Does anyone recall ever benefiting because one company merged with another? It’s not necessarily similar to Apple’s purchase of Beats and selling expensive headphones, because that deal was more about acquiring technology, which is something that’s been done for years.

So consider the act that saved Apple, acquiring NeXT in 1996, which brought a state-of-the-art Unix-based OS that, over the years, morphed into macOS and iOS. That move came in the wake of the failure of Copland, Apple’s own effort to build a successor to Mac OS. It took a while to jell, but here in 2018, we are still benefiting from the fruits of that transaction.

It also brought Steve Jobs back to Apple, and the rest is history.

From Apple A-series processors, to Touch ID, Face ID and — yes — even Siri, Apple’s ongoing acquisitions of technology companies have delivered compelling features that have advanced the company, and enhanced the user experiences of hundreds of millions of customers.

But when two companies consummate a normal merger, there are almost always promises of realizing synergies, and somehow benefiting customers. In the end, the stockholders and the executives become richer, but people lose their jobs because they are deemed redundant. With fewer competitors, prices just may  increase.

When buying a company with different products and services, it may be easier to get approval from the powers-that-be in the U.S. government. Even then, there may be restrictions to reduce corporate excesses of one sort or another. When Comcast, the number one cable and broadband company in the U.S., completed its acquisition of NBC/Universal in 2011, the deal came with restrictions to ensure fair treatment to competing companies.

So Comcast needed to be fair with in negotiating carrier deals to carry NBC content, which includes such cable networks as Bravo, CNBC, MSNBC, SyFy and USA.

Over the years, I’ve heard all sorts of tech support horror stories from Comcast cable customers. There’s no indication things became any better after the merger. Of course, the entertainment division isn’t involved in direct interactions with individual consumers.

When AT&T bought DirecTV, the world’s largest satellite TV network, in 2015, the support systems were combined. Not only were jobs lost, but service got a whole lot worse. These days, when I dial up AT&T for satellite or wireless support, I have to navigate through a mostly deaf voice assistant, and I’m often forced to talk to several people just to resolve a simple issue. How does that save money?

I remain a customer for two reasons. First no other TV service is available at this apartment, which is wired for CenturyLink, and includes a single DirecTV satellite dish feeding all the units in each building. Reception via an interior digital antenna is hit or miss. Second, although it was hard to find, I receive an AARP discount for AT&T wireless, and that discount is enough to match T-Mobile’s “Uncarrier” price.

Speaking of which, AT&T attempted to merge with T-Mobile in 2011, but the government said no. Forced to compete on its own terms, T-Mobile began its “Uncarrier” promotion, which did away with standard two-year contracts, and overhauled the industry.

As a result, your wireless bill is no doubt cheaper regardless of the carrier. T-Mobile is growing rapidly; the move spurred Sprint to slash its prices, so both became more compelling alternatives to market leaders Verizon and AT&T.

Now T-Mobile and Sprint are trying to become one. But T-Mobile’s flashy CEO, John Legere, insisted that there’s will still be more competition in the market than most believe: “This isn’t a case of going from four to three wireless companies—there are now at least seven or eight big competitors in this converging market.”

Or maybe not.

True, cable providers are entering or planning to enter the cell phone market, but it’s not at all likely that they’ll suddenly became major competition for the big four — make that big three if this merger is consummated.

At the same time, it is true that T-Mobile and Sprint together will provide healthier competition to the Verizon and AT&T. As it stands, T-Mobile has good cellular coverage in larger cities but relatively poor coverage in rural areas. A larger footprint will also provide more network resources and revenue to speed deployment of 5G networks.

In theory, that should be a good thing.

Then again, as Sprint learned when it bought Nextel in 2005, combining two incompatible networks is no easy task. Basically Nextel was shunted to the side in the wreckage of that deal.

So T-Mobile uses GSM, same as AT&T. Sprint uses CDMA, same as Verizon. Sprint claims some 20 million customers have handsets that are compatible with T-Mobile, which will be the winning company. After a migration period to the combined service, which will take from two to three years, it’ll still leave millions of users with incompatible handsets, unless the equipment supports LTE and is deployed in an area where there’s an acceptable LTE signal. I just hope there will be special discounts for people with bricked phones to upgrade.

While Legere also claimed that more employees will be needed with the combined company, that may be a tricky response. Perhaps there will be, workers to perform the hardware migration and upgrades. But what about sales and support people? How many of them will be getting pink slips? Doesn’t it make sense that there will be thousands of redundant positions, or does T-Mobile expect many of these employees will be willing to transfer to the hardware division?

Will prices really go down?

Of course, this deal hasn’t been Okayed by the authorities, and there may be restrictions to protect customers with potentially obsolete gear among other things. It would be nice to see guarantees that prices won’t increase, but such restrictions are usually temporary. What will the market be like in five years?

I am, however, pleased that the new company will be in T-Mobile’s image and not Sprint’s. I tried Sprint in the early 2000s, before switching to AT&T. As bad as the latter’s support is now, Sprint was far far worse.

Ahead of the release of the next version of Android, Google held its annual I/O event this week. As usual, a fancy new version of Android — this year known as Android P — was demonstrated. Supposedly it’ll ship this fall, but as is typical with these releases, only a small number of users will have access by then. Presumably owners of Nexus and Pixel smartphones will get first dibs.

The rest? Cross your fingers!

With the news about the forthcoming release, a beta version was made available for some users. But not, for some reason, for owners of gear made by the largest manufacturer of Android handsets, Samsung.

Regardless, Google’s marketing people have established three buzzwords — parameters — for the next release. So it’s Simplicity, which evidently covers a new usability scheme, based on gestures, which appears to be based on the one Apple introduced for the iPhone X. This new scheme replaces the home, back and multitasking buttons that were previously used. I suppose if Apple expects iPhone customers to learn something new, Google feels it might as well join the crowd, rather than retain the existing usability method and claim it’s less confusing.

Of course, it will mean new handsets without buttons on the front. I don’t have to wonder who came up with that scheme either. There are also Android handsets with notches, but not because they will be developing equivalents of Face ID. I suppose it’s just a look that’s intended to attract people with iPhone X envy. Or something or other.

The other two parameters are Intelligence and Digital Wellbeing.

I’m not at all certain how the other two integrate, but there will be a Do Not Disturb feature that will quiet the device to help keep your Samsung or other Android device from drawing attention to itself or interrupting work or play,

There are also Adaptive Battery and Auto Brightness features that are intended to improve the user experience. The first, as you might expect, is designed to focus power use on the apps you are most likely to use over the next few hours. This feature will allegedly reduce battery usage by up to 30%.

All and all, you can find a full list of the expected features at Google’s Android site, promising all sorts of terrific things to honor the platform’s 10th anniversary. It’s actually a pretty decent list of goodies, some derived from iOS, others that appear to be unique or mostly unique to Android.

The biggest problem with the OS remains, however, which is that your best chance to avail yourself of these new operating systems is to use one of Google’s mobile handsets. The others? Hit or miss. Indeed, you’ll buy a brand new handset after Android P is released and stand only a small chance of getting the new OS. Clearly Google has, after all these years, been unable to figure out how to deploy a new Android release so most users can upgrade without waiting for months or years — or never!

So regardless of what it does, and how well it does it, app developers are not at all likely to expend resources to support the newest features. It hardly makes sense if the first-year user base will not exceed the single digits. It’s predictable.

Indeed you usually have to wait two years for the new OS to gain a decent portion of the Android user base. Even then, older releases will still dominate.

In contrast, the vast majority of the iOS user base will have upgraded before the next annual release. Most of the ones that haven’t include people who own iPhones and iPads that won’t work with the current release, or people with older models that may not benefit so much.

Of course, Apple’s critics will often complain that the iOS user base, on a percentage basis, is lower than a previous year, without realizing how many millions can’t update.

But the real comparison is with Android, where the upgrade percentage is miniscule. In contrast, the high percentage of iOS upgraders mean that developers have a huge incentive to develop or update apps using the new features, the new APIs, and thus build more salable apps. It also means that the quality of apps are inevitably going to be better than their Android counterparts or equivalents.

The real question is whether any large number of people would be interested in switching to Android because of the new features. How many of them would really, truly, make your mobile computing experience better, more reliable, and more secure than with an iPhone? Even if you found some features that really lit your fire, what chance would you have of even seeing them on your new smartphone unless it was a Pixel from Google?

Consider, too, the security issue. Whenever we hear of clever gadgets that can crack an iPhone and unlock it to assist law enforcement, you never hear stories about similar problems with Android gear. It should be obvious why.

For several weeks, Apple’s stock was dropping over fake news that iPhone X sales had collapsed. Whether misreading the supply chain tea leaves or just making things up, those stories all turned out to have no basis in fact. Through the March quarter, the iPhone X was Apple’s best-selling smartphone and the best-selling smartphone on the planet, but the falsehoods about collapsing demand merely continued a trend that began the previous quarter.

Even then, we were told the news would be real bad, and when they weren’t, that the poor sales wouldn’t be revealed until the March quarter. Once that claim was also demonstrated to be false, yet again, there were apologies here and there, but you might have expected the trend would resume all over again after a quarter or two.

After all, this nonsense has gone on for several years. At the end of a year, when you’d expect Apple to routinely cut back on parts orders after the holiday quarter ended, when sales would obviously be lower, the claim was that Apple was in deep, deep trouble.

That other tech companies exhibited seasonal sales trends didn’t seem to matter. It always seems to be just about Apple.

This is similar to complaints that the iPhone X, starting at $999, was too expensive, even though other smartphones over the years have exceeded the $1,000 threshold. Again, it always seems to be just about Apple.

But since the March financials were revealed on May 1st, Apple’s stock has increased, and the trend continues. This time, however, the company’s financial position has vocal support from one of the world’s richest men, Warren Buffett.

So in the last quarter, Buffett’s company, Berkshire Hathaway, bought 75 million shares of Apple, raising its holdings to 240 million shares. Now it may seem like a lot, but that total is just below 5% of Apple’s shares, and it surely doesn’t mean that Buffett plans to attempt to buy the company. In turn, that’s roughly 21% of his company’s stock portfolio.

Now if you don’t recognize that corporate name, consider its holdings, which include a large insurance company, GEICO, and a fast food restaurant, Dairy Queen. It’s also the largest stockholder in United Airlines and Delta Air Lines.

It’s also the third largest pubic company in the world.

Clearly Buffett isn’t swayed by false reports about Apple’s impending doom, not is former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who sites on Berkshire Hathaway’s board. In a recent interview, Gates referred to Apple as an “amazing” company.

While this may seem surprising to you, the fact of the matter is that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, though fierce competitors, apparently had a warm personal relationship in the former’s final years. I recall one Macworld keynote in which Jobs casually mentioned having dinner with Gates. There were also those joint public appearances, where you can see, by the photos of both on stage, that they really liked each other.

Yes, it’s possible to keep your friends even if they run a rival company.

In any case, news of big holdings by Berkshire Hathaway aren’t new; the large increase is, and no doubt it’s because the stock was undervalued and they took advantage of a good deal. More to the point, Buffett clearly wasn’t impacted by the claims that Apple was in trouble, that it couldn’t move enough iPhones.

Consider the December quarter, where the iPhone X took one-third of the profits of the entire market. How can that happen with a product people are rejecting in droves because it’s too expensive? How does the average price of a new iPhone increase when there are problems moving the most expensive model? How come eight of the ten most popular smartphones on the planet bear the iPhone label?

Obviously, the smartphone market is saturated, and total sales actually decreased — except for Apple and a few other companies. It’s not unlikely that, over the next few years, growth in iPhones will stall again, as they did in 2016. But that doesn’t mean sales of the Apple Watch will stall, or that Apple’s services will suffer.

Or that there aren’t other products in the pipeline that will become ascendant. Or even that Apple won’t invent new iPhone, iPad and Mac variants or successors that will help spur Apple’s ongoing growth. But even if revenue and profits increase only incrementally in the years to come, we’re talking here about an incredibly successful multinational corporation that’s having a great run. There need be no apologies for what Tim Cook and crew have accomplished on a year-over-year basis.

Remember, over 20 years ago, the late Steve Jobs, soon to be joined by Cook, were busy salvaging a company that was bleeding red ink and was only weeks away from ruin. And over all those years, the critics were still actively claiming it was all a fluke, that Apple was destined to fail any time now.

Don’t forget what the boy cried.

In 1998, the typical Mac was a large beige desktop, or a black PowerBook. Simple, conservative, powerful. In those days the PowerPC roasted Intel Pentiums for lunch. It took years for the PowerPC’s reign as the fastest PC processor to end.

In May of that year, Steve Jobs announced a revolution in personal computing — with an emphasis on simple Internet access — the iMac. It didn’t ship until August of that year, but I already had one in my home. As a member of Apple’s Customer Quality Feedback program, I was beta testing the original Bondi Blue iMac. It would go on sale for $1,299, but my Apple contact told me I could keep it if it survived a final firmware update.

I wasn’t surprised to see it didn’t, and thus I sent it back for, they told me, proper disposal. But armed with that experience, and with Apple’s approval, I wrote an article about iMac for a Phoenix newspaper, which included an interview with none other than Jonathan Ive.

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