In those very old days when Apple didn’t seem long for this world, the media would generally remark on how Apple lost the PC wars and it was really time to pack it in. Instead, Apple simply persevered, and ultimately grabbed the most profitable portion of the market. Rather than selling tens of millions of PC boxes with little or no profit, four or five million per quarter with high profits made more sense.

As some of you recall, when Microsoft made a $150 million investment in Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs remarked that the PC wars were over. Microsoft won. But Macs continued to get better and more popular and, in recent years, have grown ahead of the PC market. These days, Microsoft dominates a dying industry. So Apple won by losing I suppose.

Now in recent years, you have been reminded again and again how Android dominates the mobile handset universe, and the iPhone is losing steam. But it’s not that Android earns most of the profits. Google gives it away, and only earns money from targeted ads. It’s not that the Android handset makers are rolling in cash either. Only Samsung seems to earn a decent profit from handset sales, and sales and profits are depressed over what they use to be.

Seems that Samsung is being hit on the low end by even lower-cost handset makers flooding the market, particularly in Asia, and at the high-end by Apple.

What is actually happening is that Apple continues to report iPhone sales growth and high profit margins. That’s hardly something that can be regarded as losing. Most of the growth in the Android market is at the low end, an area where Apple just won’t compete, except for models that are free with the typical wireless contract. Otherwise, iPhones aren’t very cheap, nor are they likely to be.

But when the media attempts to come up with what they regard as valid reasons for Android dominance, and what Apple must do to compete, they end up playing the fool. So there’s a recent article in a certain business publication that complains about iPhone battery life. It doesn’t matter that longevity is mostly competitive, except for a few models with very thick batteries. Worse, the comparison rated the capacity of the battery in an iPhone rather than the actual time between charges under normal use. It was all about the usual foolish emphasis on specs.

If you wanted to just use specs, you’d fail to notice that the A8 processor in the iPhone 6 series must be slower than the processors used in most other high-end smartphones. But the benchmarks continue to demonstrate that the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus are at or near the top in most every test category.

Over the years, the critics also insisted that Apple must add NFC, larger displays, and whatever features you can find in the typical checkbox.

Sure, Apple did finally decide to use NFC, but did so in a way that encompasses a full mobile payment system that includes a number of key partners. So you have the credit card companies, banks and retailers making it possible to use Apple Pay beginning in October. If Apple just added a chip without thinking through the consequences, it would present the same situation that existed with Android, where Google’s mobile wallet feature just went nowhere.

When Apple adds a feature, at least they try to make it work. Not always successfully at first, and few would regard Siri as perfect. At least it was labeled a beta for a long time as it matured.

Consider the larger displays. Samsung and other companies were delighted to diss Apple for sticking with a 4-inch display. The critics did as well, but perhaps didn’t consider the consequences of building a larger handset. Perhaps Apple should have gotten into the game earlier, but I suspect at least some customers would find even the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 to be a tad too large for their tastes. The 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus phablet, if you can find one, may look real great until you try to put it in your pocket or purse, or attempt to hold it with one hand.

Still, there’s a market for the larger iPhone that Apple needed to fill, even if there are usability concerns. Having done so, the reviewers report that the displays on the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are among the best on the market. So maybe Apple’s logic in holding off made sense. Whether sales were lost is a question mark, but that argument will no longer apply. Clearly the new models are quite successful out of the starting gate, so there’s not much to complain about.

Now it’s also true that a new Google OS, Android L, sporting an updated, or more refined, user interface, new runtime, enhanced notifications and improved power efficiencies, is coming later this year. Or at least that’s what’s claimed. Google is currently offering an L Developer Preview that appears to support just two models from the Nexus family.

In any case, however well the iPhone 6 does this year, it will never be good enough, they will tell you, to halt the Android avalanche. But does it even matter?

I’m sure a lot of you believe that the Apple II and the Mac were firsts in their categories, but they weren’t. Yes, it’s true there were personal computers with graphical user interfaces before the Mac debuted in 1984. An early version of a GUI debuted in 1973 on the Xerox Alto, developed at their PARC labs. The now-forgotten Alto sported a bitmapped screen and a desktop metaphor.

Before the Mac, Apple introduced the high-end Lisa in 1983, but it was too expensive for the mainstream. I do recall, though, that it was, for a time, offered as an alternate front end for phototypesetting systems from Agfa Compugraphic. So the Mac was the less expensive product, but the one that spurred the desktop publishing revolution. The critics naturally branded the Mac a toy not meant for serious business use, at least until Microsoft’s imitation, Windows, came to dominate the PC landscape.

Now you may not realize it, but there were digital music players before the iPod arrived in 2001. The critics branded the iPod overpriced, and predicted Apple’s foray into consumer electronics was fated to fail. The only failures, however, were all those iPod killers that never gained much traction in the marketplace.

The launch of the 2007 iPhone may have represented a unique development for Apple’s customers. But the business world had been using a BlackBerry, with that infamous and awkward physical keyboard. But the first BlackBerry appeared in 1999, so Apple was eight years late, right?

But Apple took the time to get it right and make it consumer friendly. It wasn’t long before the competition struggled to build their iPhone killers. If you look at the designs of Android ahead of the iPhone, they were clearly inspired by BlackBerry, the one time standard bearer. As was brought out during a certain patent infringement trial in Northern California, Samsung’s designs also took on the look and feel of the iPhone when its success was assured. Before then, a Samsung smartphone was mostly a copy of a BlackBerry.

For years, Microsoft touted the year of the tablet, but the year remained, for them, at some uncertain far future date. Most tablets were used by businesses, and they were thick, heavy, with clunky convertible touchscreens. These days, the typical Windows tablet is based on Intel’s reference Ultrabook design. The convertibles are just as clunky, but use thinner and lighter parts. Things really haven’t changed all that much, as Microsoft, even with the Surface 3, continues to pursue a failed vision.

When the iPad arrived in 2010, however, other companies took the hint and attempted to build their own imitations. At least Amazon’s tablets make sense as consumption/e-book reading devices sold at roughly cost. There doesn’t seem to be a valid economic model otherwise for selling gear with little or no profit.

But as you see, the iPad was definitely not first to market. This is quite typical of how Apple does things. They let others rush products to the stores often without long-range plans, or even considering if the products are even ready to put on sale. When Apple enters the game, it’s often with a daringly different product, one far more usable by regular people.

The forthcoming Apple Watch has also been sharply attacked for not being first to market. Since none of the existing so-called smartwatches has been a barn burner in terms of sales, does it really matter? If the Apple Watch becomes the gadget that defines the market, you will see Samsung and other companies attempt in typically awkward ways to come up with a scheme that marries a gadget and a piece of jewelry. If the past is a guide, they might get some traction with Apple Watch killers by selling the wanna-be gear more cheaply. Instead of 18 karat gold, maybe there will be a 14 karat gold Samsung.

You get the picture.

When it comes to the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, the main criticisms were, once again, that Apple was late to the party with larger displays. But that hasn’t stopped iPhone sales from mostly exceeding expectations. Initial sales of 10 million units for the first weekend is particularly impressive, considering that the iPhone 6 Plus remains in unusually short supply. Sure Tim Cook’s response, saying they could have sold more if they had more to sell, is nothing new. It often takes a few weeks for Apple’s contract factories to ramp up the production lines, and increase yields, particularly for new display hardware and assembly schemes.

You can argue till the end of time why Apple stayed in the 4-inch zone for four years, but the new displays are getting high marks for clarity, brightness, color accuracy and maximum viewing angles. Battery life seems pretty good, particularly on the iPhone 6 Plus; well, a certain New York Times blogger suggested otherwise, but that’s nothing to take seriously.

And, by the way, fingerprint sensors were also there before Touch ID appeared on the iPhone 5s. Indeed, the company Apple bought to develop them, AuthenTec, used to supply that technology to other companies. Siri also existed before the iPhone 4s appeared.

Do I need to say any more about this endless argument?

When Apple decided — some say relented — to produce two iPhones with larger display sizes, you can say the sucked the air out of the room when it came to the main reason to choose an Android smartphone. The argument was the fact that the iPhone was “stuck” at four inches, which some regard as a too small for such a device.

Of course, there was a time when the original 3.5-inch iPhones were considered large, and the competition sought to find ways to compete. An easy solution: A larger display. But that brings with it other problems, such as the impact to battery life and image quality. Not all solutions worked so well.

So it didn’t come as a surprise to see Samsung running ads informing you that they had large smartphones first. Other than to draw attention to the existence of the iPhone 6, I hardly see the value. If you are buying a product now, does it really matter who came first with a feature? After all, there were smartphones before the iPhone even existed, as if that matters, and it’s not as if BlackBerry still manages to succeed because they arrived before Apple.

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If you wanted to download iOS 8 for your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, Wednesday was messy. Real messy. Some of you may have waited hours to retrieve the 1.1GB file. In my case, on my first effort, for my iPhone 5s, it took several hours to grab that file on a 40 megabit broadband connection. The progress bar seemed to move at a snail’s pace when I attempted to perform the upgrade on the unit itself. An attempt to do the update on an iMac was no more effective.

I started at 10:30 AM Arizona time. The update wasn’t ready to install until after 3:00 PM, at which time I opted to perform a backup and do a restore to get the cleanest upgrade experience possible. Upgrading my wife’s iPad 3 took about two hours, and the effort to upgrade an Apple TV to the version 7, which sports an iOS-like flat interface, completed in three hours.

To avoid clogging the router, I performed each of these updates separately. Still, I’m a CenturyLink customer, and it’s possible they were throttling traffic from Apple’s side, though it was much faster by Wednesday evening. I’ve had problems of this sort with CenturyLink before, so I’m just saying.

If this slowdown persisted with other ISPs, that, in part, may be one reason why early estimates of the upgrade rate, based on online traffic, have fallen way below the heights achieved last year with iOS 7. One estimate put the adoption rate at less than 8% compared to 17% for iOS 7.

At the same time, there are widespread reports of higher-than-usual web traffic, so it would seem curious the adoption rate hasn’t yet hit the high marks, though it’s still early in the game.

Yet another obstacle: It appears that you need 4.6GB free space to install this update on an iPhone, so if you do it direct on a 16GB device, rather than using iTunes to retrieve the installation file, you might run into problems if free space is tight. Remember, the file has to be downloaded, extracted, installed and, in the end, the original is deleted.

Some are suggesting Apple needs to give up offering a 16GB iPhone or iPad, but it’s also true that the upgrade went just fine on my wife’s 16GB iPhone 5c. By evening, download speeds were many times faster.

Regardless, once you get through the standard setup questions, you may not see much has changed right away. But as you begin to use Mail, Safari and other Apple apps, you’ll see differences that are sometimes significant. If you look at Apple’s site, and all the articles written about iOS 8 posted online, you’ll discover a wealth of new features, far more than is the case for previous releases.

Still, you will no doubt read about the usual fear-mongering about Apple, this time that Apple “fanboys” aren’t rushing to adopt the new OS. We’ll see. Another explanation might be the fact that demand is so overwhelming for the new iPhones that lots of customers might just wait to experience iOS 8 on a new device. The same may be true for the iPad, although new models aren’t expected until late October — the rumors list Tuesday, October 21st as the ideal date for another Apple media event.

I did get a chance to try one of the new keyboards, SwiftKey, which is being offered free for now. The only downside I noticed is the offer to use Face-book or Google+ to back up your learning file. But that seems to defeat the purpose of the enhanced privacy offered by iOS 8. I opted not to accept this option.

You also have the choice of using either of two input schemes to type with SwiftKey. One is the standard method, and, as with the Apple’s QuickType keyboard, you’ll see suggestions in a banner above the keyboard. The other is to slide or swipe across the keyboard, which some prefer. But not me. The only annoyance is the fact that you have to activate the third-party keyboard in a per application basis, which is evidently designed to give you maximum flexibility. After installation, you switch keyboards via tapping and holding the globe icon to the left of the spacebar in any application. There you can make your selection.

For now I’ll leave it enabled in Mail, and see whether I adapt to it more quickly than Apple’s. At least there’s no cost in trying. Other keyboards, including a Swype keyboard, are usually $1.99, so it’s not a huge investment to test the waters. It’s interesting to note that keyboards are among the most popular titles in the early days of iOS 8.

But I still think most of you will stick with Apple’s keyboard and be totally satisfied.

In the meantime, I didn’t notice any difference in performance, although Touch ID seemed a tad quicker to activate on my iPhone 5s. I did experience one application crash, Mail, but otherwise everything seemed stable. Whatever worked with iOS 7.1.2 still worked. Unfortunately the GCN network streaming app, used to listen to my radio shows on an iPhone or iPad, is still broken.

But if you’ve held off upgrading, no harm in waiting a few more days for more app updates (they are coming thick and fierce) and perhaps an early fix for 8.0 release bugs.