It’s a sure thing that Apple Inc. is hit bait. So if you have something to say, anything, regardless of whether to not it makes any sense, finding an Apple connection, however tenuous, can generate extra traffic. While one hopes that online commentators and reporters are mostly concerned with facts and reasoned speculation, that’s not always the case.

Take that report that Apple’s alleged “brand value” has dropped, only to be overtaken by Google as the most valuable brand on the planet. Supposedly this is blamed, in part, on Apple’s failure to deliver new products in new categories. But if you take that as the benchmark, just what has Google produced in the past year? Can you name the trendsetting gadget or service from Google that has set the tech industry and the marketplace on fire?

That’s right, I didn’t think you could.

Android has undergone minor revisions over the past year or two, but nothing sufficient to even warrant a full version number (from four-something to five). Google Glass, a costly prototype product that remains in beta, hasn’t suddenly taken off, except to cause more and more people to be exiled from restaurants and other public places. Or just put off people who regard someone wearing that silly gadget as just a little too strange for comfort.

At the same time, Google has sold off the failing Motorola Mobility handset division for fire sale prices to Lenovo. Tests of driverless cars are continuing, but it’s not as if you can expect one to be available at a local car dealership anytime soon, or ever. And, in a recent SEC filing, Google envisions putting ads in such places as car dashboards and home appliances, among other things. But the head of Nest, former Apple iPod guru Tony Fadell, which was recently acquired by Google, was therefore forced to assure one and all that the company will continue to operate as a separate division. You won’t find ads in their thermostats or smoke detectors.

So this is, once again, the Apple double standard revisited. A market research report explaining the decline in Apple’s brand ranking states, “Whilst Apple remains a top performing brand, there is a growing perception that it is no longer redefining technology for consumers, reflected by a lack of dramatic new product launches.”

It’s not as if Apple hasn’t promised those “dramatic new product launches” but not till later in the year. At that point, if nothing about new product categories is announced, they’d have a point. But not now.

Besides, how does that explain Google’s status? Where are Google’s “dramatic new product launches,” and I’ll even amend that to include some amazing new online service, but that hasn’t happened either. Google is just doing what Google does, which is to put a bunch of products and services in endless public betas, and to earn most of their income from targeted ads.

Sure, Android is the number one mobile platform on the planet, but Google’s earnings from that OS don’t count for very much, since it’s given away free. Google Glass? How many people are actually wasting $1,500 for one? A few thousand maybe? And how does that redefine a market other than to demonstrate products that probably have no reasonable prospect for success?

Remember, it’s not above Google to start something up, support it for a few years, and then ditch it when it fails to generate sufficient income to make sense. You wonder what would happen to Android if Samsung made a wholesale switch to the Tizen OS. At a recent industry trade show, Samsung had a Tizen-equipped smartphone, one resembling a standard Galaxy handset, in a far away location off the beaten path. Published reports indicated it worked about as well as a standard Android handset, and didn’t look a whole lot different.

Right now, one reason Samsung sticks with Android is no doubt because of the huge app ecosystem. If there was a way to run Android apps with good performance on Tizen, how quickly would that change? If Samsung dropped Android, would it make sense for Google to keep it going? What about all those other mobile handset makers who can’t generate a profit from Android smartphones? Remember that Microsoft is now giving the Windows Phone OS away. If a handset maker adopts Windows Phone, they won’t be coerced into paying Microsoft fees because the company allegedly owns certain patents for Android features.

At the end of the day, however, being labeled the most valuable brand in somebody’s survey doesn’t mean very much if a company’s sales and profits aren’t impacted in any noticeable way. It might be useful for bragging rights, but not much more. And downgrading a company because of a double standard about the lack of alleged innovation makes even less sense.

This is why I’m not identifying the market research company, or even providing a link. Those links are not deserved by companies who continue to cover the tech industry in such an inconsistent and unfair fashion.

And so it goes.

So new OS X updates arrived last week, including OS 10.9.3 and iTunes 11.2. While the revisions, with minor changes, got high marks, they weren’t free of trouble. The most significant issue was the mysterious disappearance of the /Users folder on some Macs. It also made it writable to everyone, thus creating a potential security problem.

A little sleuthing turned up a possible cause. It appeared that there was a bug in the iTunes 11.2 installer that mucked up permissions, and if you also had the Find My Mac option enabled as an iCloud preferences, you wouldn’t be able to see that /Users folder.

Within hours, there were workarounds, usually the basic Terminal command to make a hidden folder visible, but it would reset upon each restart. But before the situation got out of hand, Apple released an iTunes 11.2.1 update the very next day that fixed the problem. So far so good.

As you might imagine, though, not all Mac users were happy, even though most probably didn’t have a chance to actually install the update, let alone worry so much about the need for a fix. The main issue is that an updater was released with an obvious bug — well obvious if all the conditions, such as having Find My Mac enabled, were met — and you have to wonder how Apple managed to let this bug make it through the quality control process.

You will probably never know the answer. My suspicion is that a last-minute change in the installation script may have contained the error, but went undiscovered in the rush to meet a predetermined release date. Maybe. At the end of the day, people with the best of intentions make mistakes, and perhaps Apple will know better next time. That the fix came out so quickly after the original release makes it clear there was a “whoops!” factor involved.

For the vast majority of Mac users, however, who probably don’t check their /Users folder (they go to their Home directory instead), this wasn’t a serious problem. However, a certain SSL bug in iOS and OS X, dubbed “goto fail” was, because it opened up your Apple device to a serious security problem. That issue was discovered in February as an iOS 7.0.6 updater arrived with the warning that, as the result of this bug, “An attacker with a privileged network position may capture or modify data in sessions protected by SSL/TLS.”

However, you actually needed to have control of a Mac to exploit this security leak. In short order, the problem was fixed in iOS at the same time the problem was reported in the media. But it took several more days for the OS X 10.9.2 update, which contained the fix, to arrive, which meant Macs were just as susceptible. That’s where the complaints began.

Because it involved Apple, there was a brief media freakout about the problem.

Why allow Mac users to be vulnerable, even for a few days? The repair seemed simple enough, because it involved a tiny piece of code that was accidentally duplicated. That it went undiscovered, at first, shows how even a trivial mistake has the potential to cause serious problems — or potentially serious problems, since there’s no evidence anyone ever exploited this security lapse.

Fixing it, however, may seem simple enough. But even removing a few words in a string of code requires careful testing. Apple’s developers need to make sure the fix resolves the issue, and there isn’t something else that might cause further problems. The installer also has to be checked to make sure nothing untoward occurs. Look at the iTunes 11.2 permissions issue above as an example of where a routine app installation might break something.

So maybe Apple decided it was worth waiting a few more days for the Mac fix, particularly since OS X developers decided to merge it with the pending 10.9.2 update. With a number of fixes, including security issues, even a slight coding change could have an unexpected repurcussions.

In the computer universe, mobile or desktop, instant fixes rarely happen. Microsoft took far longer to resolve security leaks in several versions of Internet Explorer that forced the Department of Homeland Security to warn people not to use that browser. To the surprise of most tech pundits, Microsoft even provided a patch for Windows XP, although the problem supposedly didn’t exist with that aging OS.

While you might rightly criticize both Apple and Microsoft for allowing security defects to exist for longer than you might think necessary, what about Google’s Android? There are serious security leaks going back a couple of years or more that remain unfixed. Worse, the cavalier attitude of Google’s executives, particularly Android chief Sundar Pichai, clearly indicate that security is not a priority. He was quoted, for example, as saying, “We do not guarantee that Android is designed to be safe; its format was designed to give more freedom.”

That makes it clear that, when it comes to security on your Android smartphone or tablet, you’re on your own. You cannot depend on Google or the device maker to ever fix serious security problems, or if they do, make them easily available for download by users impacted by these bugs. The OS that comes installed on your device will, more than likely, never be updated because there will be no updates.

The price of freedom means that, to protect yourself, you need to install a security app if you choose to use Andorid. You also have to hope that the app will get regular updates and protect you against the security leaks that Google has left untouched in the OS. But that may be more of a hope and a dream than a reality.

Stung by perfectly awful sales of the Surface tablets, Microsoft on Tuesday made it clear that they aren’t giving up on trying to deliver some sort of a tablet solution.

In a media presentation in New York City, Microsoft launched a 12-inch model, one clearly meant as a direct note-book replacement rather than a dedicated mobile device. It’s clear that approach has failed, but it’s also true that attempts to deliver tablets as PC note-book alternatives has also failed, but maybe Microsoft didn’t get the memo.

The new model certainly has higher-end pretensions than previous contenders, with Intel Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 processors, depending on the configuration, a 2160×1440 resolution regarded as HD (similar to Apple’s Retina display), and a 3×2 aspect ratio. Microsoft’s claim, that the Surface Pro 3 is “the tablet that can replace your laptop” is a hollow promise. Putting traditional note-book specs in a thinner package is not necessarily going to convince buyers that they want yet another PC with Windows 8. The market has so far very much rejected Microsoft’s approach, just as the market has rejected Microsoft’s efforts to meld a traditional note-book with a tablet. One headline on the product intro even suggested Microsoft wants you to believe a tablet isn’t a tablet.

The Surface 3 will be available for preorder this week, starting at $799, which is just above the average cost of a regular PC note-book, and $100 less than the low-end 11-inch Apple MacBook Air with which it’s meant to compete. It’s supposed to weigh 30% less than Apple’s smallest and cheapest note-book, and seems a bit more robust, at least in pictures, than previous Surface tablets.

The unit itself, though, appears at first blush similar to an enlarged iPad. The Surface Pro Type Cover is a $129.99 option on all configurations, and the new model features an enhanced version of Microsoft’s notorious kickstand. Curiously, Microsoft is touting use of a stylus, dubbed Surface Pen, rather than your fingers to navigate the screen. Talk about revisiting the past. I thought, by now, we were past that failed episode in proto-tablet history.

What it does demonstrate, however, is that Microsoft has learned absolutely nothing from the previous experiences with the Surface, and has doubled down on the concept of offering tablets as alternative PC note-books.

Sure, it’s clear Microsoft is fully dedicated to investing in the Surface and doing what they feel is necessary to make it succeed. But they should also be mindful of the terrible sales PC makers have encountered with convertible note-books, those sporting touchscreens. Offering a keyboard as an option, however, still delivers the same result, though embedding a very thin keyboard in a case is never quite as good as a traditional note-book keyboard, even if we assume that it’s well designed.

At a time where tablet sales may have reached a plateau, and Apple’s iPad is not doing quite as well as used to, there may be a feeling the market is now becoming saturated. But it’s also true that tablets can last indefinitely. There’s no incentive to upgrade every two years, as there is with a mobile handset. So long as the operating system is updated, even the lowly iPad 2 can support current apps and a fair amount of current technology. Even then, the older iPads will last for years even if you can put up with a version of the iOS that’s out of fashion.

Regardless, I felt for a time that Microsoft might be turning over a new leaf with the release of Office for iPad. Perhaps the new leadership realized that the old approach of Windows everywhere wasn’t working. Certainly the fact that the Surface tablet has gone nowhere must have provided some incentive to seek a better way. But it seems that Microsoft’s decision is to move further towards melding the Surface with the traditional PC, rather than building a strictly mobile device.

The promotional blurbs for the Surface 3 once again tout the fact that Office for Windows, still not available in a Windows 8-savvy version, is a linchpin of the new tablet. That’s the very same strategy that went nowhere with the previous Surface tablets.

In the past, I’ve been mindful of the old catchphrase that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But it’s not that Microsoft really has much of a choice if the concept of a Windows tablet is ever to go somewhere. A larger Surface might gain some traction for people who are looking for a slimmer note-book. But the $799 is akin to the loss leader, with minimal processor power and just 64GB of solid state storage. Remember that Windows 8 is bloated.

Once the option list is checked to get a higher power product with additional storage, the price will go up by hundreds of dollars. The top-of-the-line Surface 3, with an Intel Core i7, 512GB storage and 8GB of RAM, takes it well into the territory of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. A higher-end MacBook Pro configuration, with the Core i7, though only 256GB storage, is $1,799. But anyone who thinks a Mac is expensive will notice that the loaded Surface 3 is $1,949. The cover/keyboard is still optional, so do the math. Is that the Microsoft tax?

On the surface, if you’ll forgive the pun, the new tablet seems to be yet another pig in a poke from Microsoft. If the Surface 3 ends up as yet another failure, where does Microsoft take this ill-conceived concept next?

They say that, if you want a potentially important news story buried, release it on a Friday afternoon. By the time the details reach the mainstream press and popular online outlets, the workday is over, and potential readers are paying more attention to enjoying their weekends. Of course that assumes they aren’t actually working weekends.

So maybe that’s why the announcement of a truce between Apple and Google over patent issues didn’t get quite the attention you might have expected considering how this intellectual property war has played out around the world in recent years. Of course, the $49 billion merger between AT&T and DirecTV might have received more attention.

Regardless, the Apple/Google deal focused mainly on the patent skirmishes involving Motorola Mobility. Since Google is sending that unsuccessful division packing to Lenovo, it clearly seemed a good time to clear the air. Besides, it’s not that Apple hasn’t settled with other mobile companies over patent matters. Two of the notable settlements involve HTC and Nokia, and, as you know, the latter’s mobile division is now under the Microsoft umbrella. Besides, Apple and Microsoft have had a relatively peaceful relationship since a 1997 intellectual property agreement. The worst you hear are the usual competitive boasts.

It’s notable that Apple and Google promise to work towards patent reform — and it’s sorely needed, particularly in the U.S. — but there was nothing about cross-licensing. Regardless, it’s nice to see these legal skirmishes die down.

But there’s still Samsung, which has been engaged in an intense patent war with Apple for several years, despite being one of the largest suppliers of components to the latter. I always wondered how such transactions work, although it’s true the two Samsung divisions operate with separate management.

During the two trials at a California Federal Court, Judge Lucy Koh has urged the two companies to just make a deal and clear her court calendar. That she parcels the complaints into tiny, bite-sized pieces with severe limits on the time allowed for testimony, and lawyer openings and closings, it’s very obvious that she is only too happy to minimize the issues under dispute and get it over with.

So far, Apple and Samsung haven’t been able to strike a deal, but in the wake of the Google deal, there’s was a published report Monday in The Korea Times that the two companies were back at the bargaining table to try to reach an out-of-court settlement. But the publication retracted the story the very next day, blaming Apple for the alleged refusal to engage in settlement talks.

But Samsung surely knows by now that Apple is not going to back down and, stung by having to pay north of a billion dollars for patent infringement, with the risk of some products being barred from sale, it would make sense for Samsung to bring this sorry affair to an end as fast as possible.

Alas, the latest report out of California indicates that Apple and Samsung reported to Judge Koh that they tried reach an agreement earlier this month but failed yet again. Eventually, I suspect they will have to get together and perhaps strike a deal similar to the ones made with HTC and Nokia. There will be cross-licensing where appropriate, some money will change hands, and everyone will agree to play nice with one another.

Of course, being charged with theft of intellectual property is nothing new for Samsung. The company is considered to be a chronic offender, reportedly deliberately copying technology from other companies, building derivative products and profiting from them while the legal issues play out in the courts. At the end of the day, Samsung may just settle at the last minute, after wearing down the opposition as long as possible.

That, however, isn’t going to work with Apple. Besides, facing the potential loss of billions of dollars in sales for components, Samsung is downright stupid. The features cribbed from the iPhone and iPad can be altered. Maybe it won’t be so pretty and intuitive, but there are workable solutions that don’t appear to step on someone else’s patents.

Yes, it’s true that Steve Jobs promised to go “thermonuclear” because he felt Google stole Apple’s inventions when Android was released. Certainly Tim Cook has loyally followed through on protecting the company’s inventions. But years of expensive trials and hearings have really accomplished almost nothing other than to keep high-paid intellectual property attorneys busy.

Apple has made its point. They will fight what they perceive to be patent violations, and it’s high time to move on. But it’s also true that the claims from some media pundits that these patent trials have somehow hurt Apple’s ability to innovate just aren’t true. Apple is spending more than ever on R&D, and has purchased more and more companies to acquire technology. I don’t pretend to know what sort of new product categories Apple is prepared to enter later this year, but none of those products are in any way being delayed because of those lawsuits. To suggest otherwise is absurd.

Meantime, if Apple and Samsung do eventually make their deal, and a settlement doesn’t appear so hopeful right now, maybe the tech industry will work together to address the ongoing abuses to the patent system. I’m thinking particularly of those patent trolls who acquire someone’s inventions perhaps at a reduced price, build absolutely nothing, but profit from suing anyone in sight who might be using something that resembles those inventions. That’s big time abuse and it needs to stop.