The meme that has played out is that, since Apple’s profits have been relatively flat in recent quarters, and growth has slowed, the company must be in serious trouble. Any day now, they will be forced to fire Tim Cook and find someone, anyone, with a vision, to move the company forward. Meantime, Apple’s biggest rival, Samsung, a manufacturing conglomerate from South Korea, is on a tear and is taking over the smartphone world.

Or at least that’s what the critics say.

Yet it seems as if Samsung isn’t quite the juggernaut some have suggested it might be. But this goes back to the days of the introduction of the iPhone 5 in 2012. Some overeager financial analysts suggested that Apple would sell as many as ten million units the first weekend, with no actual evidence to back up that claim. When Apple sold half that number, a record for the company or any company making smartphones, that was sufficient to indicate the iPhone 5 was a big failure in the making.

This illusion played out in the ensuing months. There were alleged supply chain reports that had it that Apple had seriously cut production of the iPhone 5 after the 2012 holiday quarter due to reduced demand. It wasn’t for a moment considered that demand after a holiday quarter is usually less, and production would be adjusted accordingly.

During one of Apple’s quarterly conference calls with financial analysts, Tim Cook gently — perhaps too gently — explained that you cannot take one or two supply chain metrics, even if true, and assume the indicate the whole picture. It’s not as if the critics paid attention. The same story was repeated, and the stock price continued to drop.

When some analyst sales estimates weren’t quite achieved in a quarter or two, it was evidence anew that Apple was in serious trouble. Demands grew in some quarters to dump Cook, the supply chain genius.

Certainly, many Apple decisions were regarded as just plain wrong. It started with Apple’s decision to ditch Google and deliver their own Maps app. Early defects, typical of a 1.0 release or a late beta, only helped support the assumption that Apple had lost it. That many of the early problems have since been resolved didn’t matter.

And then there was the release of the iPhone 5s in 2013. Rather than sell the original iPhone 5 for $100 less as a cheaper alternative — and maybe confuse customers with a near-identical looking product — Apple decided to release an all-new model with mostly similar hardware and capabilities, the plastic-clad iPhone 5c.

But it was deemed a failure because so many more customers went for the more expensive flagship model. That raised the average sale price, so it should be a positive development. That the iPhone 5c still ended up among the top three best selling smartphones at carriers in the U.S. also should have been a good thing, but it wasn’t.

Unless Apple changed its ways, it risked losing big time to the Samsung juggernaut.

But is Samsung really doing as well as the critics suggested?

Take the Galaxy S4, which arrived in the spring of 2013 with lots of hype. The iPhone 5 was toast, since it had a smaller display and fewer features.

But Samsung’s smartphone didn’t quite do as well as all the positive publicity suggested. Some 10 million units were sold in the first four weeks, compared to five million iPhones in a single weekend. According to published estimates, the Galaxy S4 was beaten in the holiday quarter by that failure of a smartphone, the iPhone 5c.

What’s more, Samsung’s latest financials do not quite indicate stellar growth in sales and profits. So we have the announcement this week that the company’s operating profit dipped for the second quarter in a row. It also appears that the Galaxy’s S4’s successor, the Galaxy S5, is regarded as, at most, a modest update, and sales in South Korea are reported as slow. You’d think that Samsung needs to succeed in its home country.

Reviews haven’t been so stellar either. Although the Galaxy S4 got high marks, sometimes better than the iPhone, the Galaxy S5 isn’t getting the love. The most significant new feature, a fingerprint sensor that you swipe rather than touch, isn’t quite getting the love from the critics. Indeed, direct comparisons indicate that the iPhone 5s, whose Touch ID isn’t quite perfect, is a far superior solution.

Otherwise, the Galaxy S5 has a few new features, but it’s also bigger rather than slimmer, which isn’t a good thing for a product that’s already large enough.

This appears to be fairly typical for Samsung, however. A feature might be added to a product without regard to whether or not it works as advertised. So consider that silly Smart Scroll function on the Galaxy S4 that wasn’t very smart and wasn’t very functional.

Sure, Samsung sells loads of smartphones, more than any other company, but a hefty portion of those sales are for cheap handsets that don’t deliver huge profits.

I suppose if Samsung suffers another loss in the courts over patent infringement, maybe the tech and financial pundits will take pause. Or maybe not. Those legal skirmishes will still be all about rounded corners.

Desperate for news about a new Apple product, any Apple product, the rumors have moved back and forth between Apple TV and its variations (including a TV set) and the iWatch. While it is certain there will be an update to the Apple TV box before long, it’s not so certain when it comes to the TV set.

But enough of TVs and living rooms. What about your watch?

You don’t wear a watch? Well, you’re not unusual. While I’ve had a watch since I was real young, my wife only wears one on the weekends, but she uses it as jewelry, not as a means with which to tell time. My son takes his iPhone out of his pocket when he needs to check the time, although he also had a watch when he was a kid.

So when you look at the possibility of a smartwatch of some sort, what’s the target audience? Is it the power user who is only too happy to have yet another fancy toy to play with, or is it something that can be adopted by the masses if only it was delivered with a design and a set of features that made it indispensable?

Such consumer electronics companies as Samsung and Sony, and even a scrappy startup, Pebble, have decreed that there must be a smartwatch in our future. They even have products out there to make the case, but they are mostly variations on a theme. You have a typically electronic design out of a sci-fi movie, something meant as an accessory for your smartphone. So you need to mate your smartwatch with the smartphone in order for it to do much of anything.

So if you happen to forget your smartphone — perhaps you left it on the kitchen table — you have an expensive gadget that doesn’t do much of anything. Is that what you really want?

Now let’s take a look at a very brief history of one of Apple’s most iconic gadgets. So the iPod came out at a time when digital music players didn’t gain much traction. The reasons aren’t particularly surprising. Those players were just difficult to use, and were quite slow to download your songs. Indeed, I tried one or two at the time when writing for CNET and ZDNet, and I was only too happy to return them once the review process was completed. They were that bad.

Although quickly dismissed as an expensive toy, the iPod solved the problems, with usability and particularly download speeds. Apple’s solution was FireWire, but they later went to USB 2.0 when the iPod joy spread to the Windows platform. It wasn’t quite overnight, but it didn’t take long for Apple’s solution to influence an entire industry.

Nowadays, the iPod is yesterday’s news. The best iPod is the iPhone, although it’s not as if Apple is going to discontinue the iPod just yet.

Apple’s “nasty” habit of making power user gadgets warm and fuzzy for the masses came to the fore yet again with the iPhone and later the iPad. Once again, products that hadn’t realized their full potential — and tablets had gone almost nowhere — became perfectly sensible choices even for regular people because of Apple’s choices.

Now it’s perfectly clear that the current crop of smartwatches haven’t taken off in a way that would change the nascent market. As I said, they are mostly variations on the theme. So financial and tech pundits are once again looking to Apple for a solution, which has been dubbed iWatch.

I suppose you can take the possibility seriously enough. Tim Cook has said on a number of occasions that Apple is interested in wearables, although he hasn’t said what kind. It’s no secret Cook is very much into physical fitness, so such a product might indeed reflect, at least in part, his vision. But will it be a smartwatch or some sort of dedicated fitness gadget?

There are published reports suggesting that health and fitness are going to be very significant additions to iOS 8. But that wouldn’t require a smartwatch or some other wearable device, although there might be a market for add-on sensors to take blood pressure and other readings..

If there is an iWatch, I would think it would have to make some sort of fashion statement. It wouldn’t necessarily resemble a tiny computer that just happened to have a wrist band. I suspect Apple would want something that would make the appropriate fashion statement for men, women, children, and I suppose it’s possible that special gender-specific models might exist for obvious reasons. Remember, a watch is jewelry, or usually is.

The other feature would be to allow it to function at least to some degree as a standalone device, although linking to an iPhone via Bluetooth would surely add extra features. But would it exist as a telephone by itself, or would that require a traditional smartphone? If you could make calls, though, I suppose you’d use a Bluetooth headset. I just don’t think people would want to bring it to their mouths as Dick Tracy does in the comics.

But remember the biggest obstacle of all, which is that watches are no longer essential fashion accessories. Apple has to build something you’d be proud to wear, and, once you have one, it would become an indispensable part of your digital life. If Apple can’t resolve such problems, there won’t be an iWatch, at least not yet.

For a while I thought that the media fetish over the possibility of an Apple TV set was over and done with. But it’s back again with yet another alleged supply chain rumor about Apple sampling 65-inch flat panels. This time, they are reportedly using OLED, a promising technology that has yet to appear in a product people can actually afford.

OLED, short for “organic light-emitting diode” is yet another technology employed in digital displays. The supposed advantage over the various LCD schemes used now include extremely deep black levels, high contrast levels, and infinite viewing angles. The latter is the biggest advantage all things being equal, because it means that a family doesn’t have to crowd together on the sofa to get the best TV picture.

The display can also be near paper-thin, although that’s an advantage that’s more cosmetic than practical. OLEDs can even be folded, which means, I suppose that you could carry your TV set with you on vacation, though you’ll still need some sort of digital control box to contain the rest of the components and the connection ports.

Yes, there are a few OLED sets out there if you can afford the five-figure purchase price, but that just takes us back to the days when the first plasma and LCD sets appeared. It doesn’t make the technology practical for the mass market. So why would Apple consider OLED?

Unless Apple and the flat panel makers have developed some miraculous new variant of OLED technology that brings costs down to more realistic levels, why produce such a product? Granted, exiting LCD displays, with all the bells and whistles such as Full-Array LED backlight technology, can deliver really good pictures. Viewing angles are decent in the best models, but nowhere near as good as plasma.

So why not plasma? Well, it’s not as energy efficient, and, frankly, is quickly being phased out by existing TV makers. In other words, it’s close to becoming yesterday’s news despite offering a superior picture to LCD in most respects except for brightness. But how bright do you need your TV to be?

Now making an OLED set fits with the Apple boutique meme, that the company builds products strictly for the well-heeled. Regular people, they say, buy smartphones from Samsung. This conclusion avoids the real issue is that, despite the fact that Apple plays in the higher price points, the prices aren’t so high that regular people can’t buy them. With a two-year wireless contract, the iPhone 4S is free, and the iPhone 5c, which, despite the claims that it’s a failure, continues to sell quite well, is $99 for the 16GB version. What’s more, carriers and consumer electronic stores will sometimes even discount an iPhone 5s.

As to TVs, the market is heavily saturated. TV makers continue to struggle to convince people to buy new sets, to fight the perception that your five-year-old set still delivers a great picture, and are the new models really that much better? Such extras as Internet access, smart TV apps, and 3D, haven’t stemmed the recent declines in TV sales. The HD revolution is yesterday’s news, and most potential customers have already upgraded.

This year, the TV makers are hoping to entice you to pay extra for 4K, which doubles vertical and horizontal resolution. But the improvement in picture quality is only really visible on the really large screens, and 4K content is sparse. Sure, 4K is big in the pro market, and the Mac Pro and the latest Final Cut Pro X are tailor-made to edit higher resolution videos with great performance. But that doesn’t mean it won’t take a few years for 4K to spread to the masses. Will it be enough to boost sales? That remains to be seen. Certainly 3D didn’t help, although a glasses-free version is on the way.

With digital music players, smartphones and tablets, Apple was able to make a difference with markets that hadn’t reached their full potential. The same would be true for smartwatches should an iWatch come to be.

But the TV market is mature and saturated. What sort of difference could Apple make to convince people to buy new sets now? Would a more affordable OLED set make the difference, or do customers truly care about a screen that you can curve or fold? The answer is the OLED is now a plaything for the well-heeled, and it’s not such a new technology.

OLED was actually invented in 1987 by researchers at the Eastman Kodak company. The Kodak EasyShare LS633 digital camera, released in 2003, was one of the first devices equipped with an OLED display. Flexible OLED technology also dates back to the early 2000s, so it has taken years just to release TVs with large screen displays at extremely high prices. Does it really seem as if an OLED breakthrough is imminent?

This doesn’t mean that there won’t be an Apple smart TV in our near future. In the meantime, I’m sure all sorts of prototypes are being built and tested, and an OLED model isn’t out of the question. Perhaps Apple is hoping that, should the technology mature some day and panels become affordable, they’ll get an early jump. But not now.

One more thing: It won’t be called iTV. That’s the name of a broadcast network in the UK that has existed in various forms since the 1950s. Do you really think Apple will suddenly be able to acquire the name, or that the network would have any reason to call it something else?

A big argument made in favor of Windows, and even Google’s Android OS, is that they are friendlier towards the needs of the power user. There are more system adjustments you can make to customize the experience to your personal taste, and that is supposed to be a good thing.

This harkens back to the early days of the PC era, where you did everything via the command line. When Apple came out with the first graphical user interface that actually caught on — although it was never, ever dominant in the industry — the end result, the Macintosh, was dismissed as a toy.

The theory went that, in order to properly use a personal computer for your business, you had to master the ins and outs of the command line to provide the correct user experience and be productive. Just being productive out of the box didn’t necessarily occur to these people.

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