Some tech sites with no imagination whatever issue the same tired nonsense every year when Apple is about to issue a major product update, be it software or hardware. There’s always suspicion, the warning how bad things are apt to happen, or that the product isn’t good enough. So maybe stay away or wait for things to settle down.

Curious that they seldom post warnings of that sort about the latest stuff from Google, Microsoft or Samsung.

So one iOS 8 review suggested it was a half-point upgrade because, well, it had essentially the same interface as iOS 8, although there are lots of enhancements. The writer in question evidently forgot about the hundreds of major improvements, such as the addition of HealthKit and HomeKit, not to mention the ability to install third-party keyboards. That has been one of the major complaints about iOS.

When you consider the full package, you’ll find the extent and number of changes is amazing compared to anything the competition has devised. But Apple continues on the annual upgrade path. This time, they delivered more than twice as many new features compared to previous iOS upgrades. Apple claims hundreds, although the list I saw only mentions less than a hundred, but it’s admittedly far from complete.

Some of the basic cautions, though, are just plain common sense. The key caution is to hold off on the update in case there are serious early-release bugs. It has already been reported that the first group of HealthKit apps have been held back by Apple until the end of the month to fix some bugs, but that shouldn’t be a deal breaker. There are always glitches when doing big things.

In addition, early and preferred reviewers of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus report some app crashes and other bugs, and I’ll assume their test gear was outfitted with the iOS 8 GM, though I suppose it’s possible further changes were made before the OS went live at 10:00 AM Pacific on Wednesday in the U.S.

Yet another story questions the value of installing iOS 8 on older hardware, but some of the cautions border on the extreme. Take Touch ID. Apple’s fingerprint sensor was only installed on the iPhone 5s. Until the new iPhones arrived, no other models supported that capability. Is that a reason not to install iOS 8? What about all those other improvements?

Other reasons include lack of 64-bit support, which again is restricted to the iPhone 5s and this year’s new models. Do I have to go on?

You’ll no doubt fare worse on an iPhone 4S, the oldest supported model, which was introduced back in 2011, the day before Steve Jobs passed. This was the first time Siri appeared on an iPhone, and it’s the last iPhone with a 3.5-inch display. It also has an A5 processor, three generations behind the current chipset, so you expect things will run slower.

Ars Technica did a set of benchmarks and found that apps commonly launched from about a quarter of a second to a full second slower. Take a breath and the difference is not significant. All right, so it took more than three seconds longer to do a cold boot, which isn’t something you do on an iPhone terribly often. Indeed, the fact that performance is only slightly degraded isn’t such a huge deal. As with the iPhone 4 and iOS 7, it’s very possible Apple will make it snappier with a future maintenance update, but this is still the last hurrah for the 4s.

In short, the improvements in iOS 8 appear to make it a worthy upgrade even for the oldest supported iPhone, and the downsides aren’t so serious. Yes, you’ll encounter slightly slower app launch times, and the lack of support for features that depend on newer hardware, but that shouldn’t be a serious impediment to installing the update. Macworld Senior Editor Chris Breen wrote an article that contains a number of suggestions for installing iOS 8, and a fallback scheme to revert to iOS 7.1.2 if things go awry.

One thing that’s certain: When you try to download a major update of this sort on the first day, you expect download glitches. Tens of millions of iPhone and iPad users were out there trying to get ahold of the update, attracted by the huge amount of publicity over the past three months. No wonder the servers were slammed, although you hope Apple is finding better ways to boost capacity. Remember that OS X Yosemite, a larger update when it comes to file size, is coming in October.

In any case, the fear-mongering about iOS is less significant than a curious non-review I read about the new iPhones at a certain tech site. When I first saw the headline, I got the impression this was going to be a highly favorable review, but it was more about not being one of the preferred tech journalists who receive the first review samples from Apple, and how writing positive reviews will guarantee that status continues.

I would prefer to think that these journalists have a lot of influence in the industry and to the public, and thus they are placed on the top of the list. The article implies they write favorable reviews to get more free stuff, but that’s an attack on their ethics.

The only interesting comment in this non-review is about Apple being able to achieve a balance of features and usability with the iPhone, implying the new models, which the author has not has yet used, hit the mark better any previous model except for the original in 2007. Maybe, but I wouldn’t express any such conclusion without actually having the products at hand for a reasonable test period. But maybe that’s just me.

Just so nobody’s confused about this. U2 is just a rock and roll band. While the rock culture has had a huge impact on the lives of many of you, at the core, it’s just some singers and musicians making music. Yes, as with some other bands, they do engage in some worthy charitable activities. They don’t just take the millions they earn from recordings and concerts and live large.

Understand that I’m not an avid fan. I like some of their songs, and I really found the intro track from “Songs of Innocence,” “The Miracle (Of Joey Ramone)” to be quite a catchy tune. It doesn’t break any musical ground, and the production values, though pop slick, are strictly conventional, but it’s eminently listenable. So I fully expect that the album, their first in five years, would have been a huge hit even if it wasn’t part of a reported $100 million marketing campaign for the band and, of course, Apple.

The gimmick, however, was to make it free for all 500 million iTunes users. Free! That means you won’t be charged a penny for it, and, in fact, you don’t even have to bother downloading the album if you don’t like U2 or rock music. Get the picture?

Predictably some Apple customers, and the media, complained that Apple was somehow infringing on their personal accounts by entering a link to a product they didn’t want or request. I suppose there’s inherent logic in such concerns, particularly in light of the security issues over  the theft of explicit photos from celebrities because their iCloud accounts were hacked.

So there were probably fears Apple had somehow invaded their personal accounts to offer the album. It was regarded as not just an invasion of privacy, but malware in the strictest form of the term. While I don’t know the mechanism involved, I suspect it was done in a way that didn’t actually tap anyone’s personal account information. It was all just a backend update of some sort that made it all happen.

You see, Apple makes a big deal of being concerned about your security. This came to the fore in light of that iCloud issue — which was a matter of stealing usernames and passwords, not the result of a security leak — and the forthcoming launch of Apple Pay. Can you trust Apple to protect your personal information?

Tim Cook’s argument, when he’s asked, is to emphasize what Apple does to ensure your security and to explain that the company earns money from selling products and services. They don’t track your personal information and sell it to advertisers as Google does. To Google, to repeat the cliche, you are the product. That’s a huge distinction. Indeed, Google hasn’t fared too well selling hardware. Sales of Google Glass, in endless beta, are extremely low. A few million people have bought Google’s $35 Chromecast, but the real money comes their way from targeted ads.

The problem here is one of perceptions. Apple has the perfect right to give things away, even though U2 is earning millions from the transaction. OS X and iOS are free, and your new Mac, iPhone or iPad comes with iLife and iWork at no extra cost. So there’s nothing wrong with providing a rock and roll album as part of the bundle. After all, do you feel put upon when you find that you already own a copy of iLife and iWork as the result of getting new Apple gear? With the 16GB iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, in fact, they will both be optional downloads; they will be preloaded on higher capacity models. Is that also an infringement on your rights?

In response to the concerns, Apple has provided a tool to help you remove the U2 album from your Purchased list. You will have until October 13 to download the album direct from iTunes if you still want a free copy. Otherwise you’ll have to pay for it if you change your mind later.

The sole problem may be in the way Apple handled this gift. During that awkwardly scripted back-and-forth between U2 frontman Bono and Tim Cook, it was “revealed” that Apple had the power to give all iTunes users the album in a mere five seconds. Well, perhaps it took a little longer to accomplish, but maybe the powers that be didn’t think it through. Perhaps it would have served everyone better to simply send an email out to iTunes customers, or put up a huge banner on iTunes so you’d have to option to download the album if you wanted to.

Indeed, a little common sense and a less pie-in-the-sky approach might have avoided the negative backlash. Or perhaps not, since Apple’s critics would still find something wrong to complain about. In any case, it’s all over now. Download it or not, remove it or not. It’s all up to you, and nobody is infringing on your personal space or your financial data.

Do you remember how the media responded to the release of the original Bondi blue iMac in 1998? It was for its time regarded as severely underpowered, containing what was essentially the innards of a PowerBook with a CRT display. Apple’s decision to ditch most legacy ports in favor of USB was regarded as a huge negative.

Despite the skepticism, the iMac was successful enough to breed PC imitations; imitations that were so close in form factor that Apple had to go to court in one case, that of the E-Power, to halt the practice. Few remember the E-Power.

In 2001, the iPod was regarded as overpriced, with little chance for mass-market success. At $399 for 5GB of storage, it may have indeed seemed too expensive, but that didn’t stop customers from making it successful. Over time, Apple added Windows support courtesy of the release of iTunes for Microsoft’s platform, and soon owned the digital music player market. iPod killers came and went and none, not even Microsoft’s Zune, managed to dent Apple’s dominance.

Don’t forget how many industry and media pundits touted the Zune as inevitably destroying the iPod’s dominance, and how almost none of them backtracked when that didn’t happen.

In a move typical of the skepticism about new Apple products, don’t forget the initial reaction to the iPhone launch in 2007, and the guffaws from the likes of Microsoft’s then-CEO, Steve Ballmer. Today, the iPhone is Apple’s most popular product, and demand for the new models is off the charts.

All right, iOS doesn’t have the market penetration of Android, but no single Android smartphone outsells the top-of-the-line iPhone.

And do you remember when the iPad was regarded as little more than a larger iPod touch?

So it stands to reason that there will be plenty of skepticism about the Apple Watch. What does Apple know about wearables anyway, and about watches specifically? Of course, similar questions were raised about the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, so this is nothing new.

It’s also curious how the media wants to use the arrival of a new Apple gadget, in a new category, as fuel for their flames. Sure, it’s perfectly legitimate to question whether there is a large audience for a smartwatch, even Apple’s variation on the theme. You have to wonder whether people who get cheap watches, or no watch at all, will want to buy one. At the same time, will connoisseurs of fancy timepieces be tempted?

Certainly it seems clear Apple comes to the fight well prepared. New designers and other executives from the fashion industry have come aboard, affording a wider scope of talent with which to create the product and enter a new market.

It’s also true that some of the early comments are based on sheer stupidity. Take the one that Apple shouldn’t be limiting the ability to connect an Apple Watch to recent iPhones. Isn’t the iPhone a minority player in the market? Why not follow the iPod playbook and make it available for Android users too?

Why indeed! But let’s bust the speculative bubble with a little logic.

The iPod required iTunes, so Apple made iTunes available for Windows. That app kept you within Apple’s ecosystem, and Apple switched the connection scheme from FireWire to USB for synchronizing content to smooth the way.

Now with Apple Watch, it is designed to work with an iPhone and iOS, and the integration is carefully designed to be as seamless as possible. Before you consider the obvious problems of adding Android support, such as the lack of comparable apps and features, there is also the annoying fact that most of the people who own handsets with Google’s mobile OS are not up to date and will never be up to date.

You might as well suggest that Apple’s Continuity feature, designed to integrate OS X Yosemite and iOS 8, be expanded to include Windows, Android and BlackBerry. It’s a preposterous idea, since it works against a tight and reliable ecosystem. Even if it were possible in theory, it would present huge problems with execution. Start with HealthKit for iOS 8, and go from there. Do these uninformed commentators expect Apple to simply take all the unique features of OS X and iOS and port them to rival operating systems?

Oh, sure, some of these people still blame Apple’s decision not to clone the Mac OS from Day One as the reason Windows became dominant. They do forget what nearly happened to Apple when they finally relented on cloning. The fact that Apple is a hardware company that makes integrated software, and that Microsoft, for the most part, is a software company eludes them. Despite Microsoft’s failed forays into the hardware business — aside from the Xbox that only became profitable after huge losses — it’s still a company that profits most from software and services.

It is fair to state that the prospects for the success of the Apple Watch are still unknown. The market for a smartwatch no doubt hasn’t been fully tapped, but getting people to pay $349 or lots more for any watch will still be a hard sell.

If you were waiting patiently, hoping to order an iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus on the morning of Friday, September 12, you might have been very disappointed. Apple’s servers were slammed, delivering “sorry” messages to many of those who fought to get a connection and place an order.

It was no better at the wireless carrier sites, where the ordering systems were just overwhelmed. What’s more, it didn’t take so long for delivery times to slip, first with the iPhone 6 Plus, and later by its smaller compatriot. It may also be that Apple didn’t have as many of the phablet-sized iPhones to ship, so available, or anticipated stocks were quickly depleted.

Of course, the number of units available for shipment on the day of release will probably not be known, although one might make educated guesses from the initial sales figures. It’s also very likely that Apple won’t actually break down the numbers for the various models, except in general. So if Apple says that the larger model did better than anticipated, that’s a good thing since prices — and profits — are higher. Well, except for some tech pundits who will complain about poor planning.

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