So, as promised, the Made in the U.S.A. Mac Pro became available for ordering on Thursday, December 19. Coming so late in the month, though, I expect that all or most of the units ordered, particularly the ones that are heavily customized, will not actually reach the hands of customers until some time in January.

Certainly the photos and descriptions show a potential work of art that is remarkably small, at just 9.9 inches high. Remember that’s a bit more than an inch shy of an 11-inch sheet of paper to give you the appropriate perspective. Width is 6.6 inches and it weighs just 11 pounds.

I emphasize these numbers because the cylindrical Mac Pro seems a lot larger in the photos, and it certainly sets a new standard not just for personal computers, but for high-end number crunching machines known as workstations.

As I ponder the size of the Mac Pro, I think of the last one I had, a 2008 model that tipped the scales at just shy of 40 pounds. I’ve lugged those beasts around many times over the years, and certainly they exuded computing power. Big, powerful, fast — and expensive.

The older Mac Pro started at $2,499 before you added stuff; the 2013 model is $2,999 and it’s a sure thing that you’ll be able to boost the price to north of ten grand by a judicious selection of options in the customize box, though it requires adding some apps and an AppleCare extended warranty to the maxed-out hardware. Consider the cost of replacing the stock CPU with a 12-core Xeon processor, upgrading to the maximum of 64GB of RAM, adding more powerful AMD FirePro graphics and a 1TB solid state drive and you’ll get to the stratosphere really fast. And don’t forget a keyboard and mouse, since the Mac Pro doesn’t include either.

But since most of the Mac Pro’s expansion possibilities are external, you can see where adding a RAID drive or two, or maybe an expansion chassis with some PCI cards will put you in the neighborhood of a compact car by the time you’re done.

That is as it should be. Apple promises gobs of external expansion with six Thunderbolt 2 and four USB 3.0 ports. They aren’t there for decoration, but one potential roadblock to sales is the fact that so many power users are accustomed to sticking most of their extras inside the case. Obviously Apple made a different decision, but I hope it was a matter of practicality rather than design considerations. When the latter supplants the former, it works against the user. Don’t forget the failings of the Power Mac G4 Cube.

But why do I suggest that the Mac Pro may be the last Mac workstation?

First and foremost, it’s a question of where Apple can take this design. The previous cheese crater box survived nine years when you include the Power Mac G5 in the mix. It was very much a descendent of a traditional design philosophy behind PC towers. You make them big, put in lots of slots inside, so customers can outfit them to a fare-the-well. Indeed, that’s what many of you probably expected of the new Mac Pro before it debuted in a decidedly surprising form factor.

What’s more, I do not expect sales to be particularly high. In the older days, consumers bought an iMac or a Mac mini, while the pros had to have a Mac Pro. I was one of these people. But after moving the iMac up market beginning in late 2009, a lot of you doubtlessly felt that it was no longer necessary to rely on a large, heavy and expensive box to get work done. A fully outfitted iMac could do a lot of the chores that formerly were the province of a Mac Pro with extremely good performance.

Indeed, that’s the choice I made, and I haven’t looked back. Although the Mac Pro has intriguing possibilities, my workflow is more about audio than video, so I fail to see the need for the extra power, not to mention the price of admission.

I also expect sales will be pretty good from the starting gate because of pent-up demand from people who have been waiting for a new Mac Pro for several years after tepid updates of the previous model. Once these machines are incorporated in workflows around the world, we’ll begin to see whether Apple’s approach to emphasize external expansion was the right one.

Over the next few years, Mac sales will no doubt continue to erode. It’s a sure thing that more and more Mac users will come to rely on an iPad for many tasks. I can see where many road warriors might begin to move off a MacBook Air or a MacBook Pro. But Apple may have to add a few things to iOS to hasten this migration, such as the ability to have multiple apps and windows open and visible at the same time, as you can on a Mac. Offering real access to the file system and allowing a higher level of data sharing among apps would also help, but iOS and OS X do not need to merge.

In saying that, if the Mac Pro does well after the early adopters are satisfied, it’ll have a long useful life, and maybe it will be the last workstation produced by Apple. That is, unless there’s a Mac Pro 2 in our future that’s half the size of the current model. No doubt future models are on the drawing boards at Apple, but that doesn’t mean they’ll ever see the light of day.

Predictably, financial and media pundits are busy churning out pieces speculating about what you can expect from Apple Inc. in 2014. Predictably, some of those articles make long-disproven assumptions about the company’s history, and use that incorrect information to make questionable predictions.

So there is one article, from a large tech blog (which does not deserve a link), where it is assumed that the iPhone has been left way behind by Android when it comes to features and overall technology. How? Well, Android phones, for example, have more pixels, and more pixels are better, right? Perhaps in theory, but a Retina display means that you can’t see the individual pixels that make up the image at a normal viewing distance. So why do you need more, other than to give a company some needless bragging rights?

And, no, it’s not the same as having a car that can travel at 150 miles per hour when, aside from the race track, there aren’t many places to legally test that potential. A higher top speed usually means faster acceleration to normal or slightly above normal freeway speeds. More passing power can be a good thing even if you don’t speed. But having pixels you can’t see, pixels that don’t improve visual image quality, is a useless luxury with no practical value.

But that’s just part of the spec argument. The other is that you need a quad-core processor on a high-end smartphone (or maybe even six or eight?), although Apple’s dual-core A7 manages higher real benchmarks most of the time. I say “real,” because of the tricks Samsung has been known to pull to make their speed ratings score better in some benchmark apps, but not otherwise. But please don’t get me started about useless apps that do little or nothing but make bullet point lists larger.

Apple will, however, add features that trump the competition. The 64-bit A7, for example, freaked out Qualcomm, the large mobile chip maker, and nobody has matched the ease and efficiency of the Touch ID fingerprint sensor.

The other questionable argument is that Apple will enter a new market at the top and eventually be relegated to niche status. That didn’t exactly happen with the Mac, which has always been a minority platform. It didn’t happen with the iPhone either, because other smartphones had already gotten a hefty piece of the market, although Apple’s entry made that market larger.

Sure, the iPod took over the digital media player market, but it stayed there, and never became a niche product. Instead, it is essentially a fading product since the iPhone arrived. With the iPad, I agree Apple had early dominance, but even today’s lesser share is not niche by any means. The vast majority of tablet-based Web traffic comes from the iPad, and you can hardly call a $50 tablet a true competitor.

But what does this mean for 2014?

Well, the unnamed pundit makes the standard arguments about an iWatch, that Apple allegedly has over 100 engineers on the project (though this hasn’t been proven), that the iWatch tradename has been sought in some countries, and that Apple has hired some fashion industry executives to do, well, something.

Unfortunately, the assumption is made that an iWatch must be a limited feature accessory for  the iPhone, with some fitness apps and such and the ability to send you notices. That is in line with the image of today’s smartwatch, as typified by the Pebble. But that approach has gone nowhere. Pebble sold 80,000 units as of a few months back, with no evidence that there will be a sudden surge of any meaningful proportions this holiday season. A number of companies are building this stuff, but there’s no breakout product so far.

Apple’s well-known expertise is in taking a nascent market and finding a solution that actually works. It happened with tablets and music players. The iPhone made smartphones more compelling for the average consumer, which is why other companies built imitations. So, you can expect that, if an iWatch came to be, it would not be quite the same as current products. To assume otherwise breaks the logic threshold.

My personal feeling is that Apple would seek a way to make an iWatch operate as a standalone gadget. That doesn’t mean it won’t mate via Bluetooth with your iPhone, but it would take the iWatch beyond the mere accessory category and possibly blaze a whole new path. What path? Well, I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

As to the TV space, the latest speculation speaks of support for 4K or Ultra HD. Having all those extra pixels on your TV will mean something with a very large screen if you look real close, but real world tests have shown that you can’t tell much of a difference between Ultra HD and 1080p on a 55-inch set at a normal viewing distance. Besides, there’s not much in the way of 4K content yet, although there will be if a real demand can be demonstrated. It won’t be like 3D, however, which never really took off even though more and more affordable sets offer that feature.

But with 4K slowly expanding, that capability would seem to be a given if Apple decided to build their own set. But it would have to offer a lot in terms of user interface and other features to set it apart from a very crowded field. Unlike other markets that Apple has entered, the TV space is extremely saturated, and, unlike a personal computer, there’s little incentive for people to upgrade very often. A well-built TV set can be expected to last as much as ten years or even longer before troubles arise. I recently sold, for a very tiny sum, an 18-year-old 27-inch Sony CRT set that worked as good as new.

Yes, there is plenty of anticipation for what Apple will deliver in 2014. But some of the speculation appears to be moving in the wrong direction.

Except for the iPhone, the argument in favor of other smartphones is heavily spec-based. You almost think that companies sit in a meeting room, bring up their PowerPoint presentations, and add as many things to the spec lists as possible to validate a product’s superiority. The more bullet points, the better.

What happens next? Well, I suppose the design and engineering people are given the bill of materials and told to make it happen, somehow. No doubt they have already given input on the edict to deliver as many possible features as they can, and worry about whether they actually work later on.

Understand that this is a theory. I do not pretend to know the ins and outs of the hardware design process of any company, although enough is known about Apple’s creative process to get a fair picture of the process; anything about upcoming products remain matters of speculation.

But consider the spec sheet for Samsung’s hottest selling smartphone, the Galaxy S4. When it was first introduced early this year in an overdone media presentation, it was about all those great features Samsung packed in. In passing, Android was hardly mentioned, which may continue to pose a dilemma for Google.

Now some of the improvements over the Galaxy S3 seemed to border on absurdity. Increasing the display size from 4.8 to five inches hardly made sense, since you had to put the two units side by side to really see much of a difference. The same was true when you evaluated the pixel density, which increased from 331 ppi to 441 ppi. The former is in the so-called “retina display” league, so why would you need more? In fact, I didn’t notice any difference in image or text sharpness when I compared the two, and I looked real close. But specs are specs, and there had to be a reason to justify upgrading from an S3 to S4.

But the larger problem is that there was so much junk on the S4 that nearly half the storage space of the 16GB version was taken up with junkware. Worse, a lot of it simply replaced existing apps from Google that were probably just as good or better, at least in my experience.

Worse, adding stuff that hardly works or doesn’t work hardly vindicates Samsung’s argument for installing those apps. Take the Auto-Scroll feature, where looking up or down will supposedly cause text to move accordingly. As an alternative, you could just tilt the unit up or down to deliver a similar result. But theories don’t always work in practice, and you wonder whether Samsung tested Auto-Scroll before it debuted on the Galaxy S4.

For me, I was able to configure either option in the Settings app. What I did notice right away was that, even at its fastest setting, scroll speed was very slow. Once configured, neither feature ever worked for me, and I gather it’s been hit or miss for others.

I concede that initial releases of new apps can be buggy for any company. Apple has certainly suffered from some well-known product deficiencies. But we’re talking about an app that is basically supposed to do one thing, which is to scroll via a tilt or eye movement, and barely works.

While I was using the Galaxy S4, there was only one over-the-air software update that didn’t seem to fix much of anything except to reduce the possibility of crashing. Nothing worked better, though I didn’t check each and every app to make sure. In the end, few of the frills did anything for me, so I just relied on the basic features and survived.

It’s also true that the Galaxy S4 wasn’t quite as hot a product as Samsung hoped. Although the initial subsidized price, $199, was the same as the iPhone 5 (and now the 5s), there was a whole lot more discounting. As I write this article, the S4 is now $99.99 at AT&T with a two-year contract, and $50 more for the 32GB version, which is an almost essential upgrade since there’s so little free storage space on the standard configuration. Best Buy had some S4 configurations available for $49.99 with an AT&T contract. This approach almost speaks fire sale.

Yes, there have been some discounts of iPhones since the new models came out in September, but not as extreme and not as a general rule. Demand appears to remain high, and Apple only recently got control of supplies of the iPhone 5s.

In one of my commentaries this past weekend, I remarked how some tech writers create what some call listicles to attempt to justify the choice of one gadget over another based on specs alone. It doesn’t mean you should ignore specs, as some will indicate real performance potential. So I assume that one car with a quicker zero to 60 miles per hour rating is faster than one that takes more time to reach that speed. But it’s only a rough indication of the potential of a motor vehicle. Some cars that accelerate more rapidly from a dead stop may not deliver superior passing power on the freeway, and ride, handling and overall comfort still count for a lot.

Specs alone in a tech gadget are hardly sufficient to quantify the overall user experience either. Too bad some tech pundits haven’t gotten the memo.

I’m not going to claim I invented the word “listicle.” But I saw it mentioned by the “horned one” over at Macworld magazine who calls himself Macalope, a nom-de-plume for someone who writes humorous and thought-provoking pieces largely focusing on the foibles of the media in dealing with Apple.

The meaning of listicle is pretty much implied by the word, which combines list and article. So it’s a 10 best list, a 10 worst list — well you get the picture. It’s also a fast and dirty way to put something together and get some attention. Of course some of those lists are just too lame to take seriously.

So you have articles about the ten things that Android does that you cannot do on an iPhone, but you end up with features that you normally wouldn’t give a second glance to. Take some of the junk that Samsung dumped into the Galaxy S4 smartphone, some of which works only part of the time or not at all.

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