There are surveys and there are surveys. It’s very easy to take a little bit of highly-focused data and attempt to project how it impacts the entire product category. Before I get into the limitations of that data, once again most members of the media will quote such a survey without considering the limitations.

A notable example is a study that supposedly concludes that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are changing the equation when it comes to consuming media, well at least selecting material to view at a later time. The report comes from Pocket, who makes an iOS app that allows you to save such a reading list.

Now remember this study is strictly about saving articles and videos. It has nothing to do with customer preferences about reading or watching that material without saving for later, using apps, sending instant messages, and so on. It’s all about collecting online material for later viewing. Nothing wrong with that, but consider the narrow focus.

Now it’s important to realize that Apple already packs a Reading List feature into iOS, so you can capture the articles to which you want to return later. But Pocket’s advantage is that it saves that list online, so you can access them on any platform supported by the app. That gives you a huge advantage that you might prefer if you find the iOS Reading List limiting. All well and good.

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I have no doubt that the OS X Yosemite upgrade experience has been less than perfect for some of you. This is the way it is in the real world. No OS or app is perfect, and sometimes there will be interactions that the developers do not or cannot account for as they continue creating the software. So as it reaches more and more people, previously unsuspected problems will appear.

Sure, some of these bugs may have been known before release, but couldn’t be confirmed, or were given a low level of priority. No, I don’t know why the Wi-Fi failures reported by some of you in the initial OS X Yosemite release were left unfixed even after over a million Mac users submitted feedback during a public beta process. Apple will probably never tell us why that happened, or whether it was an artifact of the final release that wasn’t caught before it was posted.

Isolating problems in software is not easy, but it helps if more than a very few people are impacted. That gives developers more ammunition to figure out what’s wrong. But sometimes problems are so rare that it’s not possible to ever find a solution, except perhaps by accident.

It makes sense, too, that some problems may just depend on a special system configuration, but people encountering troubles sometimes assume that if it happens to them, it happens to everyone.

That takes us to a certain blogger who is complaining online about a perceived lack of “responsiveness” on OS X Yosemite on his new Mac Pro. On a workstation-class personal computer, you’d think that everything Yosemite does should be virtually instantaneous except for a hefty rendering project. Remember that a Mac Pro ships with an SSD. The only mechanical hard drives that would be used are external, and content creators would consider costly RAID assemblies of multiple drives that would deliver the maximum level of performance the technology allows.

Now before I go on, let me tell you that a lack of responsiveness or sluggishness is not a normal Yosemite system, but I gather it does happen. I do not have the OS installed on brand new Macs with SSDs. My work computer remains a late 2009 27-inch iMac with Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB RAM, and the standard 1TB hard drive. I do not find Yosemite sluggish at all. Performance for the most part appears to be as good or better than Mavericks except for an occasional stall when I switch from one virtual desktop to another.

My other work computer is a 2010 17-inch MacBook Pro, and performance seems decent overall, in line with previous OS installations.

So what is happening with that blogger’s Mac Pro? While there is one clue that ought to be investigated further. He writes: “I checked the system logs in the Console. I noticed a lot of suspicious-looking error messages in the Console, with no indication of what I could do to stop them.”

He claims that he performed a clean installation of Yosemite on a separate drive partition, and those Console logs continued to exhibit the same system errors. But what does he mean by clean?

Now in passing, I can tell you that I can find no such messages in Console on my Macs. I also did one thing that he didn’t mention, which was to launch Activity Monitor and see what system processes were active, and whether anything seemed to be taking an unusual amount of system resources. Indeed, I find that Yosemite seems use fewer resources than Mavericks, at least on my installations.

The larger question I would ask is whether the blogger actually wiped that second drive partition clean before installing OS X Yosemite, and whether he installed anything before testing performance aside from the OS. What about a third-party system enhancement or an app with a custom kernel extension? He mentions using software from Ambrosia SW, some of which is incompatible with recent OS X versions.

At no time does he explain whether he checked to see if anyone else had the problem, or whether he was all alone, meaning it was specific to his setup.

With so few details, it’s hard to know. He reports of a contact with Apple support that failed to resolve anything. At the end of the day this is, to him, Yosemite’s “default behavior.” But it’s not, not for me, not for most people who installed OS 10.10. But keeping that post so insular, focusing intently on his own situation but not on comparing or contrasting it to other installations, he reaches conclusions that aren’t supported by the facts.

There are some articles online about how to speed up your Mac if Yosemite runs too slow for you. One key suggestion is to perform a clean installation, from a hard drive wiped clean, which often clears out the remnants of earlier installations. Of course that also requires backing up your data and doing a full restore, a process that might occupy several hours. Apple’s Migration Assistant can help. But just reinstalling your apps from scratch, which may be an involved process for some, can really clear out the cruft.

My OS X Yosemite setup is a mostly clean install. A freshly formatted hard drive, followed by a full restore. I did have a slight startup glitch on the first restart that wasn’t repeated, and updating to 10.10.1 was equally uneventful. But even though my Yosemite experiences were quite successful, I wouldn’t assume that it must be perfect for everyone. And that’s a direct counterpart to claiming that one’s individual problems must, without evidence, apply to everyone else.

Typical of any publicly-traded corporation, Apple’s stock price has had its ups and downs. This reminds me of the time I met a friend, his name is Mark, at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. He accompanied me and my son, Grayson, to the Steve Jobs keynote. My press pass accommodated extra “helpers.”

After experiencing the famous Steve Jobs “reality distortion field,” Mark called his stock broker and ordered up a few hundred thousand dollars worth of Apple stock, which were trading for over $23 a share at the time. He said he sold it some months later for a decent profit. But imagine if he hung onto that investment for the full decade. Don’t forget the recent seven-for-one stock split. His investment would have appreciated nearly 35 times over the original purchase price. His stash of Apple stock would be worth millions.

Regardless, there is the delusion these days that Apple’s stock price didn’t actually crater until after Tim Cook took over as CEO. But if you examine the trends, that is just not so.

But the media often considers only the most recent stock price slide that began after the iPhone 5 shipped in 2012. Despite record sales of five million units on the launch weekend, tech and financial analysts insisted Apple must sell up to 10 million, thus the results were erroneously perceived as disappointing. It didn’t matter that Apple couldn’t meet demand. Maybe they should have built phantom smartphones or something.

Over the next few months, there were published reports claiming that Apple had reduced orders for iPhone 5 components, thus creating the impression of poor demand despite record sales.

In the next quarterly conference call with financial analysts, Cook said you cannot gauge sales from isolated supply chain metrics. This ought to have been obvious to anyone who pretends to understand the tech industry. Besides, it’s normal for a company to reduce orders after the holiday quarter, since sales would naturally be expected to decline for most consumer products. That’s only logical.

But logic and reason didn’t calm the market, and Apple’s stock price continued to dive from record levels. At the same time, some members of the media demanded Cook’s head. They said he wasn’t up to the job. He was a supply chain geek and not the visionary who could step into the shoes of Steve Jobs and keep Apple running.

They seemed to forget that Cook had worked at Apple since the 1990s, and had stepped in for Steve Jobs several times when Apple’s co-founder took sick leaves. Maybe he wasn’t quite the product visionary, but he had other talents, and Apple had a smart executive bench to handle the other chores. Remember that Jobs wasn’t a supply chain wizard; he had to hire someone else to get that job done.

Apple’s perceived roller coaster ride didn’t end. Any time sometimes inflated revenue and profit estimates were missed, or appeared to have been missed. Apple got hit between the eyes.

Now Jobs famously told Cook before the former’s death not to ask what his predecessor might do, but to move forward and do what he thought was right. That didn’t stop the media from assuming that Jobs would have acted differently when it came to various product and strategy moves. So Jobs would never have approved production of an iPad mini, since he denigrated small tablets. But that skepticism once applied to mobile phones before the iPhone was launched. Jobs was famous for attacking a product one day and launching Apple’s version the next.

I remember when Apple executives said they’d never build a cheap Mac in late 2004. The following January, they introduced the $499 Mac mini. What’s more, Steve Jobs reportedly didn’t exactly jump at the opportunity to produce the iPod when the concept was first brought to him. He often attacked an idea only to embrace it later on.

In short, there is no way to predict how he might have reacted to any decisions Tim Cook has made. That Cook has made the company more open may seem anathema to the Jobs approach, but things change, and making predictions is a fool’s errand.

These days the demands that Cook be dismissed are no longer as loud.

On the other hand, while Apple reports record revenues, and the market cap is now hovering in the $700 range ahead of Thanksgiving, one online publication has tried to make hay of the company’s perceived recent failures, referring to them collectively as another “tech turkey.” So non-original.

Consider the fact that a number of entertainers with iCloud accounts were hacked, and their explicit photos revealed, is attributed to Apple’s failure. But Apple made it clear at the time, and the statement has not been disproven, that those compromised accounts were hacked by the usual methods, such as guessing usernames and passwords. It doesn’t mean Apple couldn’t make their systems more secure, and they did expand two-factor authentication capabilities. But that doesn’t let the victims off the hook. Knowing they were targets, they should have been more careful in their online behavior.

Apple continues to be blamed for the abortive iOS 8.0.1 update that killed cellular access and Touch ID on 40,000 new iPhones. Remember that Apple is not the only company to have issued a faulty software update, and it was withdrawn in a little over an hour. The fix came out the very next day, and those impacted were given simple online instructions on how to restore their gear.

So, yes, Apple has goofed from time to time, but don’t tell me Google and Microsoft are perfect.

Still, Apple is huge, and even a minor failure or perceived failure must be a big deal, particularly for people who wish Apple would just go away.

As I look over the history of this blog, dating back to 1999, I find that I’ve covered some subjects over and over. No, not because my memory isn’t quite as sharp as it used to be. My feeling, instead, is that a lot of tech commentators choose to forget or are so busy regurgitating silly theories about Apple that they don’t do their own research. So I have to remind them from time to time.

But even a few moments at Wikipedia would demonstrate that a lot of these memes are just not true. That doesn’t suit the agenda of the people who want you to believe that Apple, now with the highest market cap of any company on the planet, is ultimately toast.

Sure, some day Apple may fall, as does most any large company eventually, though some have hung around for well over a century in one form or another. Some that are shot down for one reason or another eventually come back, and Apple did that in the mid-1990s. Others don’t. But nothing is forever. Regardless, that’s the uncertain future, and this is today.

One of the most popular complaints is that Apple is not involved in certain product categories, or isn’t enhancing an existing product line hit a certain price point. The most common demand is for cheaper gear. There’s the common perception that Apple is a manufacturer of luxury gear and hence overcharges customers. People who buy Apple must be victims of the alleged “reality distortion field” that surrounded the pronouncements of the late Steve Jobs. Of course, Jobs died in 2011, so maybe that field is about to dissipate.

The illusion that Apple customers are part of a religious cult should have vanished soon as the company became mainstream, beginning with the iPod. So iPod, iPhone and iPad are commonly recognized as synonyms for the usual and customary names of the products they represent. This is somewhat similar to saying Jello instead of gelatin. But that didn’t happen because Apple pulled the wool over anyone’s eyes.

Now the so-called “Apple Tax” has long been shown to be a false concept. True, Apple plays in the mid-range or high-end of a market. But that doesn’t mean overpriced stuff. In most cases, Apple gear is comparably priced to products from mainstream competitors. I’m not talking about cheap knockoffs in China and elsewhere, but Samsung, Lenovo, Dell, HP — you get the picture.

Yes, you can show me a $300 PC, or a $100 smartphone. But when you compare them to what you get from Apple at even their lowest prices, you’ll find they are in different leagues. High-end smartphones and high-end tablets, at least models where the manufacturer actually hopes to make a profit, are in similar price tiers to Apple. The same is true for Macs and similarly outfitted PCs.

In some cases, though, Apple gives you the better deal, particularly as go up the ladder and consider high-end systems. A Mac Pro tends to actually be lower in price that even a home-built PC with similar parts. And I remember a conversation I had once with a Dell product manager, when I asked him why a Mac Pro of that era was notably cheaper than any comparable Dell workstation. His response was an embarrassed agreement with the statement, without saying anything more.

The long and short of it is that there tends to be little or no profit in cheap tech gear. That doesn’t equate to affordable. If you can’t buy a new Mac, buy a used one. You can also get a cheaper iPhone — or one free with a wireless contract — if you’re willing to accept an older model with somewhat slower performance. There are also cheaper iPads, but that’s not so different from what you’d get if you buy any company’s low-end model.

Now the demands that Apple enter a new product category may seem perfectly logical. But Apple has traditionally been cautious about which product categories to enter, and how that market should be served. No doubt there are loads of products in Apple’s test labs that will never get the green light, or won’t until market conditions change. In short, Apple doesn’t release something unless or until it’s ready. Contrast that to all of these smartwatches that are, for the most part, simple add-ons to smartphones and not much more.

Yet another tired argument, one I dealt with in more detail in yesterday’s column, is whether Apple should be licensing iOS or OS X. Only the most blatant offenders in illogic can really believe any of this makes a lick of sense. They look at Apple in the eyes of Microsoft, failing to realize that Apple sells hardware, and Microsoft mostly exists from software sales. Sure, Microsoft is trying its hand at building more hardware, but it’s not that the Surface table has so far been successful. Yes, the Xbox has done well in recent years, but only after Microsoft squandered billions of dollars trying to make a go of it.

Of course, if the usual offenders among industry analysts and columnists actually attempted to do their research, they wouldn’t write “hit bait” articles. Or maybe they just don’t care, which may be closer to the truth.