One of the most significant features of Yosemite is Continuity, a proper and efficient way for a Mac to talk to another Mac, or to an iOS device. This is the sort of integration that you can’t find at Google, Microsoft or Samsung. The critics might regard this is a scheme on Apple’s part to perpetrate the infamous “walled garden,” but they aren’t features you ever have to use.

You can have a Mac, and use an Android smartphone of you like, or if you’re one of the few out there, one with Windows Phone or whatever it’s called nowadays, or even BlackBerry. By the same token, iPhone and iPad users aren’t at all locked into Macs. True, Mac market share is growing substantially, even when reported by IDC, which is notorious for underestimating Mac sales. But there are still loads of Windows users who haven’t made the leap. They choose to buy computing gear from multiple manufacturers.

But let’s consider a few of the Continuity basics that can be mighty convenient if you make the investment in all or mostly Apple gear.

So imagine SMS messages on a nearby iPhone being forwarded to your iPad, your iPod touch or a Mac. You can even have phone calls forwarded, and since many people these days exist on a wireless phone with no landline, that should cover the extent of it. No need to figure out where you left your iPhone when a call comes, if your Mac is close at hand. In theory, it should make handling phone calls easy, so long as you are willing to be stuck in a speakerphone mode or have a headphone at hand.

The other compelling part of Continuity is Handoff, which does what the name implies. You start an email or a document on your Mac, or iPad, and pick up where you left off on your iPhone. Choose any combination you prefer, and it’s an elegant solution for those of you who may not have the time to do it all on a single device.

Apple touts it as a great way for all your gear, at least those with an Apple label on them, to work closely together. When it works, it builds the famous Apple halo and can really make you think twice about not sticking with Macs, iPhones and iPads.

But don’t overlook certain limitations that may keep Handoff all or partly out of reach for many of you.

So you need iOS 8 to forward iPhone phone calls or manage Handoff. Monday’s iOS 8.1 update added support for SMS forwarding, but that doesn’t cover all the conditions. The fine print reveals that  millions of Macs simply cannot support Handoff. Now it’s perfectly true that Apple doesn’t exactly hide these limitations, but you have to look for them. The detailed list of supported gear, which include AirDrop’s shortcomings, can be found in a support document: http://support.apple.com/kb/PH18947.

The long and short of it is that, if you have a Mac built before 2012, Handoff probably isn’t supported. It requires Bluetooth LE hardware, no doubt chosen to allow for low-power persistent connections on a Mac note-book that won’t severely drain the battery. This limitation was discovered during the Yosemite beta process, but Apple said nothing about it at the WWDC when the new features were first demonstrated.

True, there are cheap Bluetooth LE dongles, but it would require some sort of built-in system support, perhaps in the form of a kernel extension, to work, assuming Yosemite would allow for it. I suppose Apple could provide support for that solution, though it may not be quite as stable or elegant as the built-in hardware. As soon as outside companies are brought into the picture, there’s the potential for trouble. I suppose Apple might consider offering their own line of approved Bluetooth LE accessories to deal with this problem, but the chances are slim to none.

Honestly I don’t know if it’s even feasible. What I do know is that Apple should do its best not to exclude so many Mac users from being able to use a key tentpole feature of Yosemite. I understand about not wanting to look backward, to want to exploit the features of newer hardware, and maybe entice more people to upgrade.

Whether or not Apple considers a change may depend on how well Handoff is accepted as more and more people upgrade to iOS 8 and Yosemite. My initial impression of Continuity is that it seems to work, but engaging it is awkward. For SMS forwarding to work on a Mac, you have to first setup an iMessage account in Messages before your iPhone settings can display that connection choice. Forwarding calls to your Mac requires checking a FaceTime preference that activates iPhone Cellular Calls.

But none of that is obvious unless you look to the appropriate app and app settings, check the Help menu, or search for online instructions. Wouldn’t a simple entry in System Preferences suffice? No doubt putting the settings in FaceTime and Messages ended up as the most logical choices by Apple’s OS developers, since these apps are responsible for these features to work.

But it’s early in the game. If Continuity catches on, perhaps Apple will make the initial setup a tad more intuitive. As to devising ways to add support for older Macs, I wouldn’t bet on it.

Predictably many of the stories about Apple’s record fourth fiscal quarter concentrated on diminishing iPad sales. It wasn’t so bad this time, some 12.3 million sales. Consider what the competition is doing, and it’s not pretty. But compared to last year’s results of 14.08 million, it didn’t look so well. During the quarterly call with the financial community, Tim Cook boasted of sales conquests in education and the enterprise, claiming sales were what they expected. He also said that channel inventory was drawn down in the September quarter ahead of the launch of new models.

That puts a positive spin on the matter. Certainly Apple delivered a credible iPad update last week. I expect the critics will find it insufficient, but Apple plays the long game. The new deal with IBM is clearly intended to move both iPhones and iPads, but it’ll take time before the impact is known. Meantime, Apple is clearly not panicking over short-term sales shortfalls. Indeed, Cook calls the current sales slump a “speed bump,” promising that things will get better moving forward.

In response to claims that the tablet market is saturated, Cook said, “we don’t see that.” He pointed to high first time buyer sales rates, but added that people hold onto tablets longer than smartphones. So Apple doesn’t know what the upgrade pace is yet. The tablet market for them is just too young to have a consistent picture of the replacement cycle. He continued to emphasize attempts to sell to the enterprise. There’s also cannibalization, as Cook said that some of those who might have considered an iPad bought a Mac or an iPhone instead. I expect the latter is more true with the arrival of the iPhone 6 Plus phablet, the perfect all-in-one mobile gadget for some. In short, he remains bullish on future success of the iPad.

The rest of the quarterly numbers were off the charts. Revenue for Apple’s fourth quarter was $42.1 billion with a net profit of $8.5 billon, or $1.42 per diluted share. Revenue for the year-ago quarter was $37.5 billon, with a net profit of $7.5 billion, or $1.18 per diluted hare. Gross margins increased from 37 percent to 38 percent.

So Apple returned to the “beat the street” mode, beating financial analysts, who predicted $39.85 billion revenue with $1.30 earnings per share, by a substantial and surprising margin.

After Cook announced that iPhone sales were off the charts last week, one might have expected the new smartphones to be the main stars of the lineup. But not quite. So sales were 39.3 million, compared to 33.8 million last year. Analysts expected 37.5 million.

But Cook reminded the assembled financial analysts that Apple remains way behind in supplying enough product, that Apple is working to boost supplies and meet demand. Right now, he remarked, “We’re not even on the same planet.”

This leads one to wonder just what iPhone sales might have been if Apple had a few million more to sell before the quarter ended.

Moving on, Mac sales really shined as Apple’s personal computers again continued to grow ahead of the PC market. So, some 5.5 million were sold, with the most success reported in the portable line. Last year’s Mac sales were 4.57 million for the comparable quarter, and analysts estimated 4.8 million. All this despite very modest refreshes for Macs this year aside from the brand new 5K Retina iMac.

Meanwhile, PC sales continue to suffer, and it’s a big question mark whether Windows 10, expected in the second half of 2015, will help. But Mac sales seem to be growing especially fast, reportedly achieving the highest industry market share since 1995. I do wonder, in passing, whether the Windows 8 debacle is making it easier for Apple to persuade people to switch to the Mac.

As to the Apple Watch, it appears that sales numbers will be merged with the iPod, Apple TV and accessory sales, such as Beats headphones, in a new category that will be called “Other,” when the company reports sales for the first quarter of 2015. So don’t expect that Apple Watch sales will be reported separately unless they are high. Meantime, Cook declined to estimate potential sales for Apple Watch, which goes on sale next year, saying he didn’t want to offer competitors any meat and potatoes to consider. But I wonder if Apple is emphasizing low expectations right now because nobody really knows the potential for a smartwatch. Clearly the current products haven’t done terribly well beyond a core clientele of geeks and so-called power users.

The Apple Watch may seem superficially similar to the others, but Apple clearly wants them to become not just smart gadgets but fashion statements. That’s the reasoning behind persuading fashion magazines to cover Apple, and why journalists from the fashion industry were present at the September media event where the Apple Watch was demonstrated.

For the December quarter, Apple is estimating revenue of between $63.5 billion and $66.5 billion. The Wall Street analyst community expected $63.5 billion, which means the stock price should be just soaring in the days to come. You can find more of Apple’s numbers posted online.

In any case, the attending financial people, as usual, shied away from the hard questions. Nobody asked, as a key example, about Apple’s reaction to a bankruptcy filing by GT Advanced Technologies, the company that built a sapphire production plant in Mesa with Apple funding. As it stands, hundreds of employees will end up unemployed as the plant winds down operations. It’s not known if GT ever produced a usable supply of sapphire for Apple’s needs.

Now when you look at lower-than-expected revenue reported by Google and Samsung of late, and Microsoft’s ongoing troubles staying relevant, it almost seems as if Apple has a pretty clear path for growth. Maybe some third-party company will have products and solutions that Apple can’t match. I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a startup somewhere with the potential to build the true killer products to compete with some of Apple’s offerings. But they won’t be the phantom iPad and iPhone killers that the media fantasizes about year after year.

Meantime, Apple is again firing on all cylinders.

With the arrival of OS X Yosemite, or OS X 10.10, on October 16th, tens of millions of Mac users were able to join all those beta testers in downloading the official, final release. This is the first time, since the release of the original Mac OS X Public Beta in 2000, that Mac users had a crack at trying out an unfinished OS. Well, maybe not quite, since the release version that arrived the following March was, according to Steve Jobs, intended for power users and early adopters. It was still beta quality software.

In those days, though, beta testers had to pay for the privilege, to the tune of $29.95. At least you got credit towards the release version. These days, Apple gives away OS X, and as part of a new policy of relative openness, a beta program was set up for up to one million Mac users who merely signed up and accepted the user agreement. However, it doesn’t appear that Apple ever enforced that cap, since a figure of more than a million users was cited at last week’s media event, which also included those iPad and Mac refreshes.

In theory, allowing loads of customers to beta test OS X should result in a more reliable release, assuming Apple received plenty of feedback about problems. In passing, I see some lingering issues, one possibly significant, another mostly an irritant, which survived the beta process but wasn’t fixed. But I’ll get to that shortly.

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Normally, when Tim Cook introduces an Apple media event, there are lots and lots of numbers. That’s Tim’s expertise, and you expect he’s working his Numbers spreadsheets overtime to select the results that are most favorable to Apple. That sort of happened during Apple’s Thursday media event, where new iPads and a 5K Retina iMac were introduced.

But when it come to the raw figures, all I heard were crickets. Yes, this presentation was shorter and smoother than last month’s, which was plagued by frequent interruptions in the video stream and, for a time, an audible simultaneous Mandarin Chinese translation. This time, playing to a smaller venue at Apple’s Cupertino, CA headquarters, video quality was smooth, never missing a beat. Software chief Craig Federighi even had a few moments to banter via telephone with comedian Stephen Colbert, who was introduced as a mythical security czar to deal with product leaks.

But what did we learn about the first month of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus sales? Cook said it was the best first month ever for the iPhone, “and I don’t mean by a little. By a lot. A whole lot.”

So what does that mean? How many is “a whole lot” anyway? Cook didn’t say, and some of the stories I read didn’t even bother to consider the unanswered question. The first two weeks of sales will be revealed on October 20th, when Apple presents the results for the September quarter, but some real numbers to whet our appetites would have been welcomed.

Still, Apple downplayed the negative connotations of other figures. So we know the total number of iPad sales since the product debut and the most recent year, but nothing about the impact of those declines that extended over two quarters. We know that nearly half the iOS user base has upgraded to iOS 8, but not that the rate is still behind the level achieved by iOS 7 in the comparable period. We do know that adoption level of the last major update to Google Android, version 4.4 KitKat, took almost a year to reach 25%. So Apple is still way ahead of the curve.

With the release of iOS 8.1 due by October 20, which will add Apple Pay support and expected bug fixes, maybe the adoption rate will begin to soar. But let’s not forget all the new gear, iPhones and iPads, which will ship with iOS 8.1 and later. I still expect to see a 75-80% overall adoption level by the time iOS 9 is released next year.

The cat was sort of out of the bag on the new hardware as Apple made a strong effort to boost the iPad lineup. The iPad Air 2, for example, is 18% thinner than last year’s “thinner” version, powered by an A8x processor, with an improved display, upgraded camera components, and Touch ID. Touch ID is also incorporated on the iPad mini 3. Apple also followed the iPhone 6 playbook by reducing the price of larger storage quantities. The standard 16GB configurations cost the same, but the 64GB and 128GB models are $100 cheaper than last year. An original Mac mini remains in the lineup at $249, which takes it closer to low-end Android tablet territory.

Apple appears to be pulling out all the stops to push more product in a flat market, but the critics will continue to regard the changes as little more than minor refreshes. At the same time, they can’t actually detail in any useful way what Apple should have done to make a real difference, and it’s not just about adding useless features.

The rumors were also correct about the arrival of a long-awaited Mac mini refresh. With higher performance and Thunderbolt 2, the mini returns to the price level of the original, $499. Apple’s more aggressive pricing makes it more difficult than ever to justify purchase of a Windows PC.

The major Mac introduction was the predicted 27-inch iMac with Retina display, referred to as a “Retina 5K display” by Apple because of its 5,120 x 2,880 pixel resolution. That’s sufficient to edit a 4K movie in Final Cut Pro and still have screen space left for the controls and menus. There are also significant display hardware enhancements to get all those pixels into a single display, along with speedier processors and graphics chips.

There’s a price penalty to get a “Retina 5K display” on an iMac, but not as much as you’d think. The basic 27-inch iMac remains in the lineup beginning at $1,799, and the high resolution version will start at $2,499, including a 1TB Fusion drive, which combines solid state and standard hard drive storage. Normally the Fusion drive is a $150 upgrade by itself, thus reducing the real price difference. A gussied up Retina iMac, maxed out with memory, along with a 4GHz Intel i7 processor, speedier graphics, and 1TB solid state storage, retails for $4,399, well into Mac Pro territory.

But consider that the cost of a separate 27-inch 5K display will run in the neighborhood of $2,500. That’s based on the expected pricing of the Dell Ultrasharp 27-inch display, which is due later this year. Getting similar high-resolution joy with a full computer inside starting at the same price doesn’t seem such a stretch.

Yes I do expect there will be fewer potential customers for the Mac Pro. But there will still be workflows where the superior processor and graphics of Apple’s workstation computer will be preferred.

Overall, the Mac lineup has expanded in a sensible way, with more choices for more potential customers. If reports that Mac sales are continuing to rise at a pretty good clip are true, Apple will have some terrific news to report next week during the conference call with financial analysts.

As part of the product intros, OS X Yosemite and Yosemite-savvy versions of iWork were released on Thursday for download, and the new Macs are shipping immediately in standard configurations. The refreshed iPads will ship late next week.

Still missing in action was news about the next version of Apple TV, which ought to have 4K support according to some predictions. But I suppose Apple could do that with a simple press release. If there are no significant feature improvements, a media event is unnecessary, and there would still be a new product to sell for the holiday season. But I’m not taking bets on whether this is going to happen this year.