You probably recognize the tune. One big way for a site to attract traffic is to include Apple Inc. in the title, even if the article makes only a passing reference to the company. It doesn’t matter whether it comes from an individual blogger or a multinational publishing conglomerate. Unfortunately, it also doesn’t matter if the story is true, half-true or totally false. Just say “Apple-yadda-yadda” and people will pay attention, or at least that’s what they must believe.

That explains why alleged Apple scandals still get coverage even after they are over and done with or were not what they were claimed to be. I mean, do you still want to hear about AntennaGate?

I can give lots of examples, but one immediately comes to mind. The other day, in one of my forums, someone posted a link to last year’s BBC documentary that attacked Apple’s treatment of factory workers in its Asian supply chain. This is old news. The New York Times ran a hit piece about it a few years ago, but the claim is similar. Workers who build Apple’s gadgets are getting slave wages, and working long hours in substandard factories. The number of suicides is, as a result, extremely high.

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There’s been a whole lot of play in the media about the alleged collapse of Apple Watch sales. Supposedly millions were sold during the first few weeks, and over time, demand fell precipitously. Well, at least according to a market research firm that most of us previously never heard of known as Slice Intelligence. The firm, based in Palo Alto, CA, claims to use a panel of 2.5 million people to tabulate online purchases in the U.S.

Well, as of July, sales have supposedly fallen to below the 10,000-per-day level, and that might have been reason enough for the recent slide in Apple’s stock price. Wall Street is particularly sensitive to such reports, real, fake, or somewhere in between.

Now I have no idea whether or not Slice’s figures are accurate. I have no idea whether Apple will reveal Apple Watch sales figures during the quarterly conference call with financial analysts on Tuesday, July 21. Last quarter, the question wasn’t even asked.

Before we get there, however, it’s so unfortunate that the media quotes unconfirmed statements of this sort without asking the right questions. Slice Intelligence might be right on with their report, but they don’t have a track record for accuracy. The company is still too new. There are also limitations to the results, because they are supposedly based strictly on online sales in the U.S. As you know, Apple brought the Apple Watch to the Apple Stores in June, which means there are retail sales that aren’t being counted, not to mention sales around the world in a number of countries.

This doesn’t mean Apple Watch sales haven’t fallen now that demand has apparently caught up with supplies. It may be significant how Apple deals with demand for their smartwatch in the press release about the financials or in their comments during the conference call. A lack of information would appear to confirm suspicions — or fears — that the product isn’t quite as successful as they hoped it’d be.

But there is also no history of a successful smartwatch. That Pebble sold more than a million units in a couple of years, or that Samsung sold hundreds of thousands in a single year, indicates at best tepid demand. This may indeed be a product category that is still developing, and the use case of the Apple Watch may take years to make.

Remember, too, that sales of the original iPhone weren’t so terrific. Don’t forget that Steve Jobs said that Apple would be happy to have 1% of the market by the end of 2008, and Apple exceeded that by a healthy margin. The tablet market didn’t exist until the iPad arrived in 2010, and, it’s not yet certain how far it’ll go now that the surge is history, but maybe sales will improve as the product becomes more of a productivity tool with iOS 9, and the replacement cycle truly begins in earnest.

And I haven’t considered a rumored iPad Pro, with a 12.9-inch display, since it obviously doesn’t exist, at least not yet.

But Apple Watch right how is little more than an expensive accessory for the iPhone. Yes, it does lots of things, more than other smartwatches, and most reviews appear pretty favorable. But it’s also true that some of the tech pundits I’ve talked with make it quite clear that, if they didn’t need one to continue to cover the product, they might not have bought an Apple Watch.

It’s a version 1.0 product and I fully expect that a future generation, in the next few years, will be self-contained and won’t depend on a Bluetooth connection to your iPhone. It will have all the hardware you need to do its thing, including an LTE chip (or whatever the next generation is called). Indeed, the iPhone might, at that time, be capable of serving as a larger display for the Apple Watch, the ultimate turnaround.

Clearly Apple has made a long-term investment in the success of Apple Watch. That we will see a version 2.0 WatchOS about six months after the first version demonstrates that upgrades will come fast, and the things that don’t work so well now, such as third-party app performance, will only get better as more native apps are built. Usability glitches will no doubt also be fixed.

Some might suggest Apple released the product too soon, and maybe should have waited till fall. But giving it a shakedown cruise for months before the crucial holiday season might have made sense from a marketing standpoint. After all, the updates will be free, and those who suffered through some early defects will have a far more smoothly functioning gadget. But that doesn’t mean Apple Watch owners are beta testers. The technology is new, and moving fast.

As for the Night Owl, I’m not at all convinced yet that I need an Apple Watch. My $12.88 Walmart calendar watch keeps time within a second or so, compared to my iMac, and I don’t know that I need the extra notifications and other “complications” on a watch. I work in a home office, and thus have ready access to all my gear. But those who travel a lot or work at a “normal” office may find the situation altogether different, not to mention those who want a more granular physical fitness experience than I.

I got my first iPod in 2001, a review sample from Apple. It had all of 5GB storage, using a tiny hard drive that sometimes wouldn’t survive day-to-day use before failing. While its $399 purchase price was described by many as too high, it didn’t stop Mac users from buying more and more of them.

Within two years, storage had increased to 30GB if you opted for the high-end version of the third generation iPod. With the release of iTunes for Windows, the reach of the iPod expanded to tens of millions of new customers. Selling the number one music player on the planet, Apple was on the road to becoming a full-fledged consumer electronics company.

It’s generally perceived that the iPod is what led to Apple become the powerhouse it is today. What with review samples from Apple, most of which you could actually keep since journalists weren’t asked to send them back, and the ones I bought, I kept pretty much up to date with iPods for several years. I even purchased the original 120GB iPod Classic for my son, Grayson, in 2008. It lasted three or four years before the hard drive failed. It may have been repaired along the way, but I don’t even think he has it anymore. He relies on an iPhone 5 nowadays for staying in touch with the music he wants to hear right away, and a black 2008 MacBook for the rest of his huge music library.

Indeed, the iPod has seen better days. With the release of the ultimate iPod, the iPhone, in 2007, and the iPad in 2010, more and more people choose a combo device on which to carry their mobile music libraries.

iPod sales have been on a steady decline. But the actual figures, along with those of the Apple Watch and other products, are now buried in a single category in Apple’s financials, but the last time they were reported, in Apple’s fiscal fourth quarter of 2014, Apple sold 2.6 million iPods, generating $410 in revenue.

That no doubt explains why the product hasn’t been updated since 2012, and the iPod Classic, the direct descendant of the original with a 160GB hard drive, is no longer available.

On Tuesday, as predicted in the Mac rumor sites, Apple refreshed the iPod with a refreshed iPod touch and new colors for the nano and shuffle that are, evidently, otherwise unchanged.

Most of the changes for the latest iPod touch are internal, taking it closer in design to an iPhone 6, but with a four-inch display and without, of course, a telephone. The specs include a 64-bit A8 processor, the M8 motion co-processor, an 8 megapixel camera, and up to 128GB storage. The processor reportedly runs at a lower clock speed (it’s underclocked) to save battery life.

The high-end iPod touch costs $399, same as the original iPod. It starts at $199 for 16GB, which doesn’t seem to be a terribly good deal unless you don’t have a large music library, or expect to depend on the cloud for your content. Remember that you can get a 4.7-inch iPhone 6 with 128GB storage for the same price on a typical subsidized wireless contract.

Of course, wireless carriers in the U.S. have been phasing out such deals, opting instead to sell or lease you the phone for a “low” monthly fee.

However, a new iPod touch means that the product will be around for at least a few more years. The one you buy today will likely be able to run iOS 13, or whatever it’s called, with decent performance. The model with 128GB storage capacity is sufficient for most music libraries.

I suppose the regular iPods will also remain in the lineup for many years, without need for changes except, perhaps, to increase onboard storage as flash memory becomes cheaper. The $49 iPod shuffle still has 2GB of storage, which is barely enough, particularly when you consider that the original 5GB iPod didn’t satisfy serious music lovers. I don’t see why Apple couldn’t boost storage of the current shuffle to even 8GB and not significantly increase the cost of making them.

Despite the fairly low sales of the iPod, it makes sense to keep the products available. Development costs for the new models were non-existent for the additional colors, and no doubt fairly low for the iPod touch. After all, Apple is using innards that are similar to the iPhone 6 series. So it’s more about packaging than innovation, but that’s probably more than sufficient to garner some sales, particularly from those with older versions of the iPod touch who may have felt left behind by now.

The launch of Apple Music also creates the incentive to have more devices on hand with which to play songs, so perhaps there will be some momentum for the product, at least for the short term.

Understand that I’ve never been much of a fan of portable music playback devices. I went through a couple of Walkman and similar devices in the early days, a portable CD player in the 1980s, and a few iPods before passing the latter off to my son. I just never got into them, and I’m not much of an earphone user either. But I’m not Apple’s target audience.

So there’s a published report about a new wrinkle in Apple’s negotiations with TV networks. It all goes back to the key limitation with cord-cutting services up to now, which is content from your local stations. As it stands, you may need basic cable, or an antenna; Dish Network’s Sling TV promises to offer this feature eventually.

Otherwise, if you live too far from all or most of your favorite stations to get a decent signal, you’re forced to try a roof antenna. Or reconsider cable or satellite, or do without.

One thing not mentioned in the coverage, however, is the fact that some local TV stations don’t have network affiliations at all, and thus wouldn’t be part of those negotiations, assuming the story is true. So would Apple choose to deal with them directly, or just omit them from the list of available channels?

Regardless, this rumored strategy appears to indicate that Apple is thinking carefully about what to offer in a streaming TV service. It’s not just a few channels with multiple tiers, evidently. That’s what Dish Network’s Sling TV is about, and the deal for the forthcoming streaming service from Comcast is tricky. It appears you will have to go to Comcast for broadband Internet even if another provider is available in your city. Of course for most Comcast customers, there probably is no alternative, but this is the sort of scheme that’s off-putting. It doesn’t benefit the customer, and I suppose it could change. Perhaps Comcast could simply offer a small discount if you use their Internet connection.

Now all we know about the makeup of Apple’s proposed TV service comes from rumors, or alleged informed sources. Nothing has been revealed, and I wouldn’t expect any announcements until fall, if then. For now, in addition to possibly offering local stations — at least those with network affiliations — I would hope there would be some sort of cloud-based DVR capability. So you’ll be able to record shows just as you can with a TiVo or other physical DVR.

The elephant in the room, still not mentioned very often, is how such a service will impact your ISP’s bandwidth cap, assuming there is one. Cox has increased their bandwidth allocations to 2TB for higher broadband tiers. Last I checked, CenturyLink, which offers a slower but viable broadband service in the Phoenix area, limits you to 250GB, downloads only. That may be adequate until you start streaming lots of HD video content from Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, or Apple Television, or whatever it’s called. It won’t be pretty if you exceed that limit and have your connection throttled or shut down. Or you get a huge bill for the overage, which is one way relatively cheap Internet becomes not so cheap.

I know some of you readers disagree with me, but I have questions about the case for cord cutting. It makes sense to reduce the price, and also eliminate the channels you don’t want. You also have options to watch TV free of ads, although obviously not local stations or the traditional networks unless you have a DVR with fast forward capability. I’ll avoid the Dish Network Hopper set-top box, a controversial scheme that supposedly allows you to avoid the ads, at the expense of recording shows you didn’t select.

If you don’t care about appointment TV, watching a show when it’s broadcast or shortly thereafter, you could get some of this content from Netflix or Amazon Instant Video; Hulu Plus includes some ads. Or buy a season’s pass at iTunes, although the bill can add up pretty quickly if you factor an average $24.99 to $39.99 for each show (depending on the number of episodes), and you have a few dozen favorites. But at least you can watch a show whenever you want, as often as you want, free of the ads.

In light of what Comcast and Dish Network are doing with streaming services, however, I expect that the cable and satellite companies are not going to want to be left out. So you will see more offerings that cater to people who want a bare bones service. It’s possible they might even consider a la carte, although I’m not too optimistic about the possibilities.

It doesn’t make sense, though, to see these companies double down on charging you $100-150 per month for an all-you-can-eat service, complete with premium channels. But rates continue to increase, although it’s often possible to negotiate a special discount deal, for 6 months, 12 months, or 24 months, to shield you from the real bill. I’ve managed that with Dish Network and Cox largely by threatening to take my business elsewhere after the contract period expires. If more people did that, or went elsewhere, perhaps the industry would take notice and do the right thing to deliver customer-centric services that are actually affordable.

That would be one sure way to reduce cord cutting. With stagnant growth, I can’t see why it’s barely getting started. But maybe the presence of Apple Inc. in the streaming TV mix will finally push things in the right direction.