The story continues. Macs are expensive and PCs are cheap. If you just want a basic computer to get online, run Word, and handle email, you can do perfectly fine with an entry-level Dell, and I see them for as little as $329.99 at the company’s online store.

Compare that, they tell you, to the tiny Mac mini at $599. There’s no possible comparison. Why spend the extra money for a luxury “niche” product anyway? After all, despite the problems with Windows 8, the majority of the computing world still prefers Windows.

Anyway, that’s the argument, one that I have examined over and over again over the years with essentially the same result. When identically equipped — and sometimes that’s a bit of a stretch — the Mac and the Windows PC are pretty close in price. Sometimes the Mac is cheaper, and sometimes the PC is cheaper. But not by much except at the very high-end.

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So you can bet the rumors are running at full-bore about Apple. In addition to yet another bout of downgrading by some alleged financial analysts — which caused Apple’s stock price to, predictably, dive — there’s a story from a Taiwan-based tech publication, DigiTimes, claiming that Apple is having problems building the iWatch.

Problems?

Well, when I heard about this alleged problem, I wondered if I hadn’t entered an alternate reality. So far as I know, Apple has never announced an iWatch, although Tim Cook does admit to an interest in wearable devices. There is no evidence, so far at least, that an iWatch is being manufactured, so where do stories of this sort come from?

Now to be perfectly reasonable about the situation, there have been unconfirmed reports that Apple has 100 engineers working on developing an iWatch. Apple has also reportedly trademarked the name in some countries, and a few recent hires come from the fashion industry. If you believe what these signs indicate, sure Apple might indeed be contemplating something called an iWatch, though you can’t rightly assume that such a gadget will be anything that resembles what you’ve seen in some artist renderings.

However, DigiTimes, which claims to have sources in the supply chain in Asia, has been known to be consistently wrong. Indeed, that should be sufficient to knock that publication off the list of places the media will take seriously. All right, stories will often mention this critical factoid, but proceed to go with the rumor anyway as if that qualifier was a sentence or phrase that was inserted by someone else and is thus not important.

Except, of course, if you want to actually decide whether to take the claim seriously.

So I will therefore summarize the essence of the claim briefly. Supposedly, Apple’s contract factories are having trouble achieving more than a 50% yield because of the sophisticated manufacturing processes used to assemble the iWatch which, of course, doesn’t officially exist.

Now the reason some might take the story seriously is that Apple is known to build gear that’s hard to assemble. That was true with the iPhone 5, for example, and maybe that explains why the new Mac Pro workstation is seriously backordered. After a month or two of production, however, the bottlenecks are usually resolved, and yields become more efficient. But let’s not confuse the reality with the rumor.

It’s also true that Apple might indeed do a small test run of a new product to see what’s involved in ramping up mass production. It’s very possible designs might change if they prove just too difficult to make, though sometimes you wonder whether Apple green lights a product anyway hoping things will get better over time.

So I’ll be charitable. Yes, it’s quite possible that the DigiTimes story may simply represent the issues encountered in building a test batch, period. It doesn’t mean the product will ever appear, or that it will appear in the form being sampled.

Even if Apple does make an iWatch, it may not appear until summer or fall, at least in time for the holiday season. Introducing a gadget that will often be considered for gift-giving may not make so much sense in the spring. It’s not as if there’s any real competitive pressure yet, since there are no smashing successes among existing smartwatches.

That being the case, you can hardly expect the final form of this device to be set in stone right now. Regardless of how an iWatch is presented, and what it does, Apple is not going to deliver anything of this sort just to see how it fares in the marketplace. That’s the sort of thing a company such as Samsung will do. Samsung, you see, seems to have spent more time promoting the Galaxy Gear smartwatch than in delivering a sexy new gadget that will fuel growth among wearable devices. Indeed, the Galaxy Gear appears to be a huge failure because it is so flawed.

Without going into details about Samsung’s pathetic marketing plans, which turn the protagonist in a TV ad into a possible stalker, it’s fair to say the Galaxy Gear is overpriced, underpowered, and only mates via Bluetooth with a handful of Samsung devices. You almost think the company built the thing in a vacuum without being fully aware of the existence of products that are more affordable and more compatible, such as the Pebble.

You may also want to regard smartwatches as similar to the digital music player market in 2001 before the iPod arrived. There were plenty of contenders, but all were seriously flawed. Apple built a gadget that was good looking, easy to set up, and made downloading and syncing your music simple, courtesy if iTunes. Apple solved the problems and won the market.

If there’s going to be an iWatch, you would expect Apple would consider the problems in this nascent market with existing gear and find solutions. If that happens, an iWatch may be a lock. If not, maybe the technology will appear in some other wearable device that concentrates on displaying data for exercise and other purposes.

But none of this will happen because DigiTimes writes about an iWatch, nor should you assume there are real production problems with a product that doesn’t officially exist.

You’d think what with tens of thousands of talented designers and engineers working for all the major tech companies, including Google and Samsung, that Apple would be only one of many when it comes to real innovation. It would be difficult to believe that no other company has the creativity to make a dent in the tech world in the same way as Apple.

Yet when you look at some of the me-too products that appear, or the ones that seem to have been designed to anticipate an Apple move, sometimes you have to wonder just what’s going on in that business.

Let’s look at Samsung. Since the company confessed to stealing Apple’s intellectual property recently, any penalty imposed by the court when the current lawsuit in a California federal court is resolved will be well deserved, even if it’s only financial. Surely there are other smartphone designs and OS features that can be devised that don’t look so close to iPhones, right? Again, I’m assuming Samsung has talented people on board who could do wonders if their creativity was only harnessed by the executives. Instead of telling them to make products that resemble those of other companies, or are stuffed with near-useless features nobody cares about, why not try something different?

Well, I suppose there was the Galaxy Gear smartwatch, although it was surely highly influenced by the Pebble and other contenders. But somewhere in Samsung’s executive suite, they agreed to sell it for twice as much as the Pebble, and release a design that limited compatibility to only a tiny handful of Samsung products. Battery life was inferior as well, not to mention that absurd ad campaign. Consider someone trying to get it on with a person of the opposite sex by showing her photos he surreptitiously took of her with his Galaxy Gear. If the woman was famous, he’d be part of the paparazzi. If not, he’d just be a stalker.

Clearly, when it comes to trying to be original, Samsung has no taste. But don’t forget the overblown rollout of the Galaxy S4 smartphone. That was the gadget meant to overwhelm the iPhone, only it didn’t quite work out that way.

Sure, when it comes to total unit sales, Samsung moves far more product than Apple. When it comes to gadgets that are actually designed to generate profits, not so much. But Samsung still shows a decent profit and, at the end of the day, is the only smartphone maker aside from Apple that is actually making a decent return. Forget about BlackBerry, HTC, Motorola Mobility and most of the other handset makers. The former market leader, Nokia, has done so badly under the leadership of a former Microsoft executive that it was forced to sell the handset division at a sharply reduced price to their CEO’s former employer.

All right, Nokia handsets are well designed, but hobbled by Windows Phone, which has really failed to catch on. Well, at least you can’t call Windows Phone an iOS knockoff.

Yes, Android overwhelms iOS in terms of the total number of activations, but most are low-end handsets running older versions of Google’s OS. Rather than deliver compelling new features, except for a handful of changes, Android 4.4 KitKat is mostly designed to slim down the code so it runs better on older hardware. But that assumes the hardware makers and wireless carriers will bother offering the upgrades.

But where was Android before the iPhone and iOS? Well, if you look at the early concepts, it was all about resembling a BlackBerry. The same is true for Samsung’s prototypes before Apple got in the smartphone game.

Aside from selling cheap, generic PC boxes, manufacturers of Windows computers have tried to enter the tablet game with the same failed routine they’ve used for years. Take a regular note-book — thin or normal — and install a touch-enabled display. Add to the mix the ability to rotate, or unhook the display and that’s their answer to the tablet revolution. Only people just aren’t buying. It doesn’t help that these clunky convertible PC note-books sell for more than standard models, or that reaching up to a touchscreen on a device with a regular form factor is extremely uncomfortable.

Or did anyone notice?

Clearly Apple did, but the rest of the industry isn’t learning from their mistakes as PC sales continue to erode. Sure, Apple isn’t immune, but at least they can sell you an iPad or an iPhone if you decide that a Mac isn’t for you.

When it comes to the TV market, where the world awaits Apple’s solution to dominating your living room, it almost seems as if every “smart” TV — the ones with bunches and bunches of apps — resembles someone else’s smart TV. Just the other day, I wondered through the aisles at a nearby Sam’s Club, where I saw dozens and dozens of large-screen TVs. Some even merited a separate presentation, no doubt due to a spiff from the manufacturer.

But when everything was said and done, it was near-impossible to tell one brand from another without actually looking at the label on the set or a sign. They were sleek and thin, with shiny black plastic cases, slim bezels, and decent picture quality. Since they were all fed the same content, I suppose you could see which delivered a better picture. But it doesn’t really work so well, since these sets are usually configured to a super bright or “store” setting where you get an exaggerated picture meant to draw attention to the set. At home, you’d have to choose something a little more refined that would look very different, or at least dimmer, to better suit a living room or bedroom. So much for a decent comparison.

The core argument is that Apple has taste and most other tech makers don’t. Well, some do, but the product lineups are so overwhelmed with junk, it’s hard to tell. But why should an entire industry look to one company for much of its real innovation? What would they do if Apple wasn’t around?

I couldn’t help but feel that Apple wouldn’t have a nice time of it when 2013 arrived. First there were reports, never actually confirmed, of severe cutbacks in production of the iPhone 5, thus indicating that sales may not be quite what Apple hoped.

But the false claims that the iPhone 5 was unsuccessful dated back to September of 2012. Apple boasted of selling five million the very first weekend, a record for the company. But some financial pundits, pulling figures from somewhere really dark, decreed that Apple must sell ten million and anything less was a big miss. It doesn’t matter that no other smartphone maker has done near as well. Indeed it took Samsung 28 days to ship (not sell — ship!) 10 million copies of the Galaxy S4 smartphone. That was good, Apple’s results were bad. Are you with me so far?

So, with the stock price dipping, the conventional wisdom, such as it was, indicated that Apple was in deep distress, that Tim Cook ought to be fired and replaced with some sort of visionary who could pick up the mantle of the late Steve Jobs and take the company — well, somewhere or other.

Of course it didn’t help that Apple failed to introduce much of anything new for the first five months of the year. Only in June did you see some potential, as iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks were announced. The latter didn’t seem so special, though the former surely looked different for better or worse. But there were perceptions, which still persist, that this very major iOS upgrade was lacking in fit and finish. Maybe Apple rushed too much, or maybe the assumption that Sir Jonathan Ive could do for software what he did for hardware wasn’t quite correct, or that’s what some assumed.

Nonetheless, as of the end of the year, some 78% of active iOS gadgets are running iOS 7. So maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. Nobody forced anyone to do that upgrade. Notices about new software can be safely ignored with no harm done.

But perhaps the most significant upgrade was the Mac Pro. After doing virtually nothing with that expensive workstation for three years, Apple changed the ballgame. Even better, despite prices ranging from $2,999 for the basic version to nearly $9,700 for a box with all the options, no PC maker could deliver an identical or near-identical workstation for anything near that price. The skeptics even resorted to configuring a do-it-yourself box with parts that you’d have to assemble and test yourself. Yet the Mac Pro is still cheaper to the tune of two thousand dollars or more.

Despite the fact that a lot of professional Mac users are using iMacs nowadays, there’s still a need for a workstation for video editing, 3D rendering, mathematics and other processor-intensive chores that require more active cores and more powerful graphics. So the Mac Pro, 2013 edition, was backordered for weeks at the end of the year.

A failure?

All right, it’s true that Mac sales have stopped growing. They are eroding, though mostly less than PC sales. So perhaps the era of the PC is in the rearview mirror for many of you, except, of course, for those who lust after a Mac Pro. But that isn’t Apple’s failure; it’s the market forces at work and moving in new directions. At least Apple can sell you an iPad or an iPhone. What does Dell or HP hope to offer except for tablets that nobody wants?

One thing Apple appears to do better than most tech companies is play the long ball, staying conscious of future customer needs so they can fulfill them with cutting-edge gear people didn’t know they wanted.

So we look at Apple’s intense interest in the living room. Sure, when Tim Cook said he felt he was going back a couple of decades when he entered his living room, it was a market-driven statement. It created expectations that something drastically different was coming down the pike, and no doubt spooked Apple’s competition into wondering what that drastically different gadget might be.

Would it be a connected TV set, with a 4K display? What about a souped up Apple TV box? What about something — something we can’t quite imagine yet? Is there any reason for Apple not to look for a different solution to the TV viewing dilemma?

Of course, whatever solution Apple devises, assuming one comes in 2014, the critics will say it’s nothing new, and what about Samsung’s imitation? I mean alternative. I would assume other tech companies are trying to guess what Apple is up to, so they can prepare some responses.

But, as with the introduction of 64-bit processing for the iPhone 5s and the new iPads, Apple clearly loves to catch the rest of the industry flatfooted. Consider, for example, how smartphones looked before the iPhone arrived. They were largely in the image of a BlackBerry with that famous clunky thumb-based physical keyboard. After the iPhone was announced with a virtual keyboard, most of the competition began to look like iPhones. But they didn’t know the way till Apple set the goalpost.

Maybe that’ll happen in yet another market in 2014. At least that’s what Tim Cook is promising.