When I began to give this column a title, I was really tempted to duplicate that of the “Dumb and Dumber” movie sequel, but I couldn’t bring myself to repeat the silly misspelling in the title. But when it comes to Apple’s critics, the ones who demand that Apple do this, that, or the other thing, all bets may be off.

One demand made over the years was actually shown to be potentially ruinous to Apple. After years of clamoring for the company to license the crown jewels, the Mac OS, Apple relented in 1995. The deal involved licensing the Mac ROMs and OS at a fixed fee per unit sold, starting at a reported $50. Both existing companies and new ones got involved, including Power Computing, an aggressive startup.

At the time, Macs had an estimated seven percent share of the market worldwide, close to where it is now with much higher sales numbers. It was hoped that market would expand by offering choices. Unfortunately, Power and other companies went aggressively after Apple’s core markets and essentially became competitors. So the market wasn’t expanded, it was simply diluted among a number of companies, resulting in lower sales for Apple. Since they obviously made far more revenue and profits from selling the whole widget, you could see where this misbegotten venture was going.

In 1997, newly minted as iCEO, Steve Jobs took steps to kill the program. Since the license covered Mac OS 7, Apple went to Mac OS 8, and only one cloner, Umax, received such a license.

In any case, clearly Apple’s taste for attempting this scheme ever again was soured. It may have worked for Microsoft, since the company mostly sold software — the more licenses sold the better — having hundreds of companies sell Windows PCs was a good thing. As the critics often forget, Apple’s main product is hardware. Why kill the golden goose?

But the critics never learn the lessons of history.

So there’s a renewed suggestion in a major online publication — best unnamed because the piece is far too dumb to take seriously — that Apple really needs to expand the iOS market in the enterprise by licensing the OS to other companies.

Now before you consider whether such a proposal makes sense, consider one key downside that the Android platform confronts every single day. That’s fragmentation. With iOS and the existing mobile product lineup, Apple has a small number of potential hardware configurations to support. The OS is optimized to run best with that hardware, nobody else’s hardware. Apple doesn’t have to deal with the consequences of having thousands of possible configurations, known and otherwise, to support for hardware, OS and apps.

This is a key reason why an iPhone or an iPad, with hardware specs that appear to pale compared to high-end Android gear, performs as well or better. This is the advantage of building the whole widget. But if Apple opens the door to licensing, that carefully crafted integration goes out the window. The elegant user experience goes with it.

And that’s before we come to the next problem, which is what sort of products do the critics expect to see if Apple doesn’t build them? More smartphone configurations? More tablet configurations? Larger, thicker models for dedicated enterprise tasks? What?

Just recently, it was announced that Samsung is cutting back on smartphone configurations. Having too many varieties ends up confusing customers, and Samsung is confronting flagging sales. It’s a lesson Apple learned in the 1990s with the ill-thought Performa lineup. They had so many potential models, some with very slight changes for a specific retailer, that even executives had trouble figuring them out.

While the iPad lineup is more extensive than usual these days, Apple learned the lesson well. The rest of the consumer electronics industry hasn’t, and the same is true for that dumb blogger who imagines that Apple will prosper by licensing iOS.

Now if we were talking about an unsuccessful company, perhaps the critics would have a point. Things would have to change. But whatever you think of Apple’s game plan, it has succeeded beyond the expectations of most industry analysts. Apple is still struggling to keep up with iPhone orders, and Mac sales have never been higher. True, Apple would be delighted to sell more iPads, but there’s no evidence that cloning is the solution, even if it’s restricted to allowing third parties develop custom models for specific industries.

As it stands, the iPad is by far the number one tablet in the enterprise. That’s a fact that seems to elude the blogger in question, who seems to think that Android and Windows tablets are better fits for business purposes. Apple’s new deal with IBM means the development of vertical apps for different businesses, and loads of new sales outlets and opportunities for iPad and iPhone. It’s early in the game, so predictions on the revenue impact to Apple are quite premature. Suggesting that Apple needs to license iOS to succeed, or at least expand in the enterprise, are also premature, not to mention devoid of logic.

Unfortunately, ill-informed pundits may believe they can solve Apple’s nonexistent problems. But the facts continue to show otherwise. Even worse, the blogger in question, in the middle of the article, confesses his bias in an offhand way. It seems he works for Microsoft, and thus his views about what Apple should do are colored by that experience. And until Microsoft tablets fly off the shelves, and there’s no evidence that will ever happen, I hardly think the observations from one of that company’s employees, sanctioned or not, should ever be taken seriously.

Those of you who have followed these columns in recent years know that I have never really warmed up to the iPad. Perhaps it’s just me, or my age showing, but I’m perfectly comfortable doing all of my major production work, such as audio editing, on my Mac. Trying to do the same on an iPad becomes a chore.

Now it may be the result of the fact that the apps on which I depend have no iOS equivalents. For basic audio editing, I use Amadeus Pro and Sound Studio. I call upon ID3 Editor to insert tags in the podcast versions of my radio shows, Transmit to send the files to my server, and Feeder to post updates to iTunes, Face-book, Twitter and other services. I have since added Join Together to help prepare high resolution ad-free versions of the shows for the new premium or “plus” services.

There are no doubt better apps to be found, but these work for me. I am productive and quite fast at what I do. So why do I need to force a change? Besides, integrating this workflow in basically a single app environment on an iPad would sharply reduce productivity. Since the work goes slower, so why should I force the issue? True, I might be more encouraged if Apple would release side-by-side multitasking for iOS.

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I remember it well. Apple released a spanking new OS. As soon as people started to install it, the complaints come in, lots of them. It’s unstable, this, that or the other thing doesn’t work. Why can’t I just go back to the previous OS?

What’s wrong with Apple anyway? Why is the quality going downhill? Is Apple on its last legs?

Now it so happens that I’m actually writing about Mac OS 7.5.1, sometimes known as System 7.5 Update 1.0, which was released in March 1995. It was replaced that summer with 7.5.2, said to be more stable, and later by a more unified release, 7.5.3, which ran on both regular and PowerPC Macs.

Of course, all that happened before Steve Jobs returned to the company, ushering in a new era of innovation and reliability. Well, sort of. It’s not as if a major OS release was any more stable. In fact, people always complained about problems during the first few weeks, until one or two fixer-uppers arrived. It doesn’t matter which year, it doesn’t matter whether it’s for the Mac or iOS. Apple must have lost its taste for quality what with all the problems.

Predictably, iOS 8 has been regarded as the buggiest release ever, bar none. Maybe that’s why the adoption rate flags behind previous releases, but it’s never that simple, and making assumptions about quality may be a mistake.

Do you remember the complaints about iOS 7? The new interface was rushed, incomplete, and Apple pushed it out to meet a deadline before it was fully tested. It took several updates to fix critical problems, give customers more options to change the interface excesses and deliver better performance for older devices, such as the iPhone 4. How soon people forget.

This year I read an article claiming that Apple reported more fixed bugs in maintenance updates during the first two months since iOS 8 came out, at least compared to any of its predecessors. But the number was calculated by guessing how many unmentioned problems were fixed with iOS 8.1.1. Otherwise, there would be no increase.

As with last year and iOS 7.1, iOS 8.1.1 promised improved performance for the oldest supported gear. For this year, that’s the iPhone 4s and iPad 2. Indeed, I read dozens of articles touting the reported improvements without actually putting the claim to the test. At the end of the day, Ars Technica did a set of tests on the iPhone 4s, and concluded that, except for Safari performance, particularly in reloading tabs, things ran slightly but not noticeably faster.

During this period, most of the media was simply quoting Apple’s claims of performance improvements without putting those claims to the test, or even alerting readers that the statement hadn’t been verified.

Moving to the Mac: The OS X Yosemite upgrade was, to me, mostly non-eventful. I didn’t notice any particularly serious problems, just a few minor irritants. The most serious was that the number of messages in large mailboxes in Mail stopped displaying after the app ran awhile. I know that Apple was alerted to the problem, but evidently has other priorities.

The OS X 10.10.1 update supposedly fixed problems with erratic Wi-Fi networking. For many it did, but for some it didn’t. But such situations are not unusual, and similar problems have occurred in past years. Sometimes one fix causes another problem, or it may be that several glitches are involved, and Apple repairs some of the problems to get a fix out quickly. So there will inevitably be a 10.10.2 update that will have even more fixes and changes. In fact, that version is even now reportedly under development, and being tested by Mac developers.

As a general rule, if you want to avoid the most serious early-release irritants, wait a couple of months before installing an OS upgrade from Apple, or even Microsoft and Google. You should expect that there will be last-minute glitches that are uncaught or bugs that were overlooked for some reason, which will be addressed in ongoing updates. It surprises me that this simple fact is overlooked with each year’s complaints about declines in software quality.

When it comes to Apple hardware, again things aren’t always as smooth as you might think. Some regard the alleged “AntennaGate” defect, where holding an iPhone 4 the “wrong way” would kill reception quality, as a serious problem should have forced Apple to recall and redesign the product. But just being safe and using a case would protect the sensitive spots. While never admitting anything was wrong, Apple did offer free bumper cases for a few months, and the complaints mostly stopped.

Apple did make some antenna design changes for the iPhone 4s that improved reception, but nonetheless maintained that all mobile handsets suffered reception problems if you held them in certain ways. Some were more sensitive, some less, but that’s how the technology works.

And don’t forget about those claimed bending problems with the iPhone 6 Plus. You don’t hear much about it anymore. Even Consumer Reports said the handset was sturdy enough, so where do you take it from there?

The real response to whether Apple is doing too much these days and making too many mistakes is nuanced. More people are buying these products, and more people are downloading software, so by sheer numbers alone, you might find a higher number of problems. In some years it may have seemed better, but I don’t see that the products you buy or download from Apple these days are necessarily less reliable than in the past.

It is very easy to forget past troubles, particularly if they were fixed in the normal course of events.

One quick way to pad content in an online or print publication is to publish someone’s press release. Sure, it may be adapted slightly to create the veneer of original reporting, but at its heart it’s just someone’s publicity spiel.

It may come from a politician, a government agency, a company, or any individual. But a press release is still a press release. It is not necessarily the truth, and is often just a sales pitch.

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with a press release, and getting coverage is the goal, but does that mean that the media should print them with little or no changes? What about some background perspective, second opinions, alternate points of view? What about a few terms and conditions, such as “reportedly” or “allegedly”?

So there are numerous published reports touting the improved performance on an iPad 2 or iPhone 4s with the iOS 8.1.1 update. This is an important issue, as using those devices felt like slogging through mud after installing iOS 8, at least according to numerous users. Ars Technica even ran their own application and startup launch tests that confirmed the slowdown, although it varied and was sometimes barely noticeable. But even a fraction of a second might mean the difference between the perception of snappy and lagging. The long and short of it is that it didn’t appear that anyone with the oldest supported devices should be considering the iOS 8 upgrade.

That may be one a key reason why the adoption rate is lagging, but the higher space requirements were probably more important. On a 16GB device it may be impossible, and it would have been nice if Apple took an early proactive stance and reminded users who encountered a warning about not enough space when attempting an in-device upgrade, that there’s always iTunes. They do it now at Apple’s site and in emails to customers.

Enough of the digression.

Before writing this article, I ran through dozens and dozens of reports about the iOS 8.1.1 update. I did learn something not indicated in the terse release notes, that at least 500MB of storage was being saved on at least some devices. That may be the difference between being able to install the update or being forced to delete your stuff first to make room.

But what about that promise of a performance boost for the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S? Is the promise real or just a claim?

You can’t really tell from most of the articles I read. Regardless of the source, and some major news outlets copied the information directly from those release notes, it doesn’t seem that reporters were actually inclined to put the claim to the test. While I wouldn’t presume Apple is lying, they have been known to exaggerate. Even if there is a performance boost, it may not be enough to approach that of the iOS 7 experience. It may not even be consistent.

Meantime, one other article quoted some anecdotal reports from users on Apple’s support site indicating a genuine speed up. While far from scientific — and one’s imagination might color a subjective reaction — it is encouraging. If the trend continues, iOS 8.1.1 may indeed be the magic bullet to allow older hardware to perform reasonably well.

At least Ars Technica, having tested the original iOS 8 upgrade and found it wanting in terms of performance, repeated those tests with iOS 8.1.1. Unfortunately, a new set of benchmarks failed to demonstrate much of an improvement. These results serve as a huge indictment against the quality of all those articles that accepted Apple’s claims without putting them to the test.

So reporters should have followed traditional practices, phrasing their articles carefully so as not to imply a set of facts that were not confirmed. They should have inserted such qualifiers as Apple “promises” or “claims” performance improvements. That would make it clear to readers that the statement hasn’t been tested. Instead, the story was ran as if it were true without meaningful comment.

That’s not journalism, not even close, and don’t expect any retractions.

So as far as I’m concerned, I think that significant claims from a company with commercial interests should be put to the test, particularly if they impact a customer in a noticeable way. Yes, some results might reveal fine differences in specs or performance that most people don’t notice, and it would be appropriate to provide an appropriate explanation so you know what to expect in the real world.

True, such shoddy reporting isn’t confined to the tech business. In the world of mainstream journalism, quoting someone’s political speeches without providing balance or perspective is common. Sometimes the effort to offer balance is extreme or lazy. So an alternate viewpoint is presented, even when that viewpoint carries no logic or facts behind it, but the reporter is off the hook. They’re being fair to everyone by taking no sides and abandoning common sense.