Once upon a time, when Apple was installing rofowerPC chips in Macs, there came a time when Intel appeared to be soaring ahead in the CPU horsepower race. Do you remember when Pentiums began to approach 4 GHz, while the PowerPC G5 topped out at 2.5 GHz, and that required liquid cooling? So, in theory, the Pentium must have been a whole lot faster.

In the real world, a processor’s speed potential is a lot more complicated, and don’t forget the speed of the memory bus and the hard drive. An SSD on a lower speed Mac nowadays can do wonders to make it seem a whole lot snappier. Ask any user of the new MacBook.

In any case, when Apple was still building Macs with PowerPC, and the advertised clock speeds of Pentiums soared, there were regular performance bakeoffs, usually during Apple’s public events. The result? Macs were still faster at many tasks. Some claimed the benchmark methodology was deliberately fabricated to make the Mac look faster than it really was. Perhaps Apple was selective in picking the benchmarks that put the PowerPC to its best advantage, but they still represented actual things you’d do with high-end software on your Mac.

Indeed, Apple shared the methodology, and the actual test scripts, with journalists, and when I used them, I got results quite similar to theirs.

But development of the PowerPC stalled. Apple’s chip partners, IBM and Motorola, were never able to tame the G5 to work efficiently on a note-book, so PowerBooks used the much slower G4. Steve Jobs realized something had to give, and that meant giving up the PowerPC and moving to Intel. The transition was was first announced in 2005, and completed in 2006.

Today, the issue of Mac performance is not a factor. In most respects, except for dedicated gaming machines or PCs with the most powerful graphics hardware, Macs and PCs are pretty close with most benchmarks, and the former is often more power efficient. The real comparisons are about hardware design, operating system capabilities, and the app availability.

Moving on…

With new iPhones on the agenda this week, there are the inevitable comparisons with existing gear. How well does the latest flagship smartphone from Samsung and, to a lesser extent, HTC and LG, stack up with last year’s iPhone? These are the comparisons that don’t actually use real-world results but specs.

So it’s inevitable that the presumed or measured specs of an iPhone will seem to pale in comparison to what the fastest Android gear offers. Why have two cores when you can have four or more? Aren’t the clock speeds faster on Android gear, not to mention the amount of built-in RAM? What about the added frills, such as displays that extend to the sides? Isn’t that an advantage? Well, I suppose if you want to stare at the edge of the phone and imagine that somehow improves your user experience.

As to specs: Remember we are talking about different operating systems, and processors that, in Apple’s case, are customized and optimized for specific hardware and software. Real benchmarks tend to show Apple at or near the top of the food chain. But there’s more to judging performance. What about the user interface and the basics, such as app launch times, and navigating through an interface? When or where do things lag and is everything pretty snappy? Here a few fractions of a second don’t matter regardless.

Apple routinely gets dinged for failing to match the competition’s hardware feature-for-feature, or via specs. But claiming brownie points because there’s something an iPhone doesn’t have misses the point. Is the feature needed? And if it is, does it even work? Do you remember the Tilt to Scroll capability once highly touted on Samsung Galaxy smartphones? How well did that feature really work? Did the content scroll quickly without pause? Did it stall, or sometimes fail to run?

Well, I seldom got it to work except during the setup process. In the real world, it was an abject failure, but adding bullet points appear to be more important than actually perfecting a feature.

Apple’s approach has occasionally been explained by VP Philip Schiller. It’s not just about figuring out what features to add, but what features to remove. Sometimes Apple makes a wrong move, and sometimes a new feature doesn’t work as well as it should. The first iterations of the Touch ID fingerprint sensor weren’t always reliable. But it did get better overtime, and the hardware has been improved as well. In contrast, Samsung’s early efforts in recent Galaxy handsets were very hit or miss (mostly miss), but having a fingerprint sensor was, to them, a bragging point and it didn’t matter.

When the new iPhones go on sale, there will be the inevitable benchmarks. Even though Apple seldom offers very much information about the specs of an A-series processor, the benchmarking apps will provide that information. Again, there will be inevitable feature and spec comparisons. But how it all comes together and works in the real world is the issue, even if such fine details are more difficult to quantify when you create lists in Keynote or PowerPoint.

This is a self-serving column. I’ll say that up front, so you know my point of view without excuses. But stick with me for a little while, and maybe you’ll agree with me. You see, I’m talking about some widely installed browser extensions, or apps, that are costing companies billions of dollars in lost revenue.

Do I have your attention?

How about this oft-repeated statistic, that digital advertising totals $60 billion each year in the U.S. alone. But 25% of Internet users are running ad blockers to hide that content. No, I cannot tell you how much money is actually lost from ad blockers, although there are estimates in the billions of dollars.

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So Apple gets ragged on by the media at times for not taking security seriously enough. While that may seem a sensible argument to make when a potential security threat is discovered and Apple doesn’t respond within five minutes, it remains true that the impact from such threats has not been especially high.

Indeed, the only episode where any number of Macs were vulnerable dates back to 2011, where as many as 600,000 Macs were reportedly infected with a Java infection known as the Flashback Trojan and by several other names. It’s not that there seems to have been any particular harm due to its potential presence on a Mac, although there could have been. But, after failing to respond for months, Apple released a fix and disabled older versions of Java.

A lesson learned. If you stay away from Java, particularly the browser plug-in version, and Flash, which requires regular security updates, you might avoid the most serious problems.

With OS X El Capitan, Apple has taken even more steps to shore up security. The key feature is known as “System Integrity Protection,” and it limits the power of your Mac’s root account. So you will no longer have direct control over certain system files. Only installers and installer updates will be able to modify those files. This will reduce the possibilities for mischief, though anyone who gains direct control of your Mac could, in theory, cause harm if they are skilled at such skullduggery.

This “rootless” feature also means that apps that install kernel extensions, known as kexts, will not work unless they are properly signed by Apple or an Apple developer. So I very much expect that some will stop working until new versions are developed. Meantime, my experiences with the El Capitan betas have been extremely positive, and most things still work.

Both OS X and iOS support sandboxing, which limits how apps can interact with one another. Indeed, iOS apps that don’t obey the limits simply aren’t accepted. OS X apps can still do more than Apple allows, but they are not allowed in the Mac App Store; they have to be distributed separately. But the new capabilities of El Capitan clearly create a safer environment.

Long and short of it is that it does appear Apple has taken the necessary steps to make their platforms as secure as possible. Yes, software updates often include security fixes, but nothing is perfect when it comes to software, and changes need to be made from time to time to shut down newly-discovered security leaks. That’s a process that will never end.

Now I read an article recently suggested that the need for ongoing security fixes can be blamed on bad decisions made by developers early on. Security wasn’t an issue in the early days of the Internet and personal computers, and the need for frequent updates is the end result.

Obviously Apple’s platforms are based on Unix, which actually got its start in the 1960s. Whatever changes Microsoft has made with Windows, that OS dates back to the 1980s. But I am not a developer, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable making bad guesses.

In the meantime, there are still occasional warnings about potential security issues in iOS and OS X. They usually get fixed within short order.

The most recent iOS security problem, by the way, can only harm a jailbroken iPhone. Apple is often attacked, no doubt from Android adherents, for not allowing you to sideload an app, which means installing software outside of the App Store.

The only way to do that is to jailbreak your iOS device, which also opens the doors that Apple usually keeps shut for maximum security. So when you enter the wild wild west, it’s a sure thing that you need to know what you are doing, or be extremely careful, to stay out of trouble. Maybe people who use Android gear don’t mind taking risks of that sort. But people who want things to just work — or mostly just work — probably don’t want to deal that nonsense.

I recall when I spent a number of months using two Android smartphones, the Samsung Galaxy S3 and the Samsung Galaxy S4. Both were decent enough when it came to making and receiving phone calls. Less so in using the native mail app, and there were so many extra and often meaningless app and system settings, that I wondered how the average user would cope.

But the first thing I did when setting up those devices was to install security software. I didn’t want to take any chances, although nothing untoward happened. But software that’s constantly scanning for trouble is bound to have some level of impact on performance. This is true to some extent when you install antivirus software on a Mac, particularly the apps that do background scanning.

While I realize some companies insist on installing security software on both the Macs and PCs on their networks, that need hasn’t actually arisen yet on Apple’s platforms. Maybe it’ll come, and there are always claims that, as Macs become more popular, such apps will become essential. But the first official release of OS X arrived in 2001, after a public beta was available the previous year. The sky still isn’t falling.

So when someone has a new gadget that, superficially at least, competes with something Apple produces, it suddenly breeds a major competitive war, or at least that’s what some supposed journalists believe. The product becomes an “iPhone killer,” or an “iPad killer,” or some other killer product. Yet another approach taken by the media is to suggest that the someone is “taking aim” at Apple. It has to be about Apple.

Does that mean no other tech company has anything worth “killing” or “taking aim” at? What about Samsung, which has seen its sales hammered at both the high-end and low-end by different companies? That’s about suffering in the face of competition, but that story isn’t told near as often.

But of a company is going after Apple, you’d assume it’s something in a similar category, and not just any old smartphone. So if someone is selling a handset for a third the price of the iPhone, one that superficially may sport similar features, it’s may not be shopped against the iPhone. It’s being shopped against something Samsung, or a lesser handset maker, is producing.

To take it to the automotive world, someone looking at a Honda Accord may compare it to a Nissan Altima, a Kia Optima, a Chrysler 200 or a similarly-priced midsized car. It’s possible some of the cheaper luxury models might also be compared, such as an Audi A3 or a Mercedes A-Class, since some of the latter models are price competitive with the loaded configurations of the former. Well, a heavily-subsidized lease deal might put a relatively expensive car in your driveway for the same price as a mainstream vehicle.

Now it is true that some companies have taken aim at Apple and succeeded. Microsoft is the key example, particularly when Windows 95 was found to be good enough to actually persuade people to ditch their Macs. Sure, Apple made moves that didn’t help it stay competitive. Indeed, the knife wound here was almost fatal.

Samsung certainly sells more mobile handsets than Apple, but the Galaxy series has continued to suffer against the iPhone. So that knife wound suffered by Samsung will still be moderately serious when it comes to profitable gear.

Moving on: The rumors about Apple’s September 9th media event have become more fine-tuned in recent days.

So it appears that the next iPhone may indeed be .2mm larger or at least thicker, perhaps to contain Force Touch electronics, but also as the result of a switch to sturdier 7000 series aluminum, the same composition used on the Apple Watch. This will supposedly make it more resistant to bending, but that alloy is also said to weigh less. Don’t ask me to explain. It has been repeated in a number of published reports.

Yet another rumor sugggests that the entry-level iPhone 6s will still have 16GB of storage. That continues to be too low, and it’s true that Samsung has gone to 32GB, minimum, for recent flagship gear. But don’t forget that Samsung fills their gear with junkware, whereas Apple tends to provide fewer bundled apps. iOS 9 is also designed to be a slimmer OS. That, and the greater reliance on storing stuff in the iCloud server farms may indeed mean you won’t need to worry so much if you don’t go overboard with photos and apps.

But flash memory is cheaper than ever, and the customer ought to benefit from the savings. A retail USB thumb drive’s price will increase by around $4.00 when you go from 16GB to 32GB, and I’m sure Apple fares far better. A dollar or two extra for twice as much internal flash memory? Without doubt!

I’m most surprised by the ongoing reports that the fourth generation Apple TV will be substantially more expensive then the current model. Yes, I realize the price was reduced to $69, no doubt to keep the line moving as there new version was being developed. But the standard bearers in this market are the Roku 3 and the Amazon Fire TV, both of which sell for just a tad below $100.

So why would Apple expect you to pay $149?

Now maybe there will be more than one new model, one for $99 and another for $149, the latter differing mostly by having more onboard storage, or perhaps some additional hardware features. Maybe you’ll be able to use the flagship model as a serviceable gaming controller. But the “universal search” feature being touted by some doesn’t justify a $49 price increase, nor would a spiffier interface and other nifty software features.

And I’m still reading stories that there will be no 4K support which, if true, would appear to be a wrongheaded decision.

But that’s just me. I’m just surprised tech sites aren’t devoting more space to consider the contradictions and ask the right questions. It’s not that I don’t believe Apple TV owners would be willing to pay more for the new version. However, Apple would have to do a real hard sell to present Apple TV as a far better product than the Roku or Amazon streamers. Sure, Apple manages to do just that with Macs. The Apple Watch is far more expensive than some of the other smartwatches, and yet it appears to be doing quite well.

There are also published reports that an iPad Pro, with a 12-inch or thereabouts display, is also on the agenda. I find that hard to believe, but my skepticism doesn’t matter that much anyway. In another week, we’ll all know the answers, and Apple doesn’t listen to me anyway.