It almost boggles the mind to realize that an article with a headline praising the OS X 10.10.1 update is essentially not much more than yet another an ill-informed attack against Apple. It almost seems as if the stock words were “borrowed” from other critical rants, and somehow strung together incoherently to express a point that is about as far from reality as you can get.

I won’t give you the link. The author in question, writing for a major web portal, doesn’t deserve the hits. But if you happen across the piece by accident, you will likely agree with me that it’s tragically misinformed.

It starts with the claim that Apple’s updates have become “Windows-esque,” as if Apple never before had problems with initial OS releases. Never! Well, hardly ever because it’s just not so. This argument is in keeping with the common meme that Apple’s software quality has declined since Cook over because he’s the supply side person who focuses mostly on hardware. Well, he doesn’t actually design hardware, and you can’t go to Asia to find component parts for an operating system obviously.

I realize it’s easy to remember the bad things and not the good things, but few would argue that every single major OS release from Apple, either OS X or iOS, has come with irritating glitches that required relatively fast fixes. Back in the days of OS X Tiger, one bug, interacting with third-party drivers for external hard drives, could even destroy the device’s partition map. That meant you’d lose your data and perhaps have to go to a costly data recovery shop to fix it.

The problem was quickly repaired, both Apple’s and the third-party drivers. But it wasn’t so pretty for me, because it happened on the very day I was attempting to sell an old Mac. When I saw the drive disappear from the desktop, without an easy chance to recover, I had to ad-lib real fast to devise a sensible excuse. It’s not that I was selling the drive anyway, so I simply said it was on its last legs and don’t worry about it. They believed me, handed me the cash for the Mac and left.

I heard no complaints.

Despite the facts, that ill-informed blogger goes on to claim that Steve Jobs was perfect, with an “insane attention to detail, extreme quality control, innovation, design, excellence, and a true standard of the very best.”

Except when hardware required extended warranty programs to repair persistent problems, or when they needed to rush out a fast fix for a serious OS failure. But some people never let facts get in the way.

So we are told that Tim Cook is nothing less than the “New Coke.” Or that “Tim Cook’s Apple is a fail.” Not a failure, a “fail.” It doesn’t matter that the company reports record sales and profits and has the highest market cap of any company on the planet. It’s a failure, and “Apple needs to reboot, clear its memory registers, reinitialize, POST, and nudge itself back to the Job days of excellence.”

Or maybe the blogger in question cleared his memory registers and forgot what really happened.

But let me go on. I hope you’re having a good time, because I’ve just gotten started.

So our poor, pathetic blogger fancies himself a mind reader. He says, “Steve Jobs would never have released the iPhone 6. The iPhone 6 is so bad that my oldest son, who’s in college, refused one and chose the iPhone 5s instead.”

Bad?

How so? Is it because of a poor design, poor performance, bad display, frequent breakdowns? Remember, the smaller iPhone 6 isn’t the model falsely blamed for being easy bend in your back pocket. You see “bad” is never defined. Is it maybe just too large for some people? That is quite true, but it doesn’t make an iPhone 6 bad.

What does? Inquiring minds want to know. Besides, who does anyone dare to assume what Steve Jobs — famous for changing his mind on a dime — would do in any situation were he still alive?

Unfortunately it takes a while to get to the meat of the article, about OS X Yosemite, and why it is so good. But first let’s find out why was once so bad, and apparently the blogger updated to OS 10.10 and encountered “lackluster performance.” In what respect? App launching, frequent spinning beachballs? What? The devil is in the details and there there are none.

But we do discover that the magical Yosemite 10.10.1 update made his “Mac mini awesome again.” Praise be! It’s faster than ever, proof that Yosemite is, in the end, an OS that can perform miracles once the fixes are in place. We don’t, by the way, know which Mac mini he has other than the fact that it contains 4GB RAM, and a Micron M500 SDD of unmentioned capacity.

In passing, I wonder what he would say about Apple’s decision to prohibit third-party SSD extensions that enable the key TRIM feature that ensures continued great performance. But that may just be too complicated for him to understand. There are even hacks to fix it, and that’s even more complicated.

Regardless, I’m real happy that his Mac mini has found its mojo, but I do wonder what Apple did to cause this miracle. You see, the bill of particulars for the OS 10.10.1 only lists this item that might impact his computer, one that “Addressed an issue that could prevent some Mac mini computers from waking from sleep.”

So does the inability to wake from sleep somehow create the impression of lackluster performance? If the Mac mini stays asleep there’s no performance, right?

I suppose that the original installation might well have been faulty in some fashion, and the files replaced in OS 10.10.1 undid the damage, but it’s hard to know from an article that’s so short on critical details, but rich with lurid prose about Apple’s endemic failures.

So we therefore consign yet another blog to the trash bin of meaningless rants.

It’s a curious world. On the one hand, Samsung has been sued a number of times by Apple for alleged theft of intellectual property. Samsung was charged with slavishly copying Apple’s exclusive designs, mostly the iPhone and various product features, and they fought back claiming Apple had, in fact, illegally used some of their intellectual property.

By and large, Apple won. But Samsung has yet to pay a single dollar for being on the losing side, and appeals will probably keep the cases going till the end of time, or until the two companies decide it’s time to settle and get on with their existences. Supposedly both have tried to negotiate a way out without success, although they have at least agreed to halt the court actions still active outside of the U.S.

Yet, all that nastiness played out at the same time Apple and Samsung were doing lots of business together. Apple pays Samsung billions of dollars year after year to build raw parts, such as A-series chips, and supply flash memory and other components. It’s a major source of income for the South Korean giant, but there have been ongoing reports that Apple was trying to ditch Samsung as a supplier and take its business elsewhere.

After all, why send huge checks to a company that is slavishly coping their most important products? It hardly seems to make a lick of sense.

Until fairly recently, Samsung was on a huge growth curve, seemingly unstoppable. The largest number of mobile handsets had Samsung labels on them, quite a change from the times when Motorola and Nokia ruled the roost. And we all know what happened to them.

But Samsung has succumbed to the same loss of rapid growth, and has shown reduced profits and lower handset sales in the recent quarters. They are being hit at both ends of the market, from Apple on the high-end and several makers of even cheaper gear at the low end.

Of course it’s not as if the media is making such a huge deal about it. I mean if Apple’s sales dipped even a tiny fraction, you’d never heard the end of the fear mongering.

Samsung, however, exists with a different set of rules, and it’s not the only one. So I don’t hear all that much chatter about the near-impossiblity of Amazon making anything close to a decent profit; the last quarter had huge losses. And Amazon also doesn’t say much if anything about the sales of its Kindle gadgets. They seem to be doing well and all I suppose, but the figures you encounter in the media are largely industry estimates that may or not be close to the truth. What is certain, however, is that the Fire Phone, the first Amazon handset sold for a decent amount above the cost of manufacturing, failed so much so quickly that the price was quickly reduced to 99 cents.

In any case, I wonder if the latest news about the role Samsung is rumored to play in supplying components to Apple indicates the potential for a final legal settlement. According to The Korea Times — which doesn’t necessarily have a record of getting such things right — Apple has signed up Samsung to manufacture most of the A-series processors for next year’s iPhones and iPads.

This would presumably mean an A9 chip, and the agreement is reportedly going to include an 80% share of Apple’s chip production in 2016. Samsung also reportedly builds 40% of the A8 chips used in the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.

The new deal will include production in Austin, Texas, New York and South Korea. It means that Samsung’s piece of Apple’s chip production pie is actually increasing compared to what Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company is reported to receive.

To be sure, it’s clear few outside of Apple, Samsung and TSMC know the specifics about any deals, or why component allocations move from one supplier to another. It may be for practical reasons, such as price, timely delivery and component quality. Few dispute the fact that Samsung builds quality hardware, even if their consumer products aren’t terribly inspired.

But this also assumes the report is true, and that may be difficult to confirm regardless. If true, the order increase may not mean that Apple plans to bury the hatchet with Samsung. It could be simply about getting the parts Apple needs for the best terms, and that might present a choice made regardless of any lingering legal issues. It’s not that Apple hasn’t made deals with competitors and former competitors over the years.

Or maybe Samsung is being overly aggressive about attracting business from Apple because consumer products, particularly mobile handsets, aren’t doing as well as hoped. Something has to give, so Apple responds in a proper businesslike fashion. At the end of the day, Samsung simply needs to boost revenue and profits. End of story.

There’s a published report from IDC claiming that cheaper tablets are driving growth in the market at the same time that iPad sales have continued to decline. So total shipments, which include those $59 pieces of junk sold at Walmart, reportedly grew 15% in the last quarter. The average price dropped to $294, 13% less than last year.

Now I don’t presume to know what customers expect from cheap tablets, or whether the decisions are made on factors other than price. If a tablet is meant as a cheap consumption device, for reading and watching videos, I suppose there are plenty of choices. Consider an Amazon Kindle, which is decent enough for such purposes. Amazon manages to keep the prices low by giving up on potential profit, hoping that sales through their online storefront will make the difference.

I wouldn’t guess how well the Kindle is doing, except to say that Amazon doesn’t break out the sales figures. We do know that the Fire Phone was a huge failure, and it was the one Amazon gadget that was sold for full price at first. It’s now 99 cents with a two-year AT&T wireless contract. In any case, it’s not that Apple is unaware that people are looking at price tags when they buy tablets, even if they are giving up on performance and the ability to use nearly 700,000 tablet-optimized apps from the App Store.

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In a recent column I covered the ongoing fear-mongering about alleged OS X and iOS security problems. Over the years, you’ve no doubt read lurid headlines about potential security leaks that might be exploited, only they generally aren’t. Most are based on social engineering, where you are enticed to visit a site, or just stumble on the place. You tap or click the wrong link or download something you shouldn’t download, and suddenly bad things might happen.

I recall, for example, Mac Defender, when people were convinced to pay for fraudulent software that pretended to remove a virus (non-existent) allegedly discovered on your Mac. This rogue security app, from 2011, actually had thousands of takers. Apple soon blocked it with a security update.

While some reports spoke of Mac Defender as the first major malware outbreak on the Mac, that’s just not so. In the days before the arrival of OS X, there were various virus infections, but they were few and far between. I should point out that I first installed virus protection software in the late 1980s after I bought an infected Mac app on a floppy disk from a legitimate software retailer. It was just one of those things, and it never happened again, although there were occasional malware issues on the platform.

But nothing near a virulent as what you’d find routinely on the Windows platform, where the number of malware variants long ago exceeded 100,000. But if it happens on a Mac, it has to be big news. Just the prospect of claiming that Apple’s security policies are inadequate is enough to make the critics salivate.

So Thursday came a warning from U.S. Department of Homeland Security to be careful when you install or upgrade apps on your iPhone or iPad. Why? Well, there’s supposedly a vulnerability that impacts both iOS 7 and iOS 8 that allows Internet criminals to install bogus apps on devices used in a business setting. Such devices are configured via Apple’s enterprise provisioning so that you can install dedicated corporate apps from a company’s site.

According to a security company, FireEye, Apple has allegedly known about this vulnerability since July 26. While I think warnings of OS X malware outbreaks from security companies are sometimes designed to sell you an app you may not need, I’ll take this particular warning for iOS as something serious.

So FireEye has finally decided to publish information about what they have labeled “Masque Attack.” What’s a good trojan if it isn’t given a flashy name? It actually rhymes with that other notorious malware outbreak, Flashback, which was a Java security flaw that, because Apple failed to deploy the fix for a few months, allegedly impacted up to 600,000 Macs..

In any case, Masque Attack doesn’t do its nastiness unless someone is convinced to install the imposer app, which may be presented via a link. Otherwise, the sky won’t fall, and that only makes it all the more important that people be careful about downloading stuff only from trusted sources. With a standard iPhone or iPad, you are going to get your stuff from the App Store, so installing a bogus app is essentially a non-issue. Well, unless you decide to jailbreak your iOS gadget, in which case all bets are off.

So how do you protect yourself from getting bogus apps?

The answer from US-CERT, which is the operational arm of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Security Division, simply says you only install apps from the App Store or directly from the company for which you work, if they are using custom iOS apps. Further, don’t tap “install” from a web site, and, “when opening an app, if iOS shows an ‘Untrusted App Developer’ alert, click on ‘Don’t Trust’ and uninstall that app immediately.”

Apple’s official response essentially echoes government, “We designed OS X and iOS with built-in security safeguards to help protect customers and warn them before installing potentially malicious software. We’re not aware of any customers that have actually been affected by this attack. We encourage customers to only download from trusted sources like the App Store and to pay attention to any warnings as they download apps. Enterprise users installing custom apps should install apps from their company’s secure website.”

You see, common sense!

Nothing in this warning scenario presents any new or unusual situation. There will be malware threats from time to time, but they largely rely on social engineering. So you might receive an email asking you to update your personal information at your bank or other financial institution. The message might even have some urgency to it, such as protecting your security. But rather than tap or click a link in the email, go directly to the bank’s site and check your account directly. Don’t assume a link that appears genuine is the real thing.

When it comes to getting software on an iOS device, unless you really know how to handle yourself in such situations, the romantic ideal of jailbreaking your iPhone or iPad is not something you really want to try. Once you leave Apple’s walled garden, all bets are off. It’s the wild wild west so far as any element of app security is concerned. Yes, you might really want to try out an app that Apple won’t approve, but consider the downsides.

Now Apple’s critics will say the sky is falling because of Masque Attack, or that it represents an entirely new threat front for the platform. But remember Apple’s statement about nobody actually being affected by this threat. So not much has changed.