From time to time, I’ve played with larger smartphones. For months, I had two different flavors of a Samsung Galaxy with displays in the neighborhood of five inches. They were most certainly thin enough, but they were difficult fits for my front pockets. I don’t wear super tight jeans — just normal fit — so the pockets should be large enough to comfortably contain a smartphone and a wallet. Only they didn’t, or at least not comfortably.

While in the car, I would usually remove the smartphone from my pocket and place it in one of the cup holders. The Kia doesn’t really have a dedicated smartphone slot, and I don’t drive around that often with beverages.

I’ve also spent time with an iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. The former is manageable, the latter is impossible for my setup and fashion priorities, such as they are. My wife would find either near impossible to put in her purse, unless she’s about in a larger shoulder bag, which doesn’t happen all that often. She loves her iPhone 5c.

As some of you recall, commentator Kirk McElhearn, proprietor of the Kirkville blog and Macworld’s “iTunes Guy,” bought an iPhone 6 when it first went on sale in the UK. After a short while he returned it and went back to his iPhone 5s. It was just too big for his tastes.

On the whole, the bigger iPhones have been hugely successful, and are credited with generating the amazing sales figures Apple booked in the December quarter. They led to record revenues and profits. But Apple doesn’t break out sales of specific models. It would be nice to how what the iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s are doing, so it’s going to be about guesses.

In the fall of 2015, the cheapest iPhone would probably be the iPhone 5s, assuming past is prologue. It would be free with a service contract or roughly $450 for an unlocked version. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus would become the mid-tier models, and the rumored iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus would occupy the top of the line. Again, this is based on Apple’s usual refresh practice, although they didn’t quite do that in 2013 when the plastic-clad iPhone 5c was introduced.

So the question is this: How many customers insist on a four-inch iPhone and are not apt to want larger handsets? Is that number sufficient to warrant building a new model to cater to those needs, rather than selling last year’s model? It’s a good question that I wouldn’t be prepared to answer.

One argument against it would be that Apple doesn’t want to complicate the product lineup. But compared to the model proliferation at other companies, Apple has remained fairly conservative. They’ve also been known to kill models that aren’t getting huge demand, which may explain why there is no longer a 17-inch MacBook Pro in the lineup. Or maybe Retina displays were, back in 2012, too expensive to keep such a model at an affordable price point. Regardless, it doesn’t seem that the lack of the largest Mac note-book has hurt sales. But I still keep mine around, and the recent SSD transplant has only made it more useful.

In any case, I would hope that Apple will see the wisdom in having three different sized iPhones going forward. Each serves an important purpose and it seems to me there is a large enough audience for a smaller model. I also don’t think it would take a whole lot of development dollars — and Apple clearly has plenty to spare — to build a smaller iPhone using current form factors and hardware simply scaled down. The major internal change would obviously be the display parts and battery; the rest can be pretty much the same as other iPhones in the current lineup.

Regardless of how Apple handles the case of the multiple iPhone sizes, it’s a sure thing the company will never succumb to the disease that inflicts so much of the rest of the industry. Having loads of models with slight size — and hardware — variations only confuses the end user. It may give stores lots of stock to sell, but I can’t see where they can make sensible arguments for buying the 5.1-inch smartphone instead of the 5-inch model, assuming performance and features are only slightly different.

Indeed, there was a story last year indicating that Samsung plans to cut back on the number of smartphone models. The company is clearly suffering from declining sales on the high end and sharply lower profits. So saving money on developing new stuff only makes sense. Giving customers sensible choices is just as important. If a company makes it easier for someone to buy their products, it has to help, particularly when sales are challenged.

And I do not think Apple would suffer to have an updated 4-inch iPhone, but I do not feel encouraged that such a product will appear.

I won’t get into the down and dirty details of legal entanglements that lasted for years, but most of you recall that, in the 1960s, The Beatles formed their own holding company and record label known as Apple Corps. Indeed, some of the first hits from James Taylor were recorded when he was under contract with the Beatles, not to mention Badfinger, an early Beatles-soundalike band.

In any case, after Apple Computer came about in the 1970s, Steve Jobs and crew had to cut a deal with Apple Corps to be able to use the name. In short, they agreed not to get involved in the music. Of course, the arrival of the iPod and iTunes changed all that and new agreements had to be forged once lawsuits were fled. So in 2007, Apple settled the legal skirmishes with Apple Corps by buying up all the trademarks, and licensing the relevant ones back to the Beatles holding company.

Yes, Apple Inc. owns the trademark for Apple Corps. In 2010, the entire Beatles catalog was brought to iTunes in an exclusive deal that exists to this very day. But while Apple offers music for sale and, with limited successm streaming, and sometimes offers exclusive content from some artists, they are not technically a recording company.

Is that poised to change?

There are published rumors of a greatly expanded music streaming service some time later this year from Apple. Supposedly the new service will incorporate the assets of Beats Music that Apple acquired as part of the three billion dollar purchase of that company. Supposedly it’ll be integrated with the iTunes Radio service, or presented as an additional service. Supposedly Apple will lower the monthly price from the standard $9.99 used in the industry to $7.99. Supposedly there will even be an Android version, representing Apple’s first foray into supporting another digital platform.

Supposedly.

But none of this is at all confirmed by anyone supposedly in the know. If Apple were to offer such a service, they’d have to get the music companies to accept either lower payments, or perhaps “eat” the additional charges to improve traffic. Certainly Apple is quite capable of marketing a service at a lower price since such a service would be designed to move more hardware. iTunes was originally set up to feed the iPod, and not necessarily as a profit center, though it certainly has turned out that way.

Such a move would make sense because digital music sales are down. Whether that’s the result of a change in the music habits of customers — or the fact that there are fewer compelling artists nowadays to attract large sales of albums and individual songs — I will not presume to guess. Certainly other music streaming services have had some level of success, though surely far from what would be considered successful on the scale Apple manages.

Regardless of how it all turns out, I do not think this is a market Apple wants to ignore, or play a poor second fiddle in.

I also read an article the other day suggesting that Apple might want to create their own music label. In a sense they do that already for independent artists who don’t have a contract with a recording company. It’s also true that sales of recorded music are less significant for artists these days. The big acts earn more from concerts and merchandising. The album is just the value-added extra, same as such things as the concert DVDs, T-shirts and mugs.

Now it’s a sure thing Apple could buy all the music companies wholesale in a single transaction, with billions of dollars in change leftover, and thus own an entire industry other than indies. Whether that makes sense is another matter entirely, and it’s not at all likely that the regulators in Europe and the U.S.A. would be warm and fuzzy about a giant multinational corporation taking over an entire industry, any industry. Or even that the music companies would accept Apple’s offer.

So does any of this make sense?

When it comes to introducing a new streaming music service, sure. If that’s the way the market is truly going, good artists or otherwise, then I have little doubt Apple wants to play a part in a unique way that will leverage the fact that they have 800 million iTunes accounts, and credit card numbers, on file.

At the scale Apple operates, if there was a credible music streaming solution similar to Beats Music with an iTunes slant, and the much larger music library, Apple could come to dominate the market in short order. I could also see where Apple might launch a free public beta version to attract customers and fix glitches, and go to paid in a few months once the kinks were worked out. If you don’t think Apple wants to do betas, consider Siri and the OS X Yosemite public beta program.

The other day, I read a column in a tech blog that praised Apple’s performance under Tim Cook and the company’s stellar financial performance, particularly in the last quarter. When Steve Jobs and Tim Cook were compared, it was about the company being managed by an executive rather than an entrepreneur.

So far so good, but you can bet the piece would soon jump off the rails.

When it came to Apple’s pace of innovation over the years, the writer imagined that Apple somehow released the iMac, iPod, the iPod nano, the iPod mini, the iPhone, the App Store and the iPad in quick succession. Why make a fuss over three different iPads? Because Apple, under Jobs, had no compunction about dumping a successful product and releasing a new version. As for the rest, the writer seemed to have forgotten that this rapid pace of innovation occurred over a period of 12 years between the release of the first iMac and the first iPad.

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For decades, most everything Apple did was greeted by media and tech pundits with a similar response. You almost think they were using the same word processing template when they claimed there is no way for Apple to succeed, or success was just a fluke. That it happens over and over again nowadays makes you wonder what they are smoking — or drinking — to spout such silliness.

I mean, consider where Apple is today. By market cap, it’s the largest company on planet Earth. It’s higher than Microsoft at its peak in the last decade, and in the last quarter, Apple reported record profits. At a time where some suggested smartphones had become a saturated market, iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus sales are on the rise. Although proclaimed the winner of the mobile gadget wars, Samsung’s sales and profits are down. So how many of the skeptics are admitting they were wrong?

Now at one time, it did seem as if Apple was doomed to failure. By the mid-1990s, and the arrival of Windows 95, it was felt by many that Microsoft had released a good enough operating system and you might as well get with the program. Mind you that I didn’t feel that way. I always thought of Windows as being rough around the edges and even rougher to use beyond the basics. But for people who spent all day with a single app, or used a Windows PC as the front-end for, say, a point-of-sale machine, it didn’t make a difference.

I know that, as a Mac user, I long endured the criticism that I had chosen the wrong platform. I remember setting up a new Mac at my home in 1989. I was using Macs at work for several years, and I had reached the point where I needed to be able to get work done at home, and that required investing in an expensive system.

In those days, if you wanted to chat online, you might go to one of those costly online services, such as CompuServe, or pay less with the fledgling America Online, now AOL. Or you ran a terminal session peer-to-peer with someone by calling their modem. Using an app known as Microphone, I was able to set up a session in a few moments. But the recipient, a PC user who was a colleague at work, didn’t fare so well.

For days, he’d tell me that his new Toshiba PC was far more powerful and useful than my lowly Mac, that his computer was a serious machine and not a toy. But when he tried to establish that terminal connection with me, he kept muttering about having to create a shell. It never seemed to work, however, and I finally just stopped bothering him about it. I didn’t see the need to embarrass him any further.

Perhaps the best thing Apple could do in those years was just to stay in business. Even when they were regarded as a costly niche product that only catered to a few people in the entertainment and publishing industries, we stuck by our beliefs.

Nothing stopped the Mac, even poor sales.

When the iPod arrived in 2001, the critics said it was an expensive gadget that few would buy. After all, it wasn’t even Apple’s business to build music players, thus entering the consumer electronics business, and they conveniently forgot that Apple was selling digital cameras and other gadgets in the 1990s.

The iPod didn’t become a serious product, I suppose, until Apple released a Windows version of iTunes, and moved to USB so the folks on the PC platform who didn’t have FireWire would be supported. It became a massive success, and sales only began an inevitable decline when Apple decided to cannibalize the iPod with the iPhone.

The iPhone, as you know, jumpstarted an industry that mostly catered to power users and executives. Apple made smartphones warm and fuzzy for regular people, and thus inspired other companies to copy the iPhone with varying degrees of success.

At first, some in the media scoffed at the sales prospects for the iPhone. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer offered his usual inebriated laughter, yet it wasn’t long before any variant of a Windows phone was a poor also-ran to iOS and Android. Served him right.

In 2010, with many anticipating an Apple tablet of some sort, some PC companies demonstrated prototypes at the Consumer Electronics Show. Of course, when it comes to CES, a great many products are displayed in prerelease form, but many never see the light of day. So much of the potential competing gear was missing in action when the iPad was launched.

With Apple Watch, the skeptics are wondering whether it’s different enough. Besides, what about all the others? Didn’t Pebble sell a million smartwatches? Isn’t that an achievement of sorts? Well, Microsoft sold that number of Surface 3 Pro tablets during the last quarter. Not good enough? Well, Apple sold 74.5 million iPhones in the same quarter.

Apple Watch? I wouldn’t presume to guess, but maybe a few million during the first quarter. Will that be good enough, despite being better than anyone else? Don’t bet on it!