Amid speculation that Microsoft was poised to release a new version of Office for the Mac soon came the final word. Yes, there will be a new Mac Office in 2015, with a public beta during the first half of the year and a final version during the second half. Curiously, the next Windows version will probably arrive at roughly the same time. In the past, the other platform received its upgrade first.

Microsoft’s excuse for not releasing a new version of Office for Mac, aside from service packs, since 2010 is the growing emphasis on mobile platforms. They somehow managed to release Office 2013 for the Windows in the interim, though it was a pretty tepid release. It barely supported touch PCs, even on ARM-based Surface tablets.

At the same time, Microsoft is heavily marketing the Office 365 cloud-subscription program, where you pay a monthly or annual fee and can be assured you’ll get all the updates without charge, Mac, Windows, iOS, etc. It’s actually quite a deal if you opt for the Office 365 Home package. It’s $10 a month or $100 per year, and you can install the suite on up to five Macs and/or PCs, and five iPad and/or Windows tables. You also get 1TB One Drive cloud storage per user. That price would be reasonable just for the cloud storage, even if you don’t really care so much about installing Office on more than a single computer.

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For quite some time now, members of the media have proclaimed Samsung the indisputable winner of the smartphone wars, the veritable king of the hill. Apple was doomed to niche status, so might as well get ready for the PC and Mac wars revisited. You know, that’s when Microsoft cemented its leadership long ago, and Apple was consigned, forever they believed, to niche status with tiny single figure market shares.

Yes, Apple’s worldwide Mac market share is still in the single digits, but the figure has now returned to levels not seen since 1995, before Windows 95 essentially took over the PC market for most people.

But it’s time for a reality check in the mobile business. In recent quarters, the conventional wisdom about a victorious Samsung has been turned on its ear. Big sales, sure, but wait!

So Samsung still manages to sell tens of millions of smartphones each quarter, roughly twice as many as Apple. In the last quarter alone, some 78.1 million handsets were shipped, representing an 8.5% decline in unit sales from the year-ago quarter, where some 85 million were sold. To add insult to injury, mobile revenue was down 34% over the year-ago quarter, which means that Samsung’s sales mix is moving downmarket. That’s not a good thing, except when the critics suggest Apple has to cut prices to stay competitive.

So the devil is in the details, and the details mean that customers continue to gravitate towards cheap Samsung handsets. In other words, Samsung is having a harder time moving high-priced Galaxy devices, which really hurts profits. It didn’t help that the flagship Samsung Galaxy S5 launched to lukewarm reviews, although some still extolled its perceived virtues, whatever they are supposed to be.

But while Apple reported quarterly profits of $8.5 billion in the past quarter, Samsung Electronics profits were a “mere” $3.8 billion, down 60% from the year-ago quarter. And remember that this number also includes profits for sales of TVs and appliances, not to mention the displays and chips that are sold to other tech companies including Apple. It’s still a profit, of course, something that Amazon rarely sees. But if Apple reported a profit decrease that high, you’d never hear the end of it. Even slight profit declines in past quarters were met by joyful yelps by critics who still refuse to take the company seriously.

Long and short of it is that, despite lower revenue and profits, with margins in the single digits, Samsung is still selling lots and lots of gear. It is still getting a pass from members of the media who focus on gadgets with lots of features, often ignoring the worth of those features in real world use. So we have the Galaxy S5 with a fingerprint sensor that’s not easy to use, and often doesn’t even work.

I remember my experience with the S5’s predecessor, the Galaxy S4, which was bloated with loads of silly features, such as Tilt to Scroll, which was supposed to do what the name implied. Well, at least when it worked. The OS, heavily laden with Samsung’s fluff, was endlessly buggy. Today, people complain about the lapses in iOS 8 or even iOS 8.1, but they don’t hold a candle to some of the problems you’ll encounter on an Android device, particularly one that’s stuffed with junkware.

Now I don’t want to seem as if I believe Apple is being deliberately persecuted by the media. Being very large and in your face with advertising and compelling products, Apple is a natural target. The competition wants to take them down, and the press is only too happy to see powerful companies fail.

But I’m not about to suggest that Samsung is doomed to failure. Clearly there are problems, and the product mix is moving in the wrong direction. Samsung may have reached the end of the line producing commodity gear with an overload of features that aren’t necessary or are barely functional. Presumably there are lots of brilliant engineers on board who are quite capable of delivering extraordinary, innovative products if management only had the vision to spur them on.

Don’t get me wrong, though! Samsung is still making pretty decent profits, and sales are nothing to be sad about. That Apple has managed to squeeze them at the high end is a matter of Tim Cook making smart moves, such as the hot-selling iPhone 6 series that’s still back ordered. iPhones with larger displays have very much sucked the air out of the competition. What’s more, newer handset makers such as Xiaomi, a hotshot company that considers itself China’s Apple, are making a big dent at the low end of the market.

So Samsung has to find new ways of doing things, or just hope Apple and Xiaomi will each fail in some fashion so they can get on with their business. That, however, doesn’t seem very possible right now.

If Xiaomi ever gets to the United States, I just wonder whether that company will be proclaimed the next Apple killer. Time will tell.

Usually when Apple releases a new OS, there are loads of problems that require a fast maintenance update. This was very much true with iOS 8, where Apple released 8.0.1, with a buggy “wrapper” that was killed in about an hour and replaced with 8.0.2, with a fixed wrapper, the following day. With iOS 8.1 things appear to have settled down for the most part. But the adoption rate, over 50%, continues to trail iOS 7 and even iOS 6. But it may not be the early-release bugs, which plagued the older releases too, but rather the difficulty in doing in-device upgrades on gear with limited storage.

With OS X Yosemite, Apple opened the beta process to over one million Mac users. Yes, there was a supposed limit of just a million, but I never heard of anyone being turned away. You just needed an Apple ID account, a heartbeat, approval of the non-disclosure agreement, and be good to go.

With such a large repertoire of mostly eager beta testers, you would expect Apple would get lots of feedback. Some of it not so well-crafted considering most beta testers aren’t power users, but maybe sufficient to spot and fix problems before they got out of hand. Don’t forget that earlier versions of OS X were afflicted with all sorts of ills. One year, with the Tiger release as I recall, some third-party hard drives crashed. Maybe it was partly due to third-party drivers, but still. Apple fixed their part quickly enough, but it still puts the lie to the claim that today’s OS releases are not as stable as in the past.

It’s not that Yosemite is trouble free. It appears that the most consistent problem, one I haven’t had mind you, impacts Wi-Fi connectivity. On the affected Macs, you can’t sustain a connection, and there are all sorts of home-brewed remedies. So some will use a script that resumes the connection. Some try to delete the settings files. Some reports fret that Apple has yet to acknowledge the problem, since a fair number of people might be impacted, but it may also be true that a 10.0.1 update is in the wings that will address this and other early release bugs.

Still, it’s not as treacherous as earlier OS X releases, so maybe the public beta paid off after all. Certainly the adoption rate is running somewhat better than Mavericks, which is quite promising.

The problems I’ve encountered are minor, but I’m troubled by the fact that they mostly existed during the beta process, developer and public, and weren’t fixed. It’s not that Apple didn’t know about them, since they were duly reported.

So with Safari, some pages continue to reload with an error message. It doesn’t happen with other browsers, but the list of offending sites is scattered. Some printer drivers need work. It takes a minute or two for my aging Xerox 8560DN solid ink printer to start processing a job. Normally the printer starts presenting the flashing green light within a second or two, and the first page of a document appearsd about five seconds later. But not so with Yosemite.

A newer printer, an HP OfficeJet Pro 8600 Plus, fares better mostly. But some print jobs, of mixed text and photo content, will stall for long minutes or just finish up with pages left unprinted. The download of the release version of Yosemite was accompanied by HP Printer Software Update Version 3.0, but the update doesn’t seem to have helped.

Mail’s lingering problem appeared in the middle of the beta process. After a while the total number of messages in a mailbox folder are no longer displayed. It can be fixed temporarily by quitting and relaunching Mail, but the display soon vanishes again.

True I have over 100,000 messages, dating back to the late 1990s, stored in a number of folders across several accounts. But I never had any problems with prior versions of Mail, and these symptoms do not appear to depend on any type of account. I have some hosted on my web server, plus iCloud, Gmail and AOL.

In addition to the Wi-Fi issues, some Yosemite users also report problems with Bluetooth connections, such as a curious lag effect with some input devices. The typical battery issues are also being reported, although Apple claims enhanced battery life with video playback in Safari.

For me performance is somewhat snappier than with Mavericks. Apps launch a bit quicker, and overall performance seems somewhat improved. It may all be due to performing a clean installation on a somewhat customized late 2009 27-inch iMac. But there’s one occasional glitch. When I switch apps to one in another virtual desktop — I use Spaces to carve them up into workflows — the switchover process momentarily stutters. Now maybe the older graphics are having  a problem keeping up, but it’s not consistent by any means.

The only issue that really bothers me is printing, particularly when I need to get a document out quickly and the output stalls on the HP. The lack of Handoff support, not being able to have my iPhone or iPad pick up the email, documents and what-not that I began on the iMac, isn’t serious enough to fret over.

Now if someone asked me whether they should upgrade to Yosemite, I’d give a qualified yes. A bug fix release that would eliminate most of the issues reported in this column would change that to a more positive verdict. But if the potential problems don’t bother you, upgrading to Yosemite ought to be a fairly seamless process.

Apple’s critics want to tell you that iOS 8 and the iOS 8.1 updates are seriously flawed, that maybe it was a rush job. Besides, aren’t people avoiding that update in droves? So how can the company continue to proclaim it a success? After all, the infamous Steve Jobs “reality distortion field” is gone, kaput.

The reality is rather more complicated, and I won’t gloss over legitimate issues. So there’s the adoption curve, which lagged seriously behind iOS 7 and to a lesser degree compared to iOS 6. Of course iOS 6 had its own problems, most particularly the seriously flawed release of Maps. In apologizing for that buggy release, Tim Cook even recommended that you try someone else’s Maps app, even Google’s. Oh the indignity of it all!

Of course, the worst problems with Maps have once since been fixed. The most important limitation appears to be the lack of direct support to public transit systems. Now you are directed to a third-party app, but I doubt that’s forever.

With iOS 8, some suggest there really aren’t too many changes, at least until you actually look at the list. But since visual changes are slight, all the improvements aren’t readily noticed. Typical of a new iOS release, there were reports of problems that included Bluetooth, particularly pairing with some cars, and Wi-Fi connectivity with some routers.

I paired two different iPhones with a Kia’s UVO (by Microsoft) handsfree system without a hiccup. Wi-Fi performance proved less certain. It went fine with a current model AirPort Extreme. Connection speeds dropped seriously on a Linksys WRT1900AC router, a hefty unit with four large antennas.

The fast release of an 8.0.1 updater was too fast when it came to quality control. Apple suffered the embarrassment of watching some 40,000 new iPhones being unable to connect to the cellular network and losing Touch ID. The update was pulled within a little over an hour, and Apple released a fixed version the very next day, 8.0.2. Customers whose iPhone 6 handsets were partly disabled could refer to simple online instructions to restore the units and get them working again.

But the “Apple does everything wrong” crowd was just delighted to complain, even though other companies have issued flawed updates that caused some level of havoc. Ask Microsoft.

With the arrival of the 8.1 updater, things settled down. That release also added support for Apple Pay, which has generated a little controversy because some large merchants are pushing for a different payment scheme and won’t support Apple. Clearly mobile payment systems have suddenly become important. They weren’t complaining over Google’s failed Wallet method because its presence was barely noticed.

But the adoption iOS 8 curve has increased of late, based on my regular tracking of the stats at Mixpanel Trends. As I wrote this column, iOS 8 was running between 54-55% (it was 52% at Apple’s developer site), and will likely continue to increase at a steady clip. After a year, iOS 7 hit a 91% rate, but with a number of older devices no longer supported, Apple probably won’t achieve near that level with iOS 8. I’ve been suggesting 75-80%, which is nothing to cry over. Compare those numbers to anyone else.

It’s still early in the game, though, and iOS 8.1 isn’t quite problem free. So the new “Hey Siri” feature, which allows you to activate the personal assistant with a voice command, remains flaky. Sometimes it just turns on. And, no, it’s not because someone is saying “Hey Siri” on the radio. It just happens, ghostlike. There’s no explanation.

The typically buggy Mail has a glitch or two from time to time. Sometimes it won’t swivel when I turn the iPhone around. Force quitting the app will often help, but clearly something funky is going on, since this happens on two iPhones that I’ve tested, including a friend’s iPhone 6. The app also quits on occasion, as do some others at random. But not often enough to present a serious impediment to getting things done.

Now hardly a day passes where one app or another receives an update. Some have had several since iOS 8 first arrived. These include the basic adjustments to support the larger iPhone displays, but others contain new features and the usual spate of bug fixes.

Overall, iOS 8 for me was pretty decent, and 8.1 is certainly somewhat better. Maybe it’s good enough for some who avoided the update before to take a chance. But I also see long-term iOS irritants that Apple hasn’t considered. You can, for example, sort all your apps on your Home screen under General > Reset > Reset Home Screen Layout. When I ran that function on an iPhone 5s, all of the apps on the other screens were alphabetized, but the ones on the Home Screen were curiously organized in a sequence that was nowhere close to alphabetical. Compass, Contacts, Tips and Voice Memos were placed in an Extras folder. Perhaps it was based on Apple’s concept of the order of importance.

When I tried the same maneuver on a third generation iPad, a slightly different lineup was deposited in the Extras folder, but the rest of the apps were put in a sequence comparable to the iPhone. Why not also offer some custom organizational options that are less clumsy than dragging and dropping an app icon into a new position?

But that’s a long-term iOS irritant. Besides, there are rumors that Apple is already at work on iOS 8.2 and 8.3, but that’s not a problem I expect to see them fix.