The other day, I just happened to be rummaging through the bunch of cables spread across two bookcases in my home office for something to connect to my Logitech Harmony 900 universal remote. It was one of those USB micro or mini thingies, and I had to unfurl several inter-wrapped cables to find the one that fit. At the other side is the traditional USB A connector, the one that seems always to be inserted upside down the first time you try.

The rest of the cables consist of the usual collection for a long-time Mac user. There were a couple for FireWire 800, a few Ethernet, and other USB styles, plus standard RCA audio cables. I suppose I should sort this mess out someday and get rid of stuff that I no longer use. And I haven’t included the multi-shelf storage cabinet that sits in a shed next to this little home. I haven’t looked in there for years, and no, not because I worry about what’s crawling in there aside from cords and plugs.

Well, yet another cable standard has been foisted on us. Beginning with the controversial 2015 MacBook, and a handful of other computing devices, we now have USB-C, which will add to the confusion, and it may soon get worse.

To be sure, USB-C has one positive aspect aside from an up to 10 gigabit per second performance potential (it’s five gigabits on the MacBook I hear), and that’s a reversible plug, similar to Apple’s Lightning connector. That will forever eliminate the annoyance of almost always inserting a plug in the wrong direction.

Now the other day I read an interview with an official of the USB Implementers Forum explaining how the current USB 3.1 standard can befuddle people. But the confusion is taken with equanimity, as if it’s a perfectly normal thing. So you have the Type-C connector itself. Forgetting the various specs for the protocol, there is the standard USB A cable, the one that is designed to go in one direction. But don’t forget those other USB connectors, the tiny ones used in smartphones, remotes and other gear, the micro and the mini, perennial sources of confusion since you have to look real close at a device to see which one you need.

Well to make matters ever more involved, it appears that the forthcoming Thunderbolt 3 standard, offering twice the bandwidth of Thunderbolt 2, which is in use on most Macs nowadays (except for a certain MacBook), will use a USB-C style cable. What this means is that you may end up connecting the right connector to the wrong peripheral once Thunderbolt 3 gear is available.

Don’t even ask me to explain how this can become ever more convoluted than the current USB plug configuration mess. But in case you’re wondering, both Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2 use a Mini DisplayPort cable, same as you’d use to attach external displays that support that standard. Otherwise, get an adapter.

I can see the value of simplicity, although it will take a while for the situation to sort itself out. PC makers, for example, haven’t been too keen on Thunderbolt which, as with FireWire, is often perceived as an Apple standard, even though the developers of the interface include Intel.

What would probably happen is that, when Thunderbolt 3 is available, there will be more of them to replace existing USB ports, thus allowing you to connect most any peripheral with the proper adapter. I suppose there might be one or more traditional USB A ports as well to avoid an adapter mess, though probably not on Macs since Apple will invariably want to offer the latest and greatest technology.

Support for Thunderbolt 3 is incorporated into the forthcoming Intel Skylake processors, which are due later this year. That may ultimately simplify matters of handling the multiple connection schemes. Cheap PCs will stick with USB-C or a legacy USB port. Costlier PCs, such as Macs, will switch to multiple Thunderbolt 3 ports to handle everything, and that includes FireWire. The port’s intelligence will figure out what you’ve connected to it and provide the appropriate support. So the benefit would be an all-in-one connection scheme for mid-priced and high-end PCs that, over time, might eventually eliminate multiple sources of confusion.

Except when you take a Thunderbolt 3 peripheral and attempt to connect it to a port that only supports USB-C. Simplicity has its problems, and this will likely be yet another source of technical support calls.

Of course all this might be academic in a few years, when everything, or most things, are wireless. That would certainly cater to Apple’s minimalist tastes, and the dream that a portable computing device wouldn’t have to make a physical connection to connect to anything.

Until then, expect just more confusion when you have to sort out that mass of cables on a shelf somewhere.

So you know that Microsoft is, as you’d expect, making a huge push to persuade you to upgrade to Windows 10 come late July. If you can’t wait, sign up for the Technical Preview, which continues to get regular updates. You expect the hype. Microsoft is still suffering from the Windows 8 failure, and I suspect most anything with a few reversions to previous style, such as the Start menu, would be a huge improvement. Whether it can jumpstart PC sales, however, is far from certain.

There is also another version of Android coming, Android M. Lots of promises were made at the recent Google I/O developer conference, but the new features aren’t necessarily must-haves. Indeed, as one commentator recently noted at AppleInsider, Google has mined the iOS feature set big time in order to come up with some of those features. In fairness, Apple has itself gotten a few ideas from Android, so this game is played both ways.

But the larger problem for Android is that, whatever new features are added, there’s no guarantee that your brand new smartphone, even if it’s a high-end model, will be eligible for the upgrade. This has been a longstanding problem with Android. If you don’t buy a pure Nexus smartphone that gets the latest and greatest, well fairly quickly, you have to wait for the manufacturer and wireless carrier to certify the update. It may never arrive. So last November’s Android L Lollipop is still on less than 10% of Android handsets. Although it was dinged for an “inferior” migration rate, iOS 8 is on from 82-86% of devices, depending on whether you believe Apple or a third party. Before iOS 8 came out, the previous version had exceeded a 90% migration rate, so it’s getting close.

But even with the number one spot for mobile gear on the planet, Android has problems. Upstart Asian carriers running Android have a forked version, one that doesn’t support Google Pay or other Google features. So the company doesn’t benefit. Worse, a number of smartphone makers, including Samsung, are still paying Microsoft for the rights to use some of their patents in exchange for selling Android gear. Oh the indignity of it all!

This doesn’t mean that Android will ultimately fail in the marketplace. Google’s marketshare is over 80%, although Apple excels in the most profitable segments of the smartphone market. It does mean that those who continue to claim that Apple must lose if they can’t catch up with Google are just plain wrong. Apple doesn’t want to sell gear that doesn’t make a profit. The only other smartphone company to make a decent profit is Samsung, and their numbers are not as good as they used to be, since they are being squeezed at both the high and low end.

So pundits who breathlessly and mindlessly declare that Apple is doomed because they are second in the market don’t understand how the company operates. With the vast majority of profits in the smartphone market, constantly and chronically saying Apple is still doomed to fail totally misses the point.

Now Microsoft’s smartphone situation is what’s really treacherous. After years of trying, it’s in the low single digits. Windows 10 will include versions for PCs, smartphones and tablets. But whether that attempt at platform integration puts a bandage on an open wound or gives the mobile platform new authority is questionable. While certain industry pundits lamely predicted that Microsoft would be second in the mobile handset market by now, it’s not at all certain there’s much room for new contenders to take on Android and iOS.

Those extolling the virtues of the next versions of Windows and Android won’t have much time to remain relevant in news coverage, since Apple’s WWDC next week will change the discussion. It will be all or mostly about the next versions of iOS and OS X. Will the new features be sufficient to excite users, or will it be more about new or revised tools for developers? It’s hard to know from the early chatter, though some of the rumored features seem more related to reliability than to exciting people. But after the shakiness of OS X Yosemite, perhaps reliability will seem exciting.

Each year, you wonder whether Apple can come up with anything new to create a lust factor. It doesn’t seem to be happening with Windows 10, and there’s not a lot that seems exciting about Android M, particularly since most people who run Android gear will never be able to upgrade without buying new gear.

Last year at this time, I wondered what sort of wonders Apple might produce for their operating system upgrades. If everything had worked as promised, it would have been a superb feature set. But there were just too many problems.

But Apple usually learns from its mistakes, so perhaps there will be an improved emphasis on making things more snappier and more stable, although that remains to be seen.

Just this week, I was examining the headlines over at an aggregator of tech news. Normally it’s filled with articles with Apple in the title, but not necessarily this week. You see Windows 10 is coming. Well, not today or tomorrow, more like July 29, so get your PCs ready, or your copies of Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion if you run Windows in a virtual machine on your Mac.

Why is that so special? Well, because the last version of Windows was a humongous failure. Windows 8, and its successor, 8.1, represented bad ideas gone worse. Microsoft tried to embrace our mobile future, and imagined that live tiles were good, and the venerable Windows Start menu was bad. Windows users had to give up what they were doing, and adopt new techniques of getting things done. Pointing and clicking were bad, and tapping and swiping were good. Even setting preferences for your PC was hit or miss if you didn’t have a touch-based PC.

Charms? Who came up with that dumb moniker for setting preferences? What’s wrong with control panels anyway? Why fix something that is just not broken?

Now it’s not as if Windows users weren’t given the usual previews of the new OS. They came out months before the 2012 release of Windows 8, so it’s not that the public didn’t know a train wreck was coming. From the very first preview, it was clear as day that Microsoft had made a wrongheaded decision. The public, and reviewers — even those who adored Windows — by and large told them that, but they were tone deaf.

With Windows 8.1 the following year, Microsoft made a half-hearted attempt to restore elements of the Start menu, but that could already be done in far better form with third-party alternatives. It was also easier to boot into the desktop layer, a modernized interface that was closer to Windows 7.

After all, there wasn’t really anything wrong with Windows 7. Coming after the Windows Vista failure, it was probably the most reliable, dependable version of Windows yet. It didn’t turn people off to any degree, and apps used in the enterprise ran perfectly fine. A Windows 8 that merely improved upon a solid base would probably have done fairly well in the marketplace, or as well as PCs can do nowadays.

But rather then using the Windows 9 name as the successor, Microsoft wants you  to know that, first and foremost, they had something altogether new, which is Windows 10. It’s been in public preview since last year, so anyone who cares has a pretty good handle on what’s to come.

Having run those betas, referred to as a Technical Preview, for months, I can say that it’s far closer to the Windows people know and love, or at least tolerate. There is a real Start menu, and while live tiles aren’t vanquished, they are nowhere near as offensive. The Settings screens don’t require the proper salute on a traditional PC, and nothing really stands out as being necessarily bad. There’s even a new browser, dubbed Edge. Why Edge? Well, I suppose they can keep a modified version of the “e” icon that graced Internet Explorer.

As browsers go, it’s all right, though the preview versions aren’t revealing any serious performance improvements compared to its predecessor. Forgetting the new features, maybe it’s part of the usual Microsoft approach to replacing unsuccessful products, which is to give them a shave and haircut, and change the name.

Going to Windows 10 appears to mean that Microsoft’s copying machines were closely watching OS X. There are multiple desktops, for example, shades of Apple’s Spaces. The Cortana virtual assistant is meant to be a better alternative to Siri, but its value on a desktop computer is questionable. Microsoft’s largest audience, business users, would hardly want to shout out their commands in an office environment.

Following yet another Apple strategy, and hoping to move as many Windows users as possible to Windows 10, the upgrade is free for those using Windows 7 and Windows 8/8.1, at least for the first year. But enterprise customers will still pay their annual subscription fees, and OEMs outfitting normal-sized PCs will pay the usual price for user a license. If you want to buy Windows 10 from scratch, the will range from $119 for the Home version and $199 for the Professional version. To go from Home to Professional costs $99 for the Pro Pack.

So you better not forget to get that free upgrade before it’s too late. Or maybe Microsoft will realize next year that sales will stop dead in their tracks if those upgrades don’t remain free.

As with previous versions of Windows, there are other versions that cater to different customers, but I won’t bother to explain them. It’s just another source of confusion, and it’s clear Microsoft hasn’t learned the joys of simplicity.

Now the cynical among you might consider Windows 10 to be nothing more than Windows 7 with that telltale thin lettering and dark colors, plus a few needed feature enhancements. Microsoft also claims that there will no longer be version upgrades every three years or so. Instead, they will be rolled out to customers every so often as new features and bug fixes are available. On the surface, it’s a promising approach, but companies who normally to test new releases before deploying them will only have more work to do.

I don’t want to be a downer about the possibilities of Windows 10. The technical preview versions work pretty well except for the usual beta bugs. Unfortunately not all advertised features will be available on the day of release, though Microsoft promises that they’ll be added in the months ahead. So the Edge browser, for example, may not be feature complete, or may be omitted, although beta versions still have it. Unfortunately, we’ve heard that tired refrain from Microsoft before.

It’s no secret that the first releases of OS X, starting with the Public Beta in 2000, were shaky. Your Mac suffered from subpar performance, even on the most powerful Power Macs of the time, missing features, and more crashes than you had the right to expect. After all, this was Unix, the industrial strength operating system, so why should you have to put up with so much grief?

Over time, Apple fleshed out the feature set, mostly. Some loyal users of the Classic Mac OS still felt neglected, but Apple chose to move on. Once hardware acceleration support came to the sophisticated interface elements, performance issues largely subsided. With the arrival of 10.4 Tiger, also the first OS X to run on Intel Macs, all seemed right with the world. By 2005, nearly nine years after acquiring NeXT and the services of Steve Jobs, the transition was an unqualified success.

With OS 10.6 Snow Leopard, released in 2009, Apple took a step back and cleaned most of the remaining rough edges. Some feel this was the most reliable OS X ever, but the reason most people use it nowadays — other than hardware limitations — is that it’s the last system to allow you to run PowerPC apps on an Intel Mac.

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