a whole lot of these tablets are in the wild yet, so it’s possible there are other bugs that will show up before long.

I’ve already discussed the ongoing problems with new versions of iOS and OS X. With Yosemite, it took several releases to resolve a nagging Wi-Fi problem that was evidently caused by switching to a different network resource. Perhaps Apple had perfectly logical reasons to make the change. Perhaps it was hoped it would improve Wi-Fi reliability and performance, but they had to revert to the older way of doing things after taking months to fix the problem. It certainly didn’t make Mac users warm and fuzzy about having to restart or dump a preference file or two every so often to restore Wi-Fi functionality.

El Capitan was supposed to be the release that would focus on reliability, fixing the ills of previous OS X versions and adding improvements to performance and reliability. Now from personal experience, I can tell you that I tend to view online customer reviews with some skepticism. While there are legitimate compliments and criticisms, some people just want to be negative and might exaggerate a problem, or, frankly, just make things up.

On the other hand, El Capitan is still not quite getting the love at the App Store. With a 2.5 star rating, it’s not pleasing upgraders as much as Yosemite, which was no great shakes. There are reports of installation glitches, the need to constantly restart to keep printers from falling off the network, and general performance issues. To be fair, Apple has already released one updater, 10.11.1, and is working on a 10.11.2 with more promised fixes. It took updates from Apple and Microsoft to address issues with Microsoft Office 2016, but the updated versions appear to work well. So it’s quite possible many of the remaining complaints, if they are consistent and hitting lots of users, will be mostly resolved soon.

A key change, designed to improve reliability, has made some apps incompatible. It’s called “rootless” or “System Integrity Protection,” which blocks access to certain system processes and resources. Apps that depend on that access have had to be redeveloped. Developer Jon Gotow of St. Clair Software had to totally rebuild his handy Default Folder Open/Save dialog enhancer as a result. To be fair, his public beta is coming along nicely, and will probably be finished in a few weeks. Other programmers are also working on updates for El Capitan.

iOS 9 seems to be in somewhat better shape, though I’ve read about problems with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Touch ID and battery life. You know, the usual things that impact an iOS update. But I haven’t noticed anything in particular since the original release, where some apps crashed upon launch.

Still, I have to hope Apple will actually take the experience of public betas as a means to improve system reliability. That doesn’t seem to have happened yet.