As you know, new product launches can be troublesome. Apple Music is no exception. Despite the fact that Tuesday’s 9:00 AM Pacific launch was limited to iOS 8.4 users (iTunes 12.2 didn’t arrive until several hours later), there was loads of attention. Early reviews were mixed, with a cluttered layout and lack of easy guidance for newcomers the most troublesome. But that’s not all.

Apple promises “All you music in one place,” but it’s not that simple. In order to sync all your music, you have to enable the iCloud Music Library. But when you do that, your music library may be scrambled. One report I read online described tracks moving to the wrong album as an example of the mess that’s was being created, at least for some.

Now I was not able to duplicate this problem on my iMac. It does appear that my music library, consisting of ripped tunes from my CD collection and elsewhere, along with the tracks purchased from iTunes, is intact. While I’ve heard reports of problems with iTunes Match when Apple Music is enabled, today I didn’t see that as an issue. It was yesterday, at least for a while.

Still, random songs from my library are unaccountably not matched. “She Came in Through The Bathroom Window,” from “Abbey Road,” is a typical example, and it has been thus since the day iTunes Match launched. The tracks in the last Beach Boys album, “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” are still duplicated, but I’ve been hesitant to remove one copy in case the others vanish. Yes, I did buy it just once.

After a day, it does appear that the For You section of Apple Music is learning more about my tastes, since there is more useful content in there. But it does appear as if the content is not in any particular order, at least it’s not organized by the frequency with which I play music or the tracks I’ve selected. There’s more to like, however, particularly in the Classic Rock category. Unfortunately, the Beatles aren’t represented, and presumably Apple needs to make a new deal with the Fab Four. There is some content from the individual  band members, however, but it’s hit or miss.

Early reviews indicate the New category is the most cluttered, but it seems better organized on the second day, with a style reminiscent of the standard iTunes layout and even Apple TV. Classical was supposedly poorly represented, but I found a decent selection when I selected that genre. A few “Intro To” options will help newcomers discover more composers. Devoted fans, however, will likely find things to criticize. It’s a work in progress.

Remember that iTunes is a browser, and content will be updated regularly and rapidly, so what appears to be lackluster one day, may seem more fully fleshed out the next. Unfortunately, the first group of reviewers received an iPhone 6 Plus from Apple and had maybe a day or so in which to write a review. Considering the constraints and the rapid changes, those reviews will probably have to be fleshed out, and even corrected, over time.

The best approach to Apple Music, at least for me, is not to assume anything, but simply explore the options, test the context menus, and see what’s available. As more and more users sign up, and Apple receives customer feedback, things will get better. As it is the Connect social networking feature, where artists will share stuff with fans, seems threadbare. After choosing a few musical genres to follow, my most recent visit provided no options to configure it any further. Again, this is something that’ll no doubt get fixed as time goes by.

However, Apple has no excuse when it comes to a scrambled music library, which may force you to rebuild it from scratch. In addition, Macworld’s “iTunes Guy,” Kirk McElhearn, discovered a curious phenomenon where, if a track is matched with one on Apple’s servers, you’ll get a copy-protected version even if you are already a subscriber to iTunes Match. This doesn’t appear to make any sense, unless removing Apple Music will restore the original unprotected content. Or it’s just another glitch.

Unfortunately, problems of this sort will stuff Apple’s discussion boards, and Apple users and especially critics will be busy tallying the complaints. On Wednesday, some of Apple’s iCloud services were hit by slowdowns and outages. This might be due to the fact that the arrival of Apple Music has put a far greater load on the server farms. While services are back in operation as I write this, I wouldn’t be surprised to see further hiccups until Apple gets better control of the situation.

Clearly these growing pains will continue to fuel complaints that Apple just doesn’t get the online world. There have been periodic service glitches over the years. But no cloud service is perfect. There have been problems with Amazon, Google and Microsoft, but Apple will continue to get the lion’s share of the attention. Still, the company continues to invest in new datacenters, and one hopes they will be able to beef up the network faster than customers sign up. But that remains to be seen.

So in theory Apple Music debuted at 9:00 AM Pacific time in the U.S. In theory, but not for everyone. If you wanted to use the new subscription music service on your Mac or PC, you needed iTunes 12.2. But that release didn’t make its presence known until after 3:00 PM Pacific time, sporting a much improved icon influenced by the original Apple logo. If you’re using the iOS 9 beta, you’ll have to wait until beta 3 arrives next Tuesday. Apple TV and Android users will have to be patient until fall for gratification, and it will be interesting to see how fans of Google’s mobile platform will respond. It’s very much the equivalent of the launch of iTunes for Windows in 2003.

However, if you’re using iOS 8.4, released Tuesday morning, you had it first, and all the reviews about Apple Music were evidently based on experiences with the mobile version. The usual gang of favored Apple journalists got first digs, and the scores were decidedly mixed. One reviewer complimented Apple for the smooth, elegant user interface while complaining about some usability issues. As with the Apple Watch, it may take a while to become accustomed to the features and how best to use them.

Most of the other reviews were in the “that’s nice” category, meaning it works well, but it’s nothing special. The Connect social networking feature, which allows artists to post stuff and interact with their fans, wasn’t well fleshed out. It will probably take time for entertainers to take advantage of this feature. I’d hope it’s not another Ping in the making.

Regardless, I’m the last person to guess how the public will react, although there was plenty of publicity in the wake of the Taylor Swift dustup over royalty payments. The 90-day free trial will give tens of millions of Apple customers a chance to sample the service, and enough time for Apple to flesh out the offerings and fix the glitches. That some artists have already been persuaded to offer exclusives, not available from other services, is a plus. Apple has huge clout in the industry and would likely only need to add a few refinements to stand apart.

One big plus is human curation, even though it’s actually a mixture that also involves sophisticated computer algorithms. It’s descended from Beats Music, which garnered great reviews but not so much in the way of paying customers. Whether that technology is sufficient to cover the $3 billion Apple paid for the company won’t be known until total paid memberships are tallied later this year. It can’t be just the headphones, since Apple sold them even while Beats was a separate company.

But the Beats executives, most particularly veteran music producer and executive Jimmy Iovine, not to mention Dr. Dre, afford Apple a level of credibility with the industry that Spotify, Pandora and the other companies involved in this business just cannot duplicate.

It’s also good to know that Apple’s flawed iTunes Match, now limited to 25,000 songs, will ultimately grow to 100,000. That number ought to be sufficient to accommodate the needs of pretty much any music lover. However, I’d be more interested in seeing just how well Apple does in removing the service’s glitches.

You see, iTunes Match should, in theory, find the iTunes equivalent for your music library even if you ripped them from a CD or vinyl, or got them from someplace else, legal or otherwise. In practice, matches aren’t perfect, and some albums yield more accurate results than others. It does seem to have improved in recent months, but to add to the confusion, later versions of iTunes do not appear to display this information. When I checked, nothing was listed under iCloud Status, but I wouldn’t suggest Apple is hiding these results. It has, however, been vexing for some because of the hit or miss results.

In any case, I suspect most Apple customers haven’t been shopping around for the best subscription music service. Those who have, and are currently using another service, have to consider whether to just add Apple Music, or make that decision after trying it out for 90 days. If you switch to Apple Music, any playlists you’ve accumulated with another service will be history. They cannot be imported, so it depends on the amount of time you invested in another service and whether it’s worth the bother to attempt to duplicate that content. Or maybe just start from scratch and hope for something better.

The other issue is whether you really want to use Apple Music to supplement your existing music library, which it can do, or build a new library. Remember that once you make that commitment, if and when you stop paying the monthly fee, you’ll lose any content you’ve downloaded through the service. You’ll revert to your existing music library.

While my music collection isn’t huge, my CDs date back as long as 30 years, and I’ve made a decent investment in buying the albums I like. I know that, so long as a CD player can be found, I’ll be able to listen to those albums. I fully expect Apple to be around far longer than me, so this isn’t anything I’m actually worried about. The real question is whether yet another monthly payment makes sense. The jury is still out on that one, though I will give it 90 days to see. Sign up in iTunes is just a few clicks away.

For several years, some tech and industry analysts were claiming that Apple was poised to release a “real” Apple TV, a smart TV set. But it never arrived. Much of the speculation was fueled by the quote from Steve Jobs, in Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography, that he had cracked the secret of the ultimate TV interface. Of course he didn’t actually say that the interface would appear in a TV set, but assumptions were assumptions.

Clearly Apple’s competitors were freaked, and even Lenovo, a major PC manufacturer, announced a smart TV set for the Asian market, although it doesn’t seem to have actually gone on sale.

This year, the final nail in the coffin was the claim that Apple had worked on a smart TV for several years, but couldn’t come up with a product and marketing concept that would succeed against the mass of low-cost and low-profit sets.

Of course, we’ll probably never know the truth, at least not for years, since Apple usually doesn’t reveal anything about the products under development that never see the light of day. True or not, it’s easy to speculate about unreleased gear, and blame alleged product delays when the gear doesn’t see the light of day. It’s a convenient excuse.

There are also rumors about upcoming features in a product that sometimes don’t pass the smell test. Take the one about FaceTime and the next Apple Watch. Now I wouldn’t presume to guess what Apple will do for the first refresh. Remember, too, that a WatchOS 2  is promised for this fall with a number of improvements. But somehow shoehorning a camera into the Apple Watch is but one problem. The other is the usability, forcing people to hold their watches in a single position to capture their faces, not to mention the gadget’s usual setup that puts it back into idle mode to conserve battery life after a few seconds.

But an article listing expected features in any Apple product may be certain clickbait, regardless of whether it makes any sense at all. With FaceTime it doesn’t, at least not until technology and battery life improves substantially, and maybe not even then.

We’ve also heard about a possible large iPad known as iPad Pro for a while now. One story pegged it as having a 12.9-inch display. When it failed to appear, there were claims that Apple had difficulties sourcing acceptable flat panels from its display partners. Since the story was never confirmed, any excuse can be made as to why the product doesn’t appear.

Sure, this doesn’t mean that Apple doesn’t have a larger iPad under development. It would make sense, and adding Split View to iOS 9 may help pave the way for one or more larger form factors. But don’t expect anything table-sized a la Microsoft. That’s too much of a niche product, and Apple doesn’t play in that arena. After all the Apple TV set-top box, selling in the millions, only exited hobby status last year, but barely.

For a while, it was even expected that the next Apple TV would somehow debut at the WWDC. The reason was a rumored Apple TV SDK to allow third-party developers to create apps for the platform. Right now apps appear at random when Apple makes a deal with a content provider. Shortly before the conference, stories appeared that the product wouldn’t show up.

As a practical matter, Apple TV is the sort of gadget that would show normally appear in the fall, ahead of the holiday season, since that’s where the highest sales would be achieved. This is particularly true for a relatively cheap gadget that might be purchased for gift-giving. I suppose we’ll see, but I’m not buying the claim that Apple will avoid support for 4K TV streams at first for some unspecified reason. With the TV makers pushing 4K heavily, it wouldn’t make a lick of sense for Apple not to be in the forefront of that technology.

After all, there is a 5K iMac, which allows you to edit 4K video with room for menus and palettes. Other Macs can also drive 4K and 5K displays, so what sense would it make to omit such a feature from Apple TV? But I read a curiously incoherent piece trying to justify such an unproven, unannounced decision as if it made sense from a marketing standpoint. It doesn’t.

In any case, there are rumors that Apple has already begun to manufacture the next iPhones, presumably to be known as the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus. The key feature is said to be Force Touch. Now that one makes sense, since Apple added that feature to some MacBooks after introducing it on the Apple Watch. It would be ideal for an iPhone if Apple can get it to work.

But if the feature doesn’t show up, there will always be a good excuse. It’s not that the people who publish Apple rumors will readily admit that they got it all wrong.

Microsoft went into Windows 10 with low expectations from the public. After the Windows 8 debacle, just about anything would present an improvement. Indeed, the key feature of the forthcoming Windows refresh appears to be the return of a fully-enabled Start menu. The word “pathetic” comes to mind, that a feature mistakenly removed (or at least delivered with reduced functions) becomes a significant reason to upgrade to Windows 10.

I wouldn’t presume to guess how Microsoft’s executives, some of whom are no longer with the company, could have so misjudged the public when Windows 8 was being developed. Even after people who downloaded the public beta versions complained, it doesn’t seem as if Microsoft read the memo. They were so immersed in giving Windows PCs a look similar to the one that didn’t catch on with Windows Phone gear, that the warning signs just weren’t heard.

The most profitable portion of the Windows user base consists of businesses. IT people do not want to be surprised, and Microsoft is still confronting the reality that hundreds of millions of PCs, ATMs and point-of-sale devices are still running Windows XP. That includes at least some of the computers at the IRS, although the agency paid Microsoft $30 million last year for extended support past the announced deadline.

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