Apple seeded an Apple Watch with a number of specially selected tech journalists, and the first reviews are in. Even though I haven’t yet considered whether to try one out at an Apple Store, I am intrigued by the possibilities. But it’s definitely not a slam dunk.

There are certainly lots of good parts. It’s mostly fast, fluid and stable, though apps are sometimes slow to load, and it does the things Apple claims it does. Battery life, claimed to be 18 hours under normal use, appears to be on track. One review I read spoke of having the Apple Watch last longer than an iPhone during the test period. The only downside appears to be the charging pad, since it’s just too easy to separate the two, and the fact that it takes up to two and a half hours to fully recharge. But the larger criticism is that the new scheme forces you to have yet another charging cable on hand when you travel.

While it’s clearly not as bad as one blogger — who had never tried an Apple Watch — claimed, there are some new skills to learn. So you’ll need to get accustomed to Apple’s new Force Touch feature, now also available on the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display and the thin/light MacBook. It’s mostly a matter of getting comfortable with pressing harder on the touchscreen for added functions. The only downside is that, once you are used to this routine, you’ll accidentally press harder on touchscreens and touchpads on gear that doesn’t have this feature yet. You’ll also need to learn to use the digital crown for zooming and activating Siri, plus the second button for your contacts.

None of this appears to be difficult. But when different gadgets offer different functions and different ways to access those functions, you can expect it’ll take a few days to get accustomed to everything.

Some might suggest Apple should have attempted to make the Apple Watch work more like an iPhone, but pinch and zoom on that tiny screen makes less sense. There have to be accommodations for its size, and Apple appears to have done things in a sensible way.

To allow you to make and receive phone calls on an Apple Watch, which uses your iPhone to do the heavy lifting, there’s a built in mic and speaker. But it appears the speaker system may not deliver loud enough sound for noisy surroundings. A Bluetooth headset would be the best solution for frequent calls. Well, unless you don’t like having those things in your ear.

I get all the new fitness functionality, and the clever combination of features that let you access the information you want with a casual glance rather than an extended session. That helps keep battery life as high as possible, and it also makes Apple Watch more convenient for busy people who hope to free themselves from at least some long sessions with mobile gear. So is Apple Watch a potential replacement for the iPhone, the true iPhone killer? Not until it’s powerful enough to exist by itself without tethering, and that might take a few years to happen.

The taptic features, such as getting subtle reminders when seated to get up and exercise your legs, is a real plus. I can grok this since I’ve been undergoing treatments lately for a chronic back problem and exercise does help.

The reviews suggest Apple’s own apps are the most compelling out of the starting gate, and it will be a while for the killer apps to emerge for the platform. To be sure, you don’t expect the Apple Watch to do all its tricks with a version 1.0 operating system and version 1.0 apps. That will come in time.

As smartwatches go, it appears Apple has made its case for being leader of the pack, and certainly the leader when it comes to the highest prices. I also expect demand at the start to be high, and there are indications supplies will be quite short. Apple will only allow you to buy just one during your shopping session, with no indication whether there will be fast delivery or you’ll have to wait.

Apple also requires that you reserve the Apple Watch you want or place your order online. There won’t be lines snaking around an Apple Store with customers hoping for instant gratification when it goes on sale on April 24th. In addition, Apple won’t be including Apple Watch sales figures in its financials as a separate line item, though I suppose something will be said if demand is extremely high.

Sales and profits for the March quarter will be revealed on Monday, April 27th. Coincidentally, that will be right after the Apple Watch’s first weekend on sale, so I’m sure the tech media and financial analysts will be paying really close attention to see what might be revealed. Even if Apple says nothing, I expect the question will be asked by one of the analysts present at the quarterly the conference call. How Apple responds will say a lot.

But after the initial demand is satisfied, will customers find the Apple Watch to be an indispensable wearable? Or will they opt to save their money and rely on their iPhone? Will some people buy iPhones just to be able to use an Apple Watch?

The impression I get from the reviews is that, once you’re past the learning curve, you may indeed wonder how you lived without one. Maybe, but it’s not near as indispensable as a smartphone. That’s also the question I will ponder as I decide what I can afford, and whether an Apple Watch will meet my needs. It’s not a question that I can easily answer.

One of the larger media freakouts about Apple last year was all about “BendGate,” the allegation that the iPhone 6 Plus was unduly sensitive to bending, even in your back pocket. It all started with someone’s possibly bogus YouTube video, in which deformed a tech gadget that costs upwards of $750 without the carrier subsidy.

Yes, the video showed the bend, but it’s easy to omit the extraordinary steps the poster may have taken to get it that way. There’s no real way to know what really happened, but the video went viral and soon Apple had to explain that the their largest and most expensive iPhone wasn’t defective, that they had, at the time, only seven complaints about such damage. They even took selected journalists on a tour of their test facility so you could see exactly how these products were tested. Even Consumer Reports got into the act and proclaimed all iPhones to be sufficiently robust under normal use and service.

SquareTrade, that company who sells you extended warranties for all sorts of tech gear, performed more informal tests of the iPhone 6 Plus with real people, and only one employee, a weightlifter, managed to succeed in bending the unit.

So the story ended there, except for some Apple haters who actually believed there was a problem. Some people can’t be bothered with facts.

That takes us to Samsung, who used to be on the top of the world, but has, of late, suffered from falling mobile handset sales and profits. They are being squeezed at the low end of the handset market by even cheaper gear and, at the high end, by Apple.

With record sales of iPhones, Samsung had to compete, and so they decided to ape Apple more closely than ever. So we have the Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 Edge, both of which use metal casings, sealed so you can’t easily replace the battery, and the ability to add a memory card no longer exists. To compete with Apple Pay, there’s now Samsung Pay.

To be sure, they look quite attractive, though I wonder about the value of a display that spills over the edge. But this is the company who also sells high-end TV sets with curved screens, so useless must be in Samsung’s DNA.

In any case, the new Samsungs are getting rave reviews from the same people who gave their previous gear rave reviews, but it’s questionable what these gadgets offer that’s so compelling compared to an iPhone. Yes, there are some extra features, and the usual collection of mostly unneeded junkware to fiddle with. As an Android smartphone, however, it appears to be as good as any.

But it’s not invulnerable to damage by any means. So SquareTrade this time staged formal tests pitting the iPhone 6 Plus against a Galaxy S6. Both deformed under 110 pounds of pressure, which is quite a lot mind you, and nothing anyone has to explain. But the Samsung’s glass cover was shattered, while the iPhone was merely bent.

Since putting that level of pressure to any thin and light tech gadget is apt to cause damage, Samsung need make no apologies. Coming in worse than the iPhone, however, was sufficient to force Samsung to explain. You see, they attacked Apple last year for the perceived vulnerability of the largest iPhone to extreme bending.

When caught under a similar situation, their response was to the point, “We are confident that all our smartphones are not bendable under daily usage.” I agree. Based on SquareTrade’s results, it takes extreme pressure to deform this device, and it shouldn’t happen under normal use and service. And customers need not worry about premature breakage unless they drop one of these things.

Apple has been quiet, however, over Samsung’s comeuppance. They show class, something Samsung ought to learn.

So is it really BendGate 2.0? No, not really. But Samsung’s own glass house has been exposed. That’s the real story.

Now I realize Samsung is in a touchy situation here. While financials appear to have improved in the last quarter, profits are still way down. So maybe they’ve hit bottom and the situation is stabilizing. Certainly I wouldn’t want to see any company suffer. But this is a cutthroat market, and Samsung is no industry darling.

So the stakes are high for Samsung’s latest flagship smartphones. They go on sale in 20 countries on April 10th. Will customers be lining up at dealers around the world to get them? Remember that iPhones are sold at fewer outlets, so more customers are apt to show up for a product launch. But even Apple has moving away from forcing customers to wait in line for new gear. With the Apple Watch, customers are being pushed to selecting them online, or via appointment at an Apple Store. But stocks are expected to be real low when it goes on sale, and the purchase process, with so many combinations of bracelets, is far more exacting.

What’s more, Apple retail chief Angela Ahrendts is reportedly telling Apple Store employees to direct customers to place their orders for new gear online rather than wait on a long line. So it’s possible people will no longer be hanging out for days outside an Apple Store to be first in line, but it was fun while it lasted.

You can bet that, even when Apple hasn’t announced a product, some online bloggers will ignore the facts and pretend to describe the specs and the features, missing or otherwise. That comes even before others suggest that you shouldn’t buy the product after all. Give it time to develop.

Chase the moving target, but don’t make a commitment!

Since Apple cut the price of the Apple TV from $99 to $69, speculation has mounted about its successor. The present model was first released in 2012, and underwent a very slight change in CPU design, which didn’t change actual performance. So it stands to reason that an upgrade is long overdue, but what form will it take?

Well, one common theory is that the 2015 Apple TV will have support for 4K, or Ultra HD, video. This is the new HD format that is slowly penetrating the TV world, although total sales are still in the single digits. Other Apple TV features are said to include expanded app support, Siri, and maybe gaming, using enhanced graphics capabilities, such as the Metal feature now part of new iPhones and iPads.

But the 4K theory has since been knocked down, with the suggestion it won’t appear, or that maybe it will be supported in the hardware and thus only become active with a software update at a later time when Apple is ready for something or other.

Are you with me so far? Remember that no successor to the current Apple TV has been announced, so any speculation about the features is, well, speculation. But one reason given for the presumed lack of 4K support is that Apple is catering to consumers who don’t care about such things, even though 4K streaming is already available from Netflix and other carriers. The theory goes, I suppose, that Apple doesn’t care about new generation technologies.

Funny, but I think owners of the iMac with 5K Retina display will disagree, and what about the new MacBook with USB-C? Or Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2? How often did Apple refuse to release new technologies before the public knew they existed?

That doesn’t mean Apple is always on the cutting edge, but quite often it’s for technological reasons. So early LTE mobile chips were notoriously inefficient and consumed too much battery life. Apple didn’t use them until the technology matured, and few would assert that today’s iPhones deliver less battery life than older models that predate LTE.

Yet another lame argument from a blogger attempts to suggest why you should avoid the first Apple Watch and, by the same token, other smartwatches. There’s even a quote from someone at Google to make the article seem credible, but the concept is just dumb.

So we have the statement that the first smartwatches are limited function, mostly requiring Bluetooth connections with smartphones. You won’t after all, get the most out of an Apple Watch without a supported iPhone in range. The article goes on to assert how these watches mostly use parts sourced from smartphones, although that’s not quite the case with Apple Watch. What about the Taptic Engine and digital crown? Apple has only now begun to apply taptic/haptic technology to other products starting with the new MacBook, which goes on sale April 10th and the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, which you can buy now

Unfortunately, arguing that you shouldn’t buy tech gear today because future versions will be better, perhaps cheaper, seldom makes sense. You could say that about any tech product, because there will inevitably be improvements. Even at the early stage of the technology, the first iPod, the first iPhone and the first iPad were all quite usable.

Yes, I realize that a future Apple Watch will likely exist as a standalone product, complete with cellular radio. There will be additional sensors and functions, improved performance and without doubt greatly improved battery life. Any tech product has areas that can be better, which is why product designers are always chasing improved technology.

You could argue that you should never buy any new tech product, ever, because a better one will eventually come out. That edict would also apply to motor vehicles too and lots of other product categories. Just don’t buy anything, not even food because the distributor might someday make it taste better.

The real argument is whether Apple Watch will meet the needs of customers when it goes on sale later this month. If that’s the case, people will buy them, not because of the promise that it’ll get better in the future. For those who don’t want to pay $349 or more, or feel that Apple Watch is lacking of the features they need, well they won’t buy one.

I also suspect early Apple Watch sales won’t hit the stratosphere. Apple has already limited them by requiring online ordering, or reserving one at a dealer. At the start, you won’t be able to just drop into a store and pick up the one you want along with the watchband or watchbands you prefer. That decision clearly presages limited availability. So it may well be that its sales potential won’t be known for a while, but a severe backorder situation will demonstrate demand.

No matter, after Apple Watch is released, you can bet some online pundits will find other reasons not to buy one, or why it is destined to fail. But why not wait to see how the public reacts before making those pronouncements? When it comes to Apple, the doom and gloom bloggers are almost always wrong.

And, no, I’m not holding my breath and waiting for that rumored iMac with 8K Retina display.

Believe it or not, but most people who buy Macs don’t consider the ability to upgrade or lack thereof. The latest Geekbench scores are not high on the list of priorities. Apple publishes specs, but they aren’t quite as detailed as on some PC boxes. Reason is that Mac customers are seeking a soliton, not a built-it-yourself kit. That has always separated the Macs from the PCs since 1984.

Some of you may not realize that the very first Mac couldn’t be upgraded. It was a closed box, same as the toaster oven or refrigerator. You wouldn’t think of tearing apart a refrigerator unless something needs to be fixed, and then it’s usually done by the repair service. So it’s easy to see the reason for some of the choices Apple has made through the years since they claim to be selling computing appliances.

To me, however, the very first Mac that I brought into my home (after using one at work for several years) was a IIcx from 1989, which was quite easy to upgrade; in fact, easier than most modern Macs. Just pop the cover, and everything was out in the open for you. Of course, you had to remove the floppy drive on occasion to clean it out, since it was prone to gather dust, so being too open had its downsides. But Apple has more and more moved to preventing users from being able to replace or upgrade anything.

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