This is a common scenario. You are seated at dinner with family or friends. At times, or maybe simultaneously, each of you will look at your smartphone and check for notifications or messages; maybe even send one. It’s not just young people, but people of all ages who are so dependent on their gadgets that they have less time to talk to people in person. Even the people across the table.

I remember when I’d have dinner with my son (he’s since moved to Spain so that doesn’t happen very often nowadays). For long periods of time, he was immersed in texting on his feature phone. After upgrading to an iPhone, he simply did it more, or at least more flexibly.

Although my wife prefers her iPad, she still manages to spend a decent amount of time checking her iPhone when we leave our home, and I am not innocent of such behavior. I may not use an iPad all that much, but I will take out my iPhone perhaps more often than necessary. At the dinner table, I’ll frequently leave it next to my reading glasses.

Now to be fair, it may be that other mobile platforms are less demanding of your attention. Microsoft has long claimed that Windows Phone, which becomes Windows 10, same as the desktop counterpart, this summer, allows you to get information faster. So in theory your Lumia smartphone, with live tiles, would put notices and critical messages in your face more quickly, so you can go about your business and spend more time with your compatriots.

Now it’s not as if Lumia smartphones are flying off the shelves, or even waltzing. Market share remains pathetic, and clearly customers aren’t embracing these gadgets.

As mobile operating systems expand capabilities, you wonder whether they will also require more of your attention more of the time. With hundreds of millions of smartphones out there, what can a company do to get you to pay attention to the important things in life? Well, assuming looking at their smartphones for extended periods of time isn’t the most important thing you can do with your time.

One possible solution is the smartwatch, and maybe that’s one of Apple’s key goals in developing Apple Watch. You can get a reasonable picture of Apple’s end game when you read a new Wired profile of the creative process that resulted in the Apple Watch.

Now in the past, any product that was designed to compete with something from Apple was labeled a potential “killer.” So Microsoft’s Zune music player was meant to be an iPod killer, though that didn’t work out quite so well.

Each generation of Samsung flagship smartphones has been labeled an iPhone killer. True Samsung sells more mobile handsets than Apple, but not as many of the high-end products. So the iPhone continues to beat a Samsung Galaxy when it comes to actual sales to real people.

Apple has also been known to cannibalize its own products. So most iPod users upgraded to iPhones. The iPad no doubt cannibalized sales from the Mac to some degree at the start, although Mac sales continued to grow at a good clip. But iPad sales are now declining, and it may well be that the recent Macs that are sometimes cheaper and more powerful, have earned sales that might have otherwise gone to iPad. The iPhone 6 Plus may be impacting sales of the iPad mini, which may indicate why the latest model is hardly different from last year’s.

Some alleged industry analysts may be freaking over the state of affairs, but Apple doesn’t care so long as the iPad’s replacement also bears the Apple logo. And that takes us to Apple Watch.

As the Wired article makes clear, Apple Watch provides information, such as the time, and key notifications, at a glance. A very large part of the development process was to reduce the amount of time you needed to use it to get the information you want. So you don’t have to reach for your iPhone and pluck it out of your pocket or purse — or leave it next to you. Suddenly things that might grab your attention are presented to you more quickly, more easily grasped. If you still need to consult your iPhone, so be it. But it appears that Apple Watch might reduce the need to constantly have to keep a smartphone at hand.

At least that’s the theory, and it seems to be borne out by the fact that one of the subject’s of the Wired article, Kevin Lynch, an Apple executive who formerly worked for Adobe, didn’t take more than a casual glance at his Apple Watch during the interview. That might indeed have been deliberate, a marketing trick, but it clearly conveyed the impression that he didn’t need to depend on extended face time with his iPhone to keep in touch. His Apple Watch, and an occasional quick glance, was all he needed.

So is the Apple Watch, then, a potential iPhone killer? If Apple sold a few hundred million of them, perhaps. But that would require a version that’s independent of iPhone, and that probably won’t happen for a while, maybe a few years.

For now Apple Watch is an iPhone accessory. It may reduce the time you spend with your iPhone, but it won’t eliminate it. Well, that’s the theory. Until I have extended face time with an Apple Watch, I wouldn’t make any assumptions, and later be proven wrong.

In the days when Steve Jobs ruled Apple, he very rarely ventured forth to make comments outside of a few interviews and those famous keynotes. Politics were not part of the picture. A notable exception included a blog calling for the end to DRM on iTunes. He wrote, “Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.”

Well, it wasn’t long before the music industry was persuaded — or coerced — to go along with his demands, and iTunes songs became free of DRM. With it came iTunes Plus, a higher quality version of the AAC files that were said to be much closer in quality to a CD. Some said indistinguishable. Of course, there were also several price tiers, topping out at $1.29 for a single track rather than 99 cents. There had to be give and take to get what Apple wanted.

In short order, even rival music systems no longer had DRM. However, movies and TV shows still carry unbearable restrictions, due to the intransigence of the entertainment companies that perhaps believed the music industry caved too quickly to Apple’s demands.

Later on, in response to requests that Apple support Flash on iOS, he went on to explain how Flash was a 100% proprietary format, and about its miserable record for security. The beta version of Flash for Android never left beta. Mobile operating systems supported HTML5 instead, and nowadays Flash is restricted to the desktop. But not completely, as more and more web developers are moving to open standards, even though that sometimes entails a fair amount of work.

In these two cases, Jobs’ comments strictly impacted Apple’s products and services. He stayed away from politics.

Tim Cook, however, has gone off in a more open direction. In addition to addressing the working conditions at Apple’s contract manufacturers in Asia and other matters, he has now entered the contentious political arena. His recent editorial for the Washington Post lambasts the legislators and the governor of Indiana for passing what he regarded as an overly restrictive so-called religious freedom law.

But Cook wasn’t alone. His views were embraced by other companies, commentators and sports teams. When a similar law was approved in Arkansas, the CEO of Walmart, that state’s largest employer, took the hint and spoke out against it. Within short order, the governor of Arkansas decided he needed to return the bill to the legislature for reworking to make the bill more acceptable. The governor of Indiana had previously agreed that state’s law should be tweaked.

Now the facts around such contentious matters aren’t as important as the fact that Cook felt it was important enough to speak out, and to assert that Apple fully supported him.

As you might predict, certain political talking heads have attacked Cook for daring to speak his mind. What about Apple customers who do not agree with him, they said? Would they decide to buy products from someone else? Should it even matter what a corporate executive thinks when you pay your hard-earned money for one of their products?

Some of those talking heads went on to complain about Apple selling products in countries where individual freedoms are extremely limited. But that’s true for all companies who sell products in those countries. Besides, Cook is a citizen of the United States, and Apple’s headquarters are based in the U.S. So shouldn’t they have the right to comment on issues that impact this country? Where would they come off attacking what is done in other countries?

Clearly, Apple doesn’t appear to be concerned that some customers might give up their iPads, iPhones and Macs because they don’t agree with the political views of the CEO or the corporation in general.

Now it doesn’t matter what you or I think. The executives of any company have the perfect right to express their points of view. By the same token, celebrities, people in the entertainment industry, have long taken on political or social causes. Sometimes it impacts the box office receipts or TV ratings, but usually it doesn’t seem to matter.

And of course one actor actually ran and was elected for the positions of governor and president. Did it impact his career when he first decided to run for political office, or, as some suggest, was Ronald Reagan’s career at a low ebb, where he was mostly doing TV shows, before entering politics? That came at a time when TV wasn’t taken near as seriously as film. But I wouldn’t presume to comment, except to suggest that any citizen has the right to express their point of view about any subject. Do you really care about the politics and beliefs of an entertainer when you decide whether to watch a movie or TV show? Should you?

Certainly we are seeing Apple as a more open and activist company, and it’s no doubt a work in progress. So I do expect we’ll see more statements and guest editorials from Cook as the need arises. Nobody should be surprised.

In the old days, we sometimes referred to Microsoft’s browser as “Internet Exploder.” Although it wiped Netscape all over the floor to become the number one browser on the planet, it wasn’t because of quality. It was about marketing strategy. Unfortunately Microsoft also went its own way when it came to web standards, meaning developers had to code their sites a little differently to be compatible in Internet Explorer.

It wasn’t fun.

But Internet Explorer ruled the roost. Indeed, when Apple and Microsoft made that deal in 1997 that resulted in the latter investing a $150 million in the former, Internet Explorer became the default browser on the Mac too.

With the arrival of Firefox, an open source browser built upon the ashes of Netscape, Microsoft’s Internet dominance began to lessen. It was first released in 2002 as Phoenix, morphed into Firebird the following year and became Firefox in 2004.

With the promise of better performance and closer adherence to web standards, disgusted Windows users began to make the switch. On the Mac platform, Apple gave up on Microsoft when it failed to update Internet Explorer after the first OS X compatible version was released in 2001. Safari debuted in 2003, and has had steady updates ever since. Over the years, Apple has continued to boast that Safari delivers faster and more accurate rendering than the competition. The reality is that fractions of a second among browsers hardly make much of a difference anymore.

But a more humble Microsoft came to realize that Internet Explorer wasn’t getting the job done, that its tainted reputation resulted in lost market share, despite the ongoing improvements. In the past, when Microsoft failed at something, they would simply change the name and the marketing strategy. But Internet Explorer has had steady updates in recent years, and has become more competitive.

But things are poised to change.

Starting with Windows 10, now in public beta but due this summer, there are actually two browsers included. So there’s an Internet Explorer 11, said to be the best version of all. But there’s also something called Project Spartan that is supposed to be faster and more compatible.

So with this week’s update for the Windows 10 Tech Preview, build number 10049, Project Spartan appears in its first incarnation. To launch it, instead of clicking the app icon with the telltale “e” in the taskbar, choose the globe icon instead.

According to Microsoft the Cortana personal assistant — Microsoft’s answer to Siri — is included if you want to attempt the voice recognition. I’m not in the least interested.

The new “inking” feature allows you to write or type comments on a page. As with Windows 10’s support for multiple virtual desktops, Microsoft is busy aping Apple. So there are Reading List and Reading View capabilities that are intended to mirror Safari’s Reader and Reading List. You can also save documents in PDF format, something you’ve been able to do on a Mac for years.

To Microsoft, playing catch up is nothing new. And, of course, there’s the promise that Project Spatan “just works,” and haven’t I heard that one before?

Now I wasn’t expecting perfection in the beta release. But Windows 10 is already running fairly quickly in a virtual machine on the latest Parallels Desktop on my iMac. It didn’t seem, at first blush, that Project Spartan, or whatever it’ll be called when it’s released, launched any faster than Internet Explorer, nor did it deliver pages more swiftly. I’ll be fair, though, and wait for the final release on a native Windows machine to see how it runs in the real world.

Neither browser matched the level of performance of Safari on OS X Yosemite, but again this is a virtual machine, and even coming close is an achievement of sorts.

As a practical matter, nothing stopped Microsoft from changing the browser engine in Internet Explorer and crafting the new features into that app. By turning a page and delivering the experience with in an app with a totally different name, once again Microsoft is clearly pulling another marketing stunt.

Stunts also appear to rule the day when you examine the fine print for those promises about people running Windows 7 or 8/8.1 getting free upgrades to Windows 10. Microsoft’s legal team recently released all sorts of silly terms and conditions that essentially state that this freebie promise applies strictly to consumers and not to businesses, OEMs, and other categories of customers that may or may not be clearly defined. At one time it was even claimed that those running pirated copies of Windows would be allowed to upgrade, but now it seems that their installations will still not be regarded as genuine. That will surely not encourage people to become legal.

I do understand that Microsoft makes a hefty amount of money from the sale of Windows licenses, and I would not be so bold as to suggest that they just give operating systems away except to improve the platform’s reach. Apple gets away with it because OS revenue is quite low compared to the sale of new Macs, and having as many of you as possible running the latest and greatest system release makes it easier for developers to add at least some of the new features.

Microsoft? Well, it appears they are still finding their way in a new and different world. But it has yet to be determined whether giving away Windows 10 to some of their customers, and releasing a new browser to replace— or exist beside — the old one, will somehow boost the company’s bottom line, or make the company seem warmer and friendlier. I think Windows users are too smart to fall for this nonsense.

You know the score: People who buy other Apple gear, such as an iPhone or an iPad, are tempted to consider Macs the next time they are in the market for a personal computer. In recent years, Apple has claimed that some 50% of the people who buy new Macs at an Apple Store are new to the platform. A lot of that interest appears to be the result of buying something else from Apple in the past, appreciating the quality, elegance and smooth integration, and wanting to extend the joy.

But the halo effect didn’t begin with Apple, although I suspect some of you might believe that it did. When I looked it up, I came upon this reference, “The halo effect is a cognitive bias in which an observer’s overall impression of a person, company, brand, or product influences the observer’s feelings and thoughts about that entity’s character or properties. It was named by psychologist Edward Thorndike in reference to a person being perceived as having a halo.”

For Apple it started with the iPod, and when the company made the decision to make the iconic MP3 music player available to Windows users. That soon resulted in porting iTunes to Windows, for better or worse. Even though iTunes worked well enough on the PC platform, it was generally considered to function far more smoothly on a Mac, where it was better integrated into the OS.

No matter. For a time the iPod appeared to be Apple’s most important product until it was supplanted by an even better iPod in the form of the iPhone. So there are far more iPhones sold than Macs, but Mac sales have, by and large, grown faster than Windows PCs in recent years. At a time when PC sales are regarded as flat or declining, Macs continue to do well. Apple has therefore continued to invest in the platform, and it’s clear the new MacBook represents a huge investment in trimming a note-book down to two pounds, give or take, while retaining what is said to be a solid user experience with just a few sacrifices.

Well, some would suggest that a single USB-C port is a huge sacrifice in exchange for slim and trim, but Apple has a knack for revealing significant visions for the future. The vision for the MacBook is the near total reliance on wireless connectivity aside from the battery charger. The rest of the tech universe merely has to catch up, as it did when Apple discontinued loads of peripheral ports, floppy drives and DVD drives.

In any case, by making all Apple tech gear work well with each other, the customer is encouraged to stay within the company’s ecosystem. Some might chafe and call it a walled garden, but even Microsoft wants you to accept Windows 10 on PCs, tablets and smartphones. You can’t have the same level of integration on the Microsoft platform because the hardware is built by loads of vendors, but they understand the significance of convergence.

Now to me, the so-called halo effect kind of worked in reverse. I have used Macs since the 1980s, and when it was time to upgrade my wireless handset from a simple feature phone, I chose the iPhone. All right, I had already received a unit from Apple to review, so I had some free exposure before I needed to consider a decision when my wireless contact came up for renewal. Indeed, I switched to AT&T, despite the connectivity problems (long since resolved) because I had an iPhone in my sights in those early days.

The latest halo effect scenario embraces the Apple Watch. Now Apple Watch is, at least for the first version, an accessory for recent iPhones. It doesn’t do much without them, so if you want one, you have to get an iPhone if one isn’t already in your possession. On the other hand, if you already have an iPhone and want to consider a smartwatch, certainly the Apple Watch should be high on your shopping list.

Well, unless you want to save money and give up loads of important features, in which case the Pebble is also iOS compatible. It wouldn’t integrate near as seamlessly, but that’s the promise of sticking with Apple.

Now whenever people want to speculate about what Apple might do next — and there’s still talk that a motor vehicle is in the cards some day — you can be sure that integration among all the products is part of the picture. If such integration has to be forced, or doesn’t make sense, Apple won’t consider the product. But don’t assume you can guess what they’re going to do next. Even the car project might not bear fruit, or may be more about controlling the dashboard then building the whole vehicle.

As you consider the impact of this halo effect, isn’t it true that just about any tech company on the planet would love to have their own halo effect? Wouldn’t Samsung love to see their smartphone customers buy Samsung TVs and washing machines? Perhaps that might make sense, because there are ways all these products can be integrated or at least controlled, but a Samsung vacuum cleaner?