So it’s clear that Apple’s ongoing patent war with Samsung, though it has brought some victories, hasn’t actually accomplished anything except create legal bills and enrich the lawyers. The same Samsung gear is being sold, and the company has yet to pay anything to Apple despite being penalized to the tune $929 million as the result of two losses in a California courtroom.. At the end of the day, it doesn’t seem as if an awful lot has been accomplished.

So in the most recent filing, Apple has decided to drop the cross-appeal of the final judgment from California Federal Judge Lucy Koh, which means in plain English that they aren’t going to seek a ban of Samsung gear. The cross-appeal had been filed because Judge Koh continued to deny the motion to halt the sale of some 23 Samsung devices.

In the meantime, Samsung will continue to appeal the verdict against them, which would mean, if they get their wishes, they wouldn’t owe Apple any money. Or, as seems to be the case, these actions will go on and on with no final resolution, though Apple’s latest move appears to indicate that the company is prepared to pursue an exit strategy.

Now it takes two to tango, and Samsung would have to work with Apple to resolve these issues. But just giving up will not stop Samsung from continuing to infringe on Apple’s intellectual property, although this move could be part of a potential settlement between the two warring parties.

As a practical matter, Apple has the right to sue someone for patent infringement, just as others routinely sue Apple for the same reasons. Indeed, Apple’s relationship with Bose, the audio manufacturer, is now complicated by the fact that the latter is suing Beats Electronics for patent infringement over issues concerning noise-canceling technology. As most of you know, Apple is in the midst of acquiring Beats.

This means, of course, that some settlement is probably be in the works. Apple wouldn’t want to let this issue linger, unless they believe that Bose is wrong.

Now with Samsung, we’re dealing with a company with a reputation, one that involves copying ideas from other companies and building similar products at a lower price. But till now, it appears that only Apple has been large enough to fund a sustained legal battle over the theft of intellectual property. But after several years of these back and forth skirmishes, you can still buy the very same Samsung gear, at the very same prices, as before.

So far, efforts to reach an out-of-court settlement haven’t worked, even though Judge Koh requested them. A recent story from a publication in South Korea — Samsung’s home country — claimed such talks were again occurring, but that report was later denied.

Still, there would seem to be a huge incentive for Samsung to get out of this mess. First, the company’s smartphone sales are declining. The successor to the popular Galaxy S4, the Galaxy S5, hasn’t quite done so well compared to its predecessor. A recent survey of smartphone market share showed Apple’s share shedding a little, and Samsung’s share shedding a lot. Worse for Samsung, overall sales are flat and profits are declining. This isn’t quite a good time for them.

At the same time, Apple pays Samsung billions of dollars every year for parts. The A7 processor, for example, is built by Samsung, and there’s a report that Apple is returning to Samsung for the A8, which is expected to be installed on the forthcoming iPhone 6.

Indeed, you have to wonder what the executives of Samsung’s mobile and PC division were thinking to fight Apple in the courts while the company is, overall, earning huge revenues from the same company. Sure, it’s one thing for two companies to compete in some areas and cooperate in others. Microsoft comes to mind as a prime example of the frenemy concept. But Apple and Microsoft settled their legal disputes years ago.

In light of the current situation, it would seem an ideal time for Samsung to just make a deal and move on. Maybe Apple’s decision to drop an appeal is a step in that direction, though it remains to be seen how this will all end up.

At the very least, when Steve Jobs said Apple would go “nuclear” over the alleged theft of property when Android first arrived, that may have been more than just a little bit of bluster, though Tim Cook has continued to pursue legal actions.

Still, there has to be an end to these lawsuits, and maybe we’re getting closer to a final resolution. It won’t stop Apple from suing and being sued. That will never change, but these high-profile legal battles have wasted everyone’s time, even when you subtract the legal bills, not to mention boring people to death. It’s time to move on and allow the overworked courts to handle far more important cases.

In recent years, Apple has turned topsy-turvy for long-time Mac users. Whereas the Mac used to be the cash cow, now it’s relegated to third-rate status, just behind the iPad when it comes to quarterly revenues. So there’s been the wrongheaded perception that Apple doesn’t care about Macs anymore, and would just as well have you switch to an iPhone or an iPad and be done with it.

As a practical matter, Apple has been selling more than four million Macs per quarter in recent years, which is quite enough to sustain a sizable business. Lots of companies would love to earn a fraction of what Apple pulls in from Macs. Besides, with double-digit sales growth, there’s little incentive to give up on the platform. Indeed, the Mac was the surprising winner in the June quarter.

The iPod? Well, that’s another matter, although Apple is selling enough to a smaller market to keep them in production.

But one of the main reasons for the Mac-is-dying freakout is the fact that OS X has, beginning with Lion, taken on a few interface features that are derived from iOS, along with a few apps that have the same names, such as Contacts rather than the venerable Address Book and the addition of Maps in OS X Mavericks.

Now changing the name of an app, and maybe even the decorative abstractions, but not necessarily the functionality, or adding some new apps doesn’t mean that Apple is minimizing the Mac. If anything it represents further investment in the platform.

The controversial interface elements include the new look and part-time appearance of the scrollbars, and the “natural” scrolling direction that reverses tradition. These are features that are easily restored to previous functionality in System Preferences, so it’s not significant.

You see, the argument a purist needs to consider is the fact that Apple wants to entice more iPhone and iPad users to buy Macs too. As with the iPad, most users of iOS gear are running Windows, so this would be a great way to enlarge the Mac user base, last estimated at 80 million.

Since Apple wants Mac and iOS users to move back and forth across devices with as little downtime or relearning as possible, there are going to be things that are changed in the former to ease the process. This doesn’t mean OS X is going to make your Mac look and operate as an iPad. It simply means that switching between them is going to be easier.

This convenience factor is greatly improved with OS X Yosemite and iOS 8. The Continuity feature links with your iPhone to send and receive phone calls and SMS messages. Handoff, on Macs using Bluetooth LE (mostly from 2011 or 2012 and later), lets you start a document or email on your Mac and continue on your iPhone or iPad. Or vice versa.

None of this ought to be a deal breaker. Having used prerelease versions of Yosemite, I didn’t feel that I, a long-time Mac user, was somehow being neglected. Different artwork schemes, with flatter buttons and new transparency effects, and even a new system typeface, aren’t going to force you into a new work routine. There are significant new features, of course. In addition to Continuity, Spotlight is far more functional and now may even replace some third-party app launchers. That’s a good thing that enhances the Mac user experience.

This doesn’t mean that I like everything about Yosemite. I’ve commented about the lack of proper title bars for sites in Safari, which are now only seen in tabs, meaning that some of the contents may be truncated to fit into the proper width. I also don’t know if I like engaging full-screen mode by tapping the green button. I prefer to have it fill to the size of your working document plus toolbars and other interface elements. An Option-click restores previous functionality. I see where Apple wants to make things more convenient for users of Macs with smaller displays, such as the 11-inch MacBook Air, but this choice may be confusing.

Maybe the green button functionality should be reversed.

Now remember that we are very much in the twilight of the PC era, where you can get a good part of your computing experience with other devices. Some have pointed to the phablet, a smartphone with an oversized display, as the ultimate solution for those who only want — or can only afford — one gadget. That might even explain why Apple will allegedly release a 5.5-inch iPhone this fall.

That Mac sales continue to grow ahead of the PC market, however, indicates there’s plenty of life left in the platform. Apple has no motive or excuse to suddenly ditch Macs, or even devote fewer resources.

Yes, that may happen some day. You may find that personal computers, in general, are consigned to a few demanding assignments, while most people get by with smartphones or tablets. But that time is not yet at hand, and Apple isn’t forcing you to go there by any means.

After Apple allegedly missed estimates that ten million copies of the iPhone 5 would be sold over the first weekend it went on sale in 2012 — they only managed five million, which was a record for the industry — Apple’s stock price began to take a battering. Every perceived miss from inflated expectations brought new rounds of criticism that something was amiss in Cupertino, CA.

A lot of the criticism centered on Tim Cook and his alleged inability to focus on developing fabulous new products. Forgetting the trendsetting Mac Pro, first announced at the 2013 WWDC, everything Apple did was iterative. Although it normally took at least several years for Apple to have a breakthrough product, suddenly it had to happen every week.

If Cook failed to deliver on these insane expectations, that was his fault pure and simple and he must pay for this alleged evidence of abject incompetence. A 64-bit ARM-based processor? Smoke and mirrors because it didn’t offer any advantage with low-resource mobile apps, despite evidence to the contrary. Touch ID? Well, Apple’s fingerprint sensor wasn’t exactly perfect, so it should have been tested and fixed before release. And don’t get me started with Apple’s Maps.

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In the course of checking out speculation about whether Apple will release two iPhone 6 configurations at once, or stagger the releases, I came across a curious claim. What sort of claim? Well, that Apple made a mistake releasing the iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s at the same time last year? A mistake you say?

Well, that was the weekend where Apple set a record for iPhone sales on the initial launch, with some nine million units sold. No other smartphone maker has come close. Samsung claims to have moved ten million copies of their Galaxy S4 in 28 days last year, but that hardly compares if you consider an average daily sales rate.

So how was releasing two models of the iPhone at the same time a mistake? Because some dumb industry pundit says so?

The excuse is “competition,” which means, I suppose, that people will be confused when confronted with two different models of the iPhone and thus will suffer from, what, brain freeze? Does that mean they’ll buy neither, or just buy both? Is the situation the same as releasing both an 11-inch and 13-inch version of the MacBook Air at the same time? What about the 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMac? Choices! Choices!

What about all those Samsung Galaxy smartphones? Can someone just come here and sort them all out so people know what to do? Indeed, the only brain freeze I see here is from the people who complain that introducing more than one model at a time is somehow wrong, or will present a competitive situation that’s somehow a bad thing.

Now the speculation about the iPhone 6 has centered on a 4.7-inch model, and a 5.5-inch version, the so-called phablet iPhone. There have been some reports, unconfirmed of course, centering on alleged production problems for the larger model, and even the claim that release may be moved off until later in the year or even 2015. Or it may just be that, if there are production issues, supplies will be constrained for a few months (not unusual for an Apple product), but that won’t change the actual release date.

There is also the suggestion that Apple’s somewhat lower-than-expected guidance for the September quarter is due to the fact that the new iPhone won’t arrive until quite late in that month, and thus won’t have a big impact on sales.

Of course, none of this means a thing until the products and release dates are actually announced, and we get the first weekend’s sales figures. Taking Apple at their word, sales of the iPhone in the last quarter were actually impacted to some degree by expectations about the next model, and certainly there has been plenty of chatter. That it’s also so consistent does appear to indicate it will probably be accurate to some degree, same as last year. Supply chain leaks are plentiful.

But that doesn’t mean Apple won’t manage a few surprises in terms of unexpected hardware features. Remember that the 64-bit capability of the A7 processor and the M7 coprocessor were not exactly known until Apple spilled the beans.

But when it comes to media pundit or analyst errors, they will rarely correct them. So when IDC incorrectly reported that Mac sales in the U.S. were down 1.7% in the June quarter, and Apple reported that sales increased in the double-digits in the U.S. that quarter, don’t expect an apology.

To be fair to IDC, it may just be that they need to revise their survey methods to more closely reflect reality. The major polling companies do that all the time, particularly when their numbers turn out to exceed the margins for error. But owning up to a problem is the first step towards resolving it. Pretending nothing is wrong and continuing to make the same errors over and over again doesn’t help to set things right.

Of course, when it comes to Apple’s critics, the curious claims and outright falsehoods are repeated over and over again.

Yet another story has it that Apple is somehow making a huge mistake in releasing a phablet version of the iPhone. Of course that assumes such a thing, still only a rumor, will actually occur. But if it happens, how would that move be wrong, while smartphones of similar sizes from other companies are perfectly fine?

While I wouldn’t personally buy a phablet, I can see where there’s market potential, particularly in Asia, where people actually use them as their one-and-only computing device. They don’t have a traditional Mac or PC at home, so they evidently scrape together enough money to buy a combo device that serves as a small tablet and a smartphone.

That conceivably represents a huge market potential, and Apple is fighting to build sales in China. So the alleged 5.5-inch iPhone 6 would make plenty of sense, if done right. Sure, perhaps some of those customers won’t be buying iPads, but Apple earns more money from the iPhone, subsidized or not, and a sale is a sale.

In any case, all this will play out this fall, when Apple will do what they will do once again without regard to the silly complaints from the blogosphere.