Some believe that Macs were the most popular personal computers on the planet before Microsoft and Windows took over. But that was never true, not even at the beginning. In the old days, “real PCs” used MS-DOS and many were actually made by IBM. Sure, Macs were popular among certain classes of PC users, particularly those involved in content creation, but for many the Mac was just a fancy, overpriced toy that would never do real work.

When Windows became dominant, Apple’s minority market share really shrank. The success of Windows 95 convinced some to give up on Macs completely, since Microsoft and Windows were, to them, just as good, had more apps, and more users.

Indeed, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple as the result of the decision to buy NeXT, the company he co-founded wasn’t in very good shape. Some suggested it came to a point where bankruptcy was close, but Jobs made the right moves to cut expenses and discontinue non-performing products. The rest is history.

It is true that the iPod became the most popular digital music player on the planet, and even in the twilight of that era, the situation hasn’t changed, except that Apple and the competition are chasing a smaller number of sales.

Besides, isn’t the best iPod found in the iPhone?

The theory has it that the iPhone took over the market, and Apple soon lost share to Android, particularly Android handsets made by Samsung. That was never true. The iPhone never held a majority position worldwide.

Although the iPhone is a minority product, Apple controls the high end. Most of Samsung’s success comes from cheap handsets, where meager profits are being made. No wonder Samsung’s profits have been flagging of late, although that singular fact doesn’t get near as much attention as Apple’s presumed problems, real or otherwise.

These days, the iPhone is the number one smartphone in some countries, though, particularly in the U.S. where the both the iPhone 5s and that alleged failure, the iPhone 5c, routinely occupy two of the top three spots.

Things get a little screwy when it comes to tablets. The iPad took off real fast, coming to dominate a market that had gone nowhere before Apple got into the game. These days, surveys that claim to report tablet sales report that the iPad’s share is slipping, and the combined total of other tablets covers a growing majority of the market.

If you can believe them.

So it was revealed as part of the documents released during the latest Apple versus Samsung patent trial that Samsung’s own figures about tablet sales have been faked. An example is an alleged “top secret” document from the company that revealed sales of the Galaxy Tab tablet in 2011 were in the range of one million. This is quite a bit less than the data reported by such analytics firms as Strategy Analytics and even IDC.

Samsung’s gambit was to tout the number of units shipped into the channel, not actual sales, although you’d think the chickens would come home to roost eventually when dealers were left saddled with loads of unsold inventory.

An even larger number of tablets fit into the “white box” category, no-name gear sold, or at least shipped, mostly in Asia, for extremely low prices. But if you check the tablet offerings at dealers selling consumer electronics gear here in the U.S., you’ll find loads of cheap models from unknown manufacturers from which to choose — if you’re looking for junk. Just a quick run through of Best Buy’s online catalog revealed products from such unknown makers as Digital2 (or D2) or Visual Land beginning at a mere $59.99.

Does anyone actually buy that garbage? And if they do, what percentage of those tablets are returned because they just don’t work very well?

This explains why some 85% of the tablets recorded online are iPads. Sure, the iPad doesn’t command 85% of the market, or even close to it. I’m not about to suggest that all those cheap tablets do not exist, or that people aren’t buying them. But they clearly aren’t getting much use, for why aren’t they showing up in those online surveys?

Members of the media, however, will continue to pretend there is an honest-to-goodness tablet market, rather than an iPad market with lots of cheap competitors that few buy or, if they buy them, actually use on a regular basis even for email and browsing.

True, some of those cheap tablets do seem to get favorable customer reviews, although I did catch this comment about the $59.99 D2 (Digital2), “I had called the company no one answer.”

Why am I not surprised?

To be sure, I am not suggesting that the iPad’s real market share is over 50%. But it may well be that a lot of the sales attributed to other brands amount to channel flooding and number fudging. Or maybe people do buy them, turn them on once, and put them away, realizing that you get what you paid for, and what they got was a hunk of junk.

The conventional wisdom goes that more and more people are ditching cable and satellite TV and taking the streaming video route. Certainly, the growth of Netflix is an example of a company plowing a different road and achieving great success. But it’s largely about having award-winning original shows, such as the dark political thriller, “House of Cards,” which are not available anywhere else.

Indeed, there are loads of third-party networks that provide a wide range of TV programming. So if you want typical network fare, there’s Hulu Plus,” although you won’t get your favorite shows at the same time they appear on a regular TV or cable channel. Apple TV offers several dozen apps or channels, or you can just rent typical pay-per-view movies and TV shows via iTunes. Roku offers hundreds of choices, some very obscure, but adding up to a positively huge range of programming choices.

Regardless of which TV box you use, even the new Amazon Fire TV, cutting the cable cord is not easy. The shows you like, assuming they are available, may be divided among many separate services, each of which requires a subscription and perhaps a separate payment plan. You might even want to install an antenna for local stations, assuming you can get a decent signal.

So at the end of the day, navigating through all these choices can be exceedingly complex.

Compare that to the standard cable and satellite system. Regardless of the quality of the user interface on the set top box, you only need to navigate a single list of channels. If you want pay-per-view, it’s part of the same list. This all-in-one smorgasbord of offerings can usually be searched, and every cable box with DVR capability lets you schedule shows you don’t want to miss, and usually set up a full season with a few clicks of the remote.

Now a big criticism of the way cable TV is marketed is the channel bundle. How often have you heard complaints that, out of over 300 choices, there’s nothing to watch. Maybe you only want a few channels, but they are in different “tiers” or service levels, and thus you have to order a high-end package to get everything you want. So why can’t the cable companies go a la carte?

Well, it’s not so simple. The entertainment companies offer channels to the cable companies as a package. You want SyFy and USA Network from Comcast, you’ve got to pay the carriage fees for others, such as CLOO (mostly crime procedurals, such as “Law & Order Criminal Intent”) that have a far smaller audience.

But I want to be fair to both sides. You see, a really great channel may go undiscovered if you didn’t have it, but you might discover it when doing some channel surfing. That’s how I happened upon USA Network in 2002 when I caught an episode of “Monk,” a terrific comedy mystery series starring the great character actor Tony Shalhoub as a brilliant detective suffering from obessive/compulsive disorder.

These days, the theory goes that the cable and satellite companies are having trouble selling their services to young people, who comprise a large portion of the audience for Netflix and other streaming services. Maybe they have a point. But it’s also true that the younger generation has other priorities, such as school, working overtime to get ahead at the job or to build a business, or just starting a family. Budgets are tight, and it may come down to dinner or cable. As things settle down, perhaps they will, indeed, choose the simple approach, which is to take one of those great discount offers from the cable or satellite companies.

Regardless, the theory goes that, with so many choices out there, traditional cable and satellite services are in a pickle, and customers are dropping like flies. You see all those enticing ads to sign up new customers. Perhaps they’re desperate, and many of the customers are really conquests from other companies. Back and forth, as the offers change, and the long-term discount deals expire.

Yet with all the competition from iTunes, Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video and all the rest, the actual erosion in the number of cable subscribers is relatively modest. Recent surveys from Forrester Research indicate that only 6% of adults with online access have cut the cord. As you might expect, the percentage of cord cutters increases to 10% for those aged 18-24, with another 14% considering the jump from pay TV to net TV.

With the growth of new households ordering up cable or satellite, however, the number of pay TV homes will reportedly drop from 91.8 households in the U.S. to 91.5 million by 2018.

That’s hardly an avalanche, and seems a natural consequence of the fact there are more programming choices fighting for your attention. So the cable industry can still look forward to a huge number of paying customers in the years that follow, although competition for the living room will become far more intense.

It’s not as if any of them are poised to go out of business tomorrow. You see, having that one-size-fits-all solution is actually a good idea, and the fight for new sign-ups means that the cable industry will add more features, such as multi-room capability, the ability to record up to six channels and more at a time, and smoother integration between your TV, the set top box, your smartphone and your iPad.

This is the business that Apple wants to conquer, and while some have suggested it means an Apple TV set, it seems that it’s more focused on the set top box for now. And, as I’ve said before, don’t be surprised to see an Apple TV serve as the connection point for your cable company too.

But it does appear as if the fears of mass cord cutting are, for now at least, rather overblown.

On June 2, 2014, iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks will become yesterday’s news. That’s when Apple is expected to unveil the next versions of both at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, so let the speculation begin in earnest.

It’s not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with the existing versions of Apple’s free operating systems. But time marches on, and you have to keep up with the program. Besides, iOS 7 was nothing if not controversial. The heavily-modified flat look, the brainchild of superstar designer Sir Jonathan Ive, was thought by some to be inferior to the previous of aging iOS 6.

It didn’t help that the initial release was ragged around the edges, although the interface and the options to smooth the excesses were largely resolved in iOS 7.1. Performance on the 2010 iPhone 4 even became good enough to be useful for many, so they didn’t have to scramble to somehow induce iOS 6 to be reinstalled. According to the most recent estimate, some 87% of iOS gear still in use are using the latest and greatest OS. Take that Google!

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To show you how desperate the media has become when it comes to news about a forthcoming Apple product — any forthcoming product – there is a certain report that indicates Comcast knows something about the next Apple TV.

Or maybe not.

In an FCC filing designed to explain why it’s a great idea for Comcast and Time Warner to merge, there’s a single phrase that is giving the media goose bumps. It comes from a paragraph designed to explain the competitive landscape in the broadband and cable industries:

Today, Google competes as a network, video, and technology provider, and 8 out 9 of the next Google Fiber markets the company announced are in Comcast or TWC areas. Apple tablets are viewing platforms for cable services even while Apple offers an online video service, Apple TV, and explores development of an Apple set-top box. Microsoft just announced that it will feature ads on the Xbox One, creating a new video advertising platform. And just last week, Amazon announced its own set-top box while it continues to leverage its unequaled sales platform and family of competitive tablets to promote its burgeoning Prime Instant Video business.

So is that the proof we’ve been waiting for about the next Apple TV?

Read it again, “explores development of an Apple set-top box.” Is that some sort of amazing revelation of what’s going on behind the scenes in Cupertino, or does it represent something we already know? Unfortunately, the statement is poorly phrased, because the Apple TV is a set-top box that’s already available, and the statement that development is being “explored” is no great revelation. Apple already admits the Apple TV is an area of intense interest, so you would expect new versions to be in the works. It’s very possible a major upgrade is already forthcoming, if you can believe yet another set of Apple TV rumors.

Now Comcast’s statement is meant to be self-serving. It’s designed to convince the FCC, who would predictably be skeptical about the extent to which a merger of the number one and the number two cable providers would impact the business, that the market is in fact competitive.

But consider the truth, which is that, in many cities, Comcast or Time Warner Cable may be your only broadband Internet options. Well, other than satellite Internet, which has its own problems and is usually not a cost-effective alternative, except for those who live in outlying areas where there is no choice.  Google Fiber, offering gigabit Internet, is being test marketed in a handful of cities, with no indication when or if there will be a nationwide rollout. But it should serve as a message to ISPs that it is possible to give customers something far better than what they already have.

If you’re talking about TV service, well there is satellite, but it’s rare to find more than one cable provider. As a practical matter, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to build out two systems, except where a traditional telecom is leveraging old-fashioned copper wire for TV. So we have CenturyLink’s Prism, which does just that, though it means that your broadband Internet speeds are limited since bandwidth is being shared.

The long and short of it is that Comcast and Time Warner cable serve markets that largely do not overlap and for which there is little if any direct competition. So the argument in favor of the move seems promising enough. Certainly it would give cable companies more power to negotiate with the entertainment companies who have on occasion blocked service to customers during disputes over carriage fees.

I wouldn’t presume to know if the merger will sail through or not, but if it does, it would probably mean that other cable companies would also consider merging to leverage monopolies in more cities. It’s not the same thing as the failed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile, where the choices available to customers would have been reduced.

When it comes to Apple TV, the use of a single phrase in Comcast’s document may seem significant to some, but it’s all about competition, since Amazon and Microsoft were also mentioned. But not Netflix, since Comcast inked a deal with them to provide special access. I’m not surprised.

The real question is just what Apple is working on. Will all roads lead to the TV set that will not be called iTV? Will Apple concentrate on a souped up Apple TV with gaming pretensions, a newly-designed interface, and perhaps integration with some cable or satellite providers? What’s Apple’s magic formula to conquer the living room, and can it all be done with a set-top box, as opposed to the whole widget?

I’d really like to know those answers, and I expect we will soon enough. But not from a confusing phrase in a self-serving FCC document from a cable provider trying to push through a merger.