So you’ve heard nearly the same chatter from a number of sources about what Apple might do in 2014. Certainly Tim Cook has made some big promises, about great products and some new product categories. That ought to be quite sufficient to fuel the speculation, and there has been plenty of that. But even the vaunted tech site Ars Technica hasn’t delivered any compelling new ideas. It’s all about variations on the theme.

Now before I go on, let me confess that I am not a product designer or engineer, and I do not play either on radio or TV. But I have written sci-fi novels and I do have a slight feeling for the future, so maybe I can contribute a little. I would, though, expect more of the tech media, and it doesn’t seem they are delivering very much.

So first we have the usual iterative upgrades. A faster, more energy-efficient Mac lineup, an iPad that, after a major change to the flagship product this year, will be confined to modest updates in 2014. Maybe there will be slight changes to the aging iPod lineup, but then there’s the iPhone.

Apple revises form factors in alternate years, even though the media hasn’t gotten the memo. It would seem, then, that an iPhone 6 would look at least somewhat different. Maybe it’ll have a larger screen, and several measurements between 4.5 and 5 inches have been bandied about. Logic dictates that the iPhone 5s and 5c will be sold for $99 less, each, meaning the 5c will be free with a two-year contract. Nothing surprising so far.

In fact, if the iPhone 6 goes this route, the only question will be whether Apple will divide the product line with more than one new size. But since fragmentation isn’t their game, I expect not. Sure, it’ll have snazzy looks and all, with more powerful guts, perhaps more battery life and a camera with a higher megapixel count, but there are no surprises in any of that.

So what’s left?

Well, the tech bloggers, and the financial pundits for that matter, demand Apple do something original. But when you ask them what they are thinking about, it’s pretty much the iWatch and an Apple connected TV set.

Sure, perhaps there will be an iWatch or some other wearable device of some sort. There is that unconfirmed rumor that Apple has over 100 engineers working on the product, and some executives from the fashion industry might have been hired to handle the development and marketing of wearable gear. Apple is also trademarking iWatch in some countries, but that could be a defensive move to reserve the name in case something does come down the pike. It doesn’t mean it’s happening in 2014.

Indeed, is there a demand for a smartwatch from anyone? Does Apple have to build one? So far, smartwatches haven’t gone very far. The overpriced and underpowered Samsung Galaxy Gear was a miserable failure, with Samsung being forced to confess that the claim of 800,000 sales was based solely on shipments. But that’s their usual game when it comes to reporting sales.

The other supposed “lock” from Apple is some sort of enhanced Apple TV box, a connected TV, or perhaps both. Much of this seems to come from the statement from Steve Jobs in that authorized biography about developing the magic interface that will revolutionize the industry. Maybe. But Jobs might also have said that to spook the competition, forcing them to deliver something, anything, to head off Apple. Just remember how a number of tablets were introduced ahead of the arrival of the iPad in 2010, but most never saw the light of day when Apple’s tablet solution was launched.

Of course, they’ve been saying that Apple has a TV set in development for a couple of years now if not longer. There are rumors that several display sizes have been sampled, no doubt for prototypes. There are no doubt prototypes aplenty in Apple’s secret labs, but most of those prototypes will never be released for manufacturing and sale.

True, Tim Cook has said that TV and the living room remain areas of intense interest for the company, but how or when that interest will manifest itself is still anyone’s guess.

All right, that’s the 2014 story that you’ve heard about in various and sundry ways across the media. There are minor variations here and there, but does any of it come as a surprise? Well, maybe a larger iPad, but is that all Apple can do?

The real question is whether there are other product segments that Apple is working on that may be reflected in new products this coming year and beyond. That’s the real question that isn’t being answered.

Just this week, there were published reports about Google’s pact with Audi, the luxury car maker owned by Volkswagen, which would install Android as part of the brand’s infotainment systems. Microsoft is already there with mixed results. It seems to do all right with the Kia UVO system, but not nearly so well with MyFordTouch, a flawed design that has caused Ford to get far lower initial quality and reliability ratings.

Apple has iOS in the Car under development, and Siri support is already beginning to appear. The media wants to portray this as a fight to the death between Apple and Google to control the auto interface.

So far so good. But that is fairly predictable. It doesn’t mean Apple will release an iCar, a full-blown motor vehicle. What’s more, purchasing Tesla, the electric car maker, wouldn’t make very much sense either, although some have demanded just that.

At the end of the day, is Apple planning something us that’ll amaze us and send us scurrying to consult credit card and checking account balances? That’s the real question, but I’ve yet to see a compelling answer.

You just know that, if you were sick of those 10 best or 10 worst listicles through the year, prepare for a surfeit of them to close the year. Some were designed just to fill space, but certainly a few were well-considered, with a solid factual basis.

So we have an online publication, 24/7 Wall Street, which reported about “The Worst Product Flops of 2013,” and there’s plenty of meat and potatoes to chew on among the seven items that are presented. For one thing, there don’t seem to be any obvious efforts to advance an agenda. Just let the facts fall where they may.

Now among the listed products is a movie. After all, entertainment companies consider their work “product,” so it stands to reason that an expensive dud of a picture would get a prime listing. So we have Disney’s “The Lone Ranger,” an attempted reinvention of an old franchise that began as a radio show in the 1930s. The film allegedly cost around $250 million to shoot. With such A-list talents as Johnny Depp as Tonto and movie and TV producer Jerry Bruckheimer onboard, you’d expect a sure-fire success. Instead, Disney may lose up to $190 million from this unfortunate enterprise despite a worldwide gross of over $261 million, making it another Hollywood excess that went nowhere.

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Almost every time someone discusses Apple’s pricing, it is assumed that you can buy similar products from other companies for less. From the release of the very first Mac, you supposedly had to pay more money to go Apple. Indeed, Apple was often attacked for daring to charge extra for Macs and other gear.

Now in the early days, the critics were probably right about overpriced Macs, but there came a time after Steve Jobs returned to the company where a Mac and a near-identically configured PC were quite close in price. Sometimes the Mac was a bit more expensive and sometimes the PC. When the original Mac Pro came out, it did appear that supposedly comparable Windows workstations cost quite a bit more with similar options.

At the low end of the scale, Apple wasn’t there. The $599 Mac mini is the cheapest personal computer offered by Apple, but you can spend $300 or maybe less and get something workable in a Windows PC. It may not contain the premium components that Apple uses, of course, or match the performance. Apple simply doesn’t play in the cheap PC arena, where there are no profits to be made.

Now when it comes to the high-end Mac Pro, as soon as the 2013 model with its striking tubular looks shipped, you can bet that the critics were busy trying to see if a workstation that started at $2,999 for a fairly basic configuration, and came close to $9,600 fully outfitted, was indeed a good value compared to the competition.

What is clear from the starting gate is that it’s extremely difficult to actually find anything with comparable specs in any workstation from a mainstream manufacturer, such as Dell or HP. I checked the business section at Dell’s site and tried to match the component complement, roughly speaking, of the most expensive Mac Pro with a Precision Workstation. I couldn’t come close regardless of what I did.

My next attempt was to build a customized HP Z820 workstation. The price hit $11,581 before I gave up without getting all the components in place. This appears to explain why others have tried the build-it-yourself route, using parts from different PC dealers to see if they could make one.

AppleInsider made a huge splash configuring a DIY box, ending up with a tally of $14,300 to come up with something that, on paper at least, essentially matched a Mac Pro, except for the cool case and the advanced thermal system of course. Understand, though, that Apple is using some customized parts that do not match the equivalents that bear similar model names and ratings.

But AppleInsider wasn’t the only publication to attempt a customized Mac Pro clone. Yet another effort came from Stephen Fung, of FutureLooks, who ended up with a price tag of $11.530.54, but it wasn’t an exact match by any means. Fung used a logic board that wouldn’t support the Mac Pro’s 64GB RAM complement, compromising at 32GB. Solid state storage required two 512GB drives and a RAID 0 setup to match the 1GB drive PCIe system used by Apple.

You can read the article itself to see the extent of the compromises, and whether that amounts to cheating, or simply represents the difficulty of matching the guts of a Mac Pro on the DIY market. So it is possible that, over time, PC makers and independent parts retailers will begin offering components that more closely match a Mac Pro.

Now it is true that a valid argument can be made for Apple’s Mac Pro design decision. Rather than contain internal ports for extra drives and expansion cards, Apple added six Thunderbolt 2 and four USB 3.0 ports as replacements. There’s also an HDMI 1.4 Ultra HD port and two Gigabit Ethernet ports. While there aren’t a whole lot of Thunderbolt 2 peripherals out, you can bet there will be if vendors conclude that the Mac Pro is sufficiently popular for them to make sense.

Indeed, the third-party workstations, built or otherwise, aren’t offering Thunderbolt 2. But, as I said, if the new Mac Pro is a keeper, it’s a sure thing that PC and peripheral manufacturers will seek solutions.

The long and short of it is that, when it comes to the Mac Pro, it may be an expensive beast. But it is not expensive when you consider what Apple has done compared to the rest of the industry. In saying that, though, the Mac Pro is designed to reach a very specialized audience. For most computing tasks, a fully tricked out 27-inch iMac will provide essentially equal performance in most respects. But if you run apps that keep all the processor cores working full-time, or are contemplating 4K video work, the Mac Pro will be an excellent and productive tool.

That the Mac Pro is backordered does appear to indicate there’s plenty of pent-up demand for a full-bore workstation for 3D rendering, mathematics, and other heavy-duty computing chores. For that reason, and because Apple wants a showpiece to advance the brand, the Mac Pro will continue to be built and updated for quite some time to come.

As many members of the media try real hard to find failure with Apple even when success is at hand, it’s often forgotten that the company has actually released products that haven’t done so well over the years. Of course, most of these products are forgotten among thousands and thousands of other products that have failed to deliver acceptable sales, but it’s Apple after all.

But before you consider the bad stuff, today’s Apple can’t afford any failure. The world is watching carefully. Even the iPhone 5c, which basically allowed Apple to sell a new model rather than last year’s iPhone 5, is perceived as a huge fail. Is it? If sales are less the iPhone 5, perhaps. If sales are equal or better, the answer is no. By using plastic rather than metal, Apple has managed to build them cheaper. But since Apple isn’t breaking out sales of individual models, the best that can be done is to examine the top listings at a third-party dealer or a wireless carrier that reveal such figures.

The real failure is the product that goes nowhere, and certainly the Power Mac G4 Cube is first among many. Released in August 2000, its slick looks seemed destined to make it a museum piece. At $1,799 for the entry-level version, it was perceived as much too expensive for what it offered, and expansion capabilities were very basic. Better to buy a fully-outfitted Power Mac G4 tower instead and put up with something a lot uglier.

Clearly sales didn’t take off as Apple hoped, so the price was reduced in a failed attempt to boost sales, first to $1,499 in February 2001. An updated version was introduced at $1,299, but it still didn’t help. By July 2001, the Cube was gone. And, no, there is no reason to compare the Cube with the new Mac Pro, except for the unique designs.

But you can go way back through Apple’s history to find more examples of good intentions, and I assume they were mostly good, producing bad results. According to an article entitled, “Picturing Apple’s Biggest Failures,” the most expensive or blatant example was probably the Apple Lisa, the forerunner of the Macintosh, released in 1983. The starting price was $9,995, which would be well over $21,000 in today’s dollars. Apple cheapened the layout and internal configuration for the Lisa 2, introduced in January 1984, which sold between $3,495 and $5,495, but it didn’t really go anywhere either. It was too high end for its time.

In the same month that the Lisa 2 arrived, the original Macintosh 128k went on sale, for $2,495. I suppose that was pretty expensive too — that’s over $5,555 in today’s dollars — but it caused a sensation on the computing industry.

Now when you look at the $499 iPad Air, you can hardly believe it came from the very same company that brought you the 1989 Macintosh Portable, which cost $4,500 way back then. But it was portable in name only, tipping the scales at 16 pounds. Compare to the 11-pound Mac Pro or even the one-pound iPad Air. But Apple once again managed to redeem itself when the PowerBook arrived, a note-book computer that heavily influenced the entire PC industry. And, may I add, was used to save the world in the 1996 blockbuster film, “Independence Day.” Apple has long had an edge when it comes to product placement.

Yet another of those Apple failures pictured in that article is the infamous iMac hockey puck mouse. I wonder, in passing, what convinced Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive that we wanted a circular mouse. Fortunately, there were cheap extensions that turned the foolish mouse into a reasonably sensible egg-shaped one. Or you do as I did, which was to simply buy a normally configured mouse. But I hardly call this a huge failure by any means, nor would I regard the $349 iPod Hi-Fi stereo speaker system, from 2006, as anything of much significance.

Of course Apple has failed even when new market segments were pioneered. So consider the Newton Message Pad, which was introduced in 1993, although it wasn’t terribly good at one of its core tasks, which was handwriting recognition (at least at the beginning). But it was the forerunner of the personal digital assistant which, when married to a phone, evolved into today’s smartphone. And don’t forget a certain Newton variant, the eMate 300, a small note-book offered to the educational market, which surely influenced the development of tinier note-books years later.

It may also be forgotten, but those looking at the earliest digital cameras have only to check out the 1994 Apple QuickTake. While a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels doesn’t seem much when you consider that the smaller iPhone 5s offers eight megapixels, it was still a revolution for its time. But it took other companies to perfect digital cameras, and Steve Jobs discontinued the QuickTake in 1997 to streamline the company’s product portfolio. Other casualties included the Newton and the remaining LaserWriter printers.

But as Apple made itself smaller in order to survive, I wonder how many at the time realized that, in the following decade, Apple would introduce a digital music player, a smartphone and, in 2010, a tablet. Or that the Mac would play second fiddle to all of them.