The Apple TV has been considered Apple’s next potential great thing for quite a while. First a hobby, it’s now a supposedly full-fledged product that seems strangely unfinished. To many, it’s just another streamer, a way to deliver TV shows and movies to your TV set, and content from your Mac or iOS device courtesy of AirPlay. But where does Apple expect to take it?

In the wake of the best-selling authorized biography of Steve Jobs from Walter Isaacson, I’m sure many of you expected something amazing was about to happen. Jobs said Apple had devised the best TV interface anywhere, but where is it? Knowing his time was short, was Jobs merely trying to spook the competition into wasting money to compete with a product that was never to be?

Just what is Apple’s final solution to take the living room into the 21st century?

Certainly there are plenty of hints. We know from Apple CEO Tim Cook that TV remains an area of intense interest. We know that millions own an Apple TV, but enhancements in recent years have been minor since the 2010 redesign. In 2012, support for 1080p video was added, and there was a minor processor upgrade the following year that did nothing to change performance.

Since then, the Apple TV has gained new channels, but also gained complexities because each channel just gives you yet another app and interface to navigate. Here Roku might offer the better alternative since you can search content across services.

Indeed, according to published reports, Roku outsells Apple TV nowadays, and offers over 1,800 channels on its streamers compared to a few dozen with Apple. All right, you have to manually add most of them via Roku’s web-based interface, so it’s not what you’d call an easy process, not even close.

Still Roku appears to be king of the hill. There’s a decent product lineup starting with the $39.99 Roku LT stick, topped with the $99.99 Roku 3. I’ve had the latter for a while, and it is razor fast, with a decent interface that allows for fairly quick navigation. Roku specializes in offering loads of third-party services, which means you have to go directly to each site to set up new accounts and send your payment information. Nothing just works.

So Apple TV is second or third best nowadays in both sales and content offerings, depending on which estimates you read. The easy integration with Apple services and your Apple gear is a huge plus, and if you stick with iTunes for content, you don’t even have to establish a new account. You merely have to enter your WI-Fi login info and your Apple ID and you’re good to go.

But Apple TV’s interface doesn’t break any new ground. It’s flatter these days, closer in concept to iOS conventions. Aside from having more channels, there’s not a lot new there, and it seems Apple just ignored its streamer for the holiday season. All the attention is on the iPhone 6 series and the hot-selling 27-inch iMac 5K.

TV?

Well, there is 4K, or UHD, the higher definition TV sets that are supposed to be the big stars for the holiday season. When a 4K TV was several thousand dollars, sales were low. Now that you can get a pretty good 4K set for less than $1,000 from mainstream makers such as VIZIO, TV makers are hoping it’s the magic bullet to jump start the flagging industry.

Certainly, 3D did nothing. VIZIO, in fact, has killed the feature on new sets, and I haven’t heard much in the way of complaints. You can still buy 3D sets from other companies, but most 3D viewing is confined to the local multiplex. Being forced to put on a pair of glasses and sit in a confined space in your home when you want to watch TV is a non-starter for most, even though prices are only slightly higher than regular TVs.

But even 4K may be a hard sell. Don’t forget that you really can’t see the improved picture quality unless you sit real close or have a really large set. I expect that over 60 inches is a sweet spot, though I’ve seen 55-inch 4K TVs that, when viewed from a decent distance, seem to offer a superior picture.

Unfortunately bringing a 4K set into your home is only part of the problem. What about content? The demonstrations I usually see at the local Best Buy are largely confined to still pictures, which help exploit the resolution advantage. But there are few movies, and few ways to deliver them. We don’t have 4K Blu-ray players in stores this year, and TV services are just beginning to work at deploying content. DirecTV is offering a 4K promotion with Samsung sets, but you wonder why other brands aren’t involved yet. Netflix is also supposed to deliver limited 4K, but how many of you have broadband connections that offer enough speed to accommodate the higher bit rates?

It’s another chicken and egg problem, though I suppose there will be enough 4K content if sales are decent. But who will buy until there’s content, unless they just want to future proof? In any case, 4K sets scale up regular HD content with varying degrees of success.

Meantime, I suppose the next Apple TV — which appears overdue at this point — will support 4K. That will give Apple one temporary advantage. The other would be an interface that makes it easier to grab content across channels, and perhaps simpler integration if you have several devices hooked up to your set.

I know Apple prefers to live in its own ecosystem, but people do buy game consoles, soundbars, Blu-rays and other accessories. Integrating all that hardware is not always easy, even with the best universal remote.

If Apple wants to bring TV viewing into the 21st century, why not start with the issues discussed in the previous two paragraphs? I’m sure you can add to that list, and I haven’t even considered the possibility of a 4K set from Apple.

Ahead of the release of the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus phablet, you could hear the howls from the media critics. Apple is losing out on millions and millions of sales by not joining the bigger smartphone party. When Apple VP Philip Schiller one year demonstrated how you could use a four-inch iPhone with one hand, while that’s not so easy with larger handsets, it was suggested it was just an excuse.

Apple had to think big — or bigger than bigger — or whatever!

It didn’t matter that the iPhone 5s delivered record sales numbers. That was last year’s news, and Apple had to get with the straight and the narrow and compete better with Samsung. If you wanted a larger smartphone, Apple couldn’t deliver the goods. Samsung could, though it took a while before the media recognized that the newest high-end gear from the South Korean consumer electronics giant wasn’t doing so well.

Aside from a bunch of often-useless features, the sole genuine argument Samsung had in its favor was a lineup of handsets with displays larger than four inches. In fact, if you wanted a high-end smartphone from Samsung with all the bells and whistles, you had to go for the larger display.

For months ahead of the September introduction of the iPhone 6 series, the speculation was hot and heavy about the expected larger displays. Some of that speculation was a natural byproduct of the demand or belief in the inevitably of bigger iPhones, some of it fueled by the statement from Tim Cook that there were still problems with those larger displays. That implied Apple was working through those problems and a solution would soon be at hand.

Maybe Apple deliberately worked behind the scenes to get people to speculate about the new generation iPhones with bigger displays. In the weeks before the announcement, the rumor sites and the mainstream media had correctly honed in on 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch versions. Was it a good guess, a leak from the supply chain, or perhaps a deliberate disclosure from Apple delivered to certain selected journalists on background?

By the time the new iPhones were launched, Samsung had already begun to suffer from lower sales and profits. It wasn’t exactly a secret, but it wasn’t getting the daily fear-mongering that the company was about to bite the dust. If that happened to Apple, you wouldn’t have heard the last of it. Apple suffers from bad publicity even when revenue hits record highs, because the numbers aren’t high enough, or sales of some products don’t quite match financial analyst expectations.

After the iPhone 6 arrived to record sales and chronic shortages, you’d think the complaints would stop. Well, there was BendGate, the faux controversy over the alleged vulnerability to bending of the iPhone 6 Plus. You don’t hear much about it anymore, and it’s not at all clear sales were hurt. But it was oh-so-curious how the uproar arose just as product was reaching the masses. A little too convenient perhaps?

The next complaint was size. First, the critics wanted iPhones to be larger — when they weren’t ranting about making them cheaper — but now some appear to have second-thoughts about the display size.

Some of these complaints are legitimate, but I wonder if others just like to take a too big, too small, not good enough posture.

But I have one friend who bought an iPhone 6 on launch day. He was one of the first people to take delivery, and he used it for a week or two. Just before the return deadline was up, he sent it back. Why? Well, performance was great. It took terrific pictures and all, and the display was just beautiful.

That’s the good part.

But the unit was just a little ungainly in regular use despite all its charms. So putting it in your pocket might be perfectly OK with your wardrobe. My short exposure to an iPhone 6 was, shall we say, acceptable. As with those Samsung smartphones I’ve used in the past, I could get it in my pants pocket, a side pocket, not rear, with a bit of difficulty. That difficulty may be a deal breaker for some. An iPhone 5s was more comfortably situated in my pants pockets, but I wouldn’t give up on a larger device for that reason alone. In any case, Apple has kept last year’s iPhones in stock for those who find the new models a bit too large, and that certainly applies to some of you.

The other issue, perhaps more important, is that large smartphones are near-impossible to use with one hand. You can push the content down on the iPhone 6 series with a double tap on the Home button, but that’s a clumsy workaround. If you require a smaller display on which to navigate, get a smaller smartphone. And that’s a decision some of you have made.

But the tide of the industry has moved towards larger gear. Indeed, some of you clearly prefer a phablet such as the iPhone 6 Plus instead of a tablet. I understand the convenience of having just one mobile gadget, though there are clear tradeoffs.

My personal feeling is that Apple ought to add a 4-inch model to the iPhone 6 family, perhaps call it a mini, and see whether it gains more sales compared to offering a previous year’s model. Or at least keep the iPhone 5s around for another year.

Consider this very simple process, or would should be a very simple process. You want to add an account to Apple Mail — and it works essentially the same in all recent versions — so you start by entering your name,  email address and password. At this point, Mail determines whether your settings can be entered automatically or not.

Now if you have one of those free email systems, such as AOL, Gmail, iCloud or Outlook, the app already has the settings to configure the account. This is also true for a Microsoft Exchange Server, so these are listed separately. But when it comes with a regular company email account, or maybe the one provided with your web hosting service, consigned to the “other” category, Mail hasn’t a clue. That’s true even if the mail server has autoconfig and autodiscover settings, which are used to feed an email client the correct settings for incoming and outgoing servers plus a few other odds and ends.

The long and short of it is that, if I want to configure Mail to handle the accounts from our server, it’s mostly a manual process. After the account is created, I have to return and fix such arcane entries as the port number for SSL, which is usually entered incorrectly for incoming email.

Now I use IMAP, which stores the messages on the server for easy syncing among all devices I use. For this scheme to work properly, I have to manually map the local email folders to the ones on the server for Sent, Drafts, Junk and Trash; they are labeled differently on some email systems. Trust me, this is important, especially for Sent. Otherwise, the messages I send from my iPhone won’t show up on the server, so they’ll be missing in action on my iMac or my wife’s iPad.

With me so far?

Setting up an email account on an iOS device essentially involves the very same steps made via the Settings interface on your iPhone or iPad. I’ve also tried adding this same collection of accounts on Android devices, a pair of Samsung smartphones, with different email apps. I had to slog through far more configuration options to complete an account setup. I won’t even begin to list the extra choices that some believe makes Android a superior platform. It is the polar opposite of just working, though Apple isn’t much better.

Now the email system we use is nothing special. The web server is managed by cPanel, a very popular control panel system used on a large number of servers worldwide. It leverages a lot of popular open source software in a fairly simple graphical interface. So I’d think a properly-designed email client would figure it all out for you.

It’s a tad better with Microsoft’s Outlook for Mac. But even the beta version posted recently for Office 365 subscribers still requires you do a lot of the stuff yourself. It does seem, though, that Outlook can guess which mailboxes on the server to link to at least. In that respect, it’s better than Mail, though performance is awful with larger mailboxes.

Well, on Tuesday morning, I downloaded the latest version of Mozilla’s Thunderbird, a mail client that mostly receives minor updates these days, and decided to see how it fared in setting up my email accounts. To my surprise, the process was almost entirely automatic. After entering my address and password, Thunderbird got most of the rest correct. I did have to make a few custom settings so junk mail would flow into the proper Junk folder and all, but it seemed to work properly in nearly every respect as far as configuration was concerned.

The lone glitch was identifying the Junk folder for my Gmail account incorrectly. It listed it as Junk instead Spam on Gmail, but that’s a small problem. For the most part, Thunderbird is doing what it appears Mail and Outlook cannot do, which is to configure a collection of different email accounts correctly with minimal configuration.

So are Apple’s OS X and iOS developers even paying attention? Yes, your accounts on one device will kind of/sort of transfer to other devices when you set them up with iCloud. Well sometimes. When I recently restored an iPhone from scratch, none of the email accounts were added, but the accounts on my iMac are almost always duplicated on the MacBook Pro. Even then, I have to go through individual settings to match them up, and I’m sure most people would just not bother. If things aren’t perfect, they’ll put up with the situation.

Now I suppose you might think that I switched to Thunderbird, but I didn’t. I just do not like the look and the feel, nor the way settings are laid out. I appreciate the fact that all of my email accounts can be added with only minor tweaks, but that’s all.

What I wonder is why the people at Mozilla who work on Thunderbird can devise a mostly workable automatic email account configuration scheme, but not Apple or Microsoft. Or maybe Apple’s developers just not taking into consideration the fact that millions of people use email accounts that aren’t owned by AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

It wasn’t so long ago that Apple was considered to be a relic of the past, a company with a brief turn in the sun, but doomed to return to perceived irrelevance. While all the skepticism mounted amid Apple’s move to concentrate on modest product refreshes rather than introduce innovative products and services, clearly things were going on behind the scenes only hinted at on the rumor sites.

After suffering from big declines in the stock price last year after reportedly failing to meet financial analyst expectations in some respects — while hitting records for sales and mostly profits — Apple’s perceived turnaround began in earnest.

Well, it wasn’t exactly a turnaround, except for the stock price. It was simply a period of more gradual growth and more realistic expectations. But until Apple delivered products and services that the media or industry analysts, in their infinite wisdom (or lack thereof), perceived as significant, it didn’t count. It didn’t matter that iPhones continued to garner records sales. It didn’t matter that Mac sales growth exceeded that of the PC industry for several years.

It was never enough.

Until now.

So it appears that Apple began to hit its stride once again this year at the June WWDC. It was mostly about the new iOS and OS X, but the bill of particulars seemed far more expansive than previous releases. Where it seemed that Apple tried to hard to force another 200 changes or enhancements, that number seemed conservative when you tallied up what was new this time. Of course, some media pundits claimed the event wasn’t so important. After all, it was just about software and there were no fancy new gadgets to lust over.

Where, for example, was that rumored smartwatch formerly known as iWatch? No new Macs? And what about the iPhone and the iPad, forgetting that recent years have brought updates for both in the September-October timeframe.

So why won’t Apple listen to the critics? Wouldn’t that set things right with the world? Oh, yes, Apple continues score great sales and profits, and they aren’t listening to the critics. The indignity of it all!

Earlier this year, Apple declared a seven-for-one stock split, while buying back more shares than ever. Some suggested this was just another delay tactic, designed to appease Wall Street but not addressing the core problem, which is Tim Cook’s promise of new products and services this year.

The September media event brought the expected larger iPhones, supposedly the most compelling threat in recent years to the alleged unstoppable growth of Android and Samsung in particular. It didn’t matter that Samsung had a hard time keeping sales high, particularly on more expensive smartphones, and profits were way down. They had already been crowned as a winner.

As of the launch weekend, Apple fell way behind meeting demand for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. While you can find the models you want if you check around, officially The Apple Store shows delivery times of three-to-five days and sometimes more, particularly if you want a 128GB version. It may well be that demand won’t be fully satisfied until 2015.

Regardless, industry analysts suggest that Apple will move record numbers of the new iPhones this year. Maybe they could sell more, but if the sales projections are met, Apple won’t have to apologize for a thing.

The Mac is on a roll. Although the main improvement is the 27-inch iMac with that wonderful 5K display, there’s a lot of interest in the entire lineup. Professional users who might have previously considered a Mac Pro are clearly tempted to buy an iMac instead, though certainly Apple’s costly workstation can do better with the few apps that leverage multiple cores.

All right, the same cannot be said for the iPad. While the iPad Air 2 appears to be a worthy improvement, with a slimmer form factor and speedier components, the iPad mini isn’t changed that much, encouraging some, I suppose, to just buy last year’s model if they can live without Touch ID and the other minor enhancements.

Flattening tablet sales have also made some wonder if sales going forward are going to climb all that much. Are phablets, such as the iPhone 6 Plus, cannibalizing volume sales from tablets? Doesn’t an all-in-one gadget suffice at a small sacrifice in display size? That’s not a question I’m prepared to answer, but I am warming to that iPad Air 2 that I have for extended hands-on review. I’ll have more to say when I can put a keyboard or two into service to see how it handles more in-depth productivity.

All this adds up to the promise of a great holiday quarter. Apple’s stock price has reached new highs, along with the largest market cap ever. I’m not counting the December 1 drop just yet, since it may be due to some trading glitch that’s under investigation.

Next year comes the Apple Watch, but few expect it to outsell an iPhone — far from it — even  though some versions may be more expensive. Apple Pay is taking off and evidently boosting interest in other digital wallet systems.

Of course the critics continue to lurk in the background waiting for Apple to fall. But not this year.