First, let me thank The Register’s Rik Myslewski for raising some intriguing possibilities that I’ll expand upon in this article. You see, in recent months, there have been ongoing rumors that Apple is working on a 12.9-inch version of the iPad. Some call it an iPad Pro, while others use the name iPad Maxi; I lean towards the first if such a beast comes to be. It just sounds better.

Now those rumors, in large part, come from the supply chain, and I suppose Apple is probably sampling various iPad form factors, so the rumors are probably true. But that doesn’t we’ll see one in the flesh. Remember there were also reports that Apple was sampling TV sets, and where’s that gone?

But before we look at what Apple might have in mind with a larger iPad, consider the state of the personal computer market. Traditional PCs, and that includes Macs, are not growing anymore. Sure, perhaps Apple can stem the erosion with wonderful new products, a few strategic price cuts, and lots of promotion, but the long-term trends seem clear. The PC is yesterday’s news.

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As Apple’s stock price approached the highest levels in a year, you had to wonder what happened to the company many industry analysts thought to be beleaguered. Was Tim Cook replaced? Well, obviously not. Did Apple deliver a cheap iPhone? Another no. Was there a new Apple branded TV set with the “magic” interface predicted by Steve Jobs? No, not that either.

So is there some significant change in Apple’s current sales or future prospects that seems to have fueled a huge turnaround for everyone’s favorite, or not-so-favorite, fruit company? This is the question of the ages, and actually Apple hasn’t really done anything so different, except for granting stock dividends and buying back some shares. Indeed, activist investor Carl Icahn is pressing Apple to do even more, but that’s not necessarily a valid reason for the stock price to rise. Besides, Apple will probably just say no to Icahn, as they have so far.

Now I wouldn’t presume to have any pithy comments to make about the actual mechanics of Wall Street. A lot of what investors do or not do is based on perceptions more than reality. In the case of Apple, some believed that the company had run out of steam. Part of that was due to the obvious fact that Steve Jobs is no longer around to steer the helm, and Tim Cook is surely not a product person. Thus Apple must lose its direction.

What appears to have happened is that every little bit of potential negative data was used to demonstrate that Apple was on the skids. There were published reports last year about the supposed lack of demand for the iPhone 5, but it all started when the product was first introduced. Apple sold five million as of the first weekend, a record to be sure, but some industry pundits who must have been drunk with power predicted it would be ten million. Since Apple didn’t meet such exaggerated expectations, it must have been a huge failure. The iPhone was dead, may Android live on.

In the real world, the iPhone 5 did quite well, even in quarters where industry pundits suggested otherwise.

Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether some people in the financial industry make a living by talking Apple down. A few negative comments here, a few unfounded rumors there, and the stock price dips. It’s actually possible to make money by anticipating a stock price dip. I could be even more conspiratorial and suggest that maybe some of Apple’s competitors are happy to spread misinformation to hurt the company. When billions of dollars of sales are at stake, you can expect cutthroat competition. It’s also true, for example, that Samsung has had a less-than-stellar record for corporate honesty, and has been known to play dirty tricks against the competition. And don’t forget how some Samsung smartphones have code that deliberately makes benchmark apps run faster to deliver better ratings. How does that improve the user experience?

Sure, some might argue the finer points of Apple’s own competitive information, since the material is clearly designed to put the company in the best light. But a little exaggeration or selectivity here and there is not the same as lying.

As I was writing this article, I heard an interview with some unspecified analyst on Bloomberg Radio, who explained why Apple’s major growth cycle was in the past. The theory went that Apple has made deals with Japan’s largest wireless carrier, NTT DoCoMo, where the iPhone is doing very nicely thank you, and China Mobile, the world’s largest carrier. This will mean more sales, but where does Apple go from there? Clearly the growth rate has to decline.

Evidently the analyst didn’t consider that there are other parts of the world, such as India, where there’s still great potential. More to the point, what does Apple do from here? Will there be no more category busting products? What about the long-rumored iWatch, or the possible solution to living room entertainment? What about market segments and products that aren’t even mentioned on the rumor sites? Does Apple rest on its laurels?

Yes, it’s true that Apple can’t grow the smartphone and tablet market by 100% every single year, and Mac sales are eroding somewhat. But that doesn’t mean future upgrades won’t reinvigorate these markets, or that there won’t be something new and different from the company that can grow at an accelerated rate. The long and short of it is that, so long as Apple continues to make high profits with steady revenue growth, year after year, what should investors complain about?

The stock price? We forget that this roller coaster syndrome has happened before to Apple. What’s different? Well, this time the amounts are far higher, and thus appear to be more significant. In each case, the price dips way down before resuming a growth curve. Of course, I’m in no position to predict what is going to happen this time as the price continues to soar. By the time you read this article, things may change. Or maybe Apple will first reach new heights before the price drops. If that happens, you can bet that the critics will be pronouncing doom and gloom as vigorously as ever.

So is the conventional wisdom correct? Is broadcast radio truly dead, yesterday’s news and all that?

Now this ages me, but when I grew up, FM radio was the luxury you added to a car only if you checked off the appropriate box on the option sheet. FM meant clean sound, relatively free of hiss, although the you couldn’t hear stations from hundreds of miles away. Remember, there was no satellite or online radio in those days. This was before both AM and FM were standard issue on a new auto.

If you wanted long distance, you listened to AM. At night, weather being right and all, you might receive stations from hundreds or thousands of miles away as signals hopped to the stratosphere and back. In some larger cities, such as New York and Chicago, you had 50,000 watt “clear channel” giants — meaning there were few if any stations on the same frequency — that you could hear from thousands of miles away. I remember, for example, listening to rock music on WLS-AM Chicago when I resided in Alabama. These days, most music has migrated to FM, and WLS-AM, as with most AM outlets, is mostly talk.

From a quality standpoint, it made sense. AM is fine for talk, but not so fine for music, and, depending on where you are in relation to the transmitter, you may hear lots of static or a spillover from other stations on the same frequency, particularly at night. Indeed, to avoid interfering with other stations, the FCC mandates that the AM signal be highly directional for many stations, particularly at night. This means you can be in the very same place where you heard a clear daytime signal, but you hear nothing at all at night, or just scattershot signals from faraway stations. Drive a few miles, and the same station comes through loud and clear.

With the growth of satellite and online radio, particularly podcasts, the argument for AM is more difficult to make, which is unfortunate. My radio shows are carried on some AM talk stations, so I’m particularly interested in the future of this classic radio technology. But if you live in a city with lots of local outlets, there’s still plenty to hear, and there may be some solace in something known as HD Radio.

HD Radio?

Well, “HD” is the usual abbreviation for high definition. With HD Radio (and the “HD” is simply a trade name that doesn’t stand for anything), broadcasters embed a digital signal as part of their transmissions on both AM and FM. On AM, you get hiss-free audio that’s is fairly close to FM in quality. FM delivers audio quality that is close to CD, which makes it even better than satellite radio. But in addition to carrying a station’s normal broadcasts, HD Radio supports up to three additional stations on the very same channel. So you get the equivalent of an HD2, HD3, and HD4, depending on the decision of the broadcaster about offering extra content.

Now what’s nice about the technology is that it’s essentially seamless. If you don’t have an HD Radio, you receive your stations the same way as before whether or not they are transmitting a digital signal. If you have an HD Radio, it will switch to the digital signal automatically after a few seconds. If you drive in an area where the digital signal isn’t strong enough, it will be replaced with the analog signal, although that doesn’t help if you’re listening to one of the alternate stations.

The biggest negative, however, is finding a radio that supports HD, and the rollout has been incredibly slow. While the technology seems promising enough, and is sometimes touted as a free alternative to satellite radio, good luck finding a home HD receiver. The HD Radio site lists only one portable, and two affordable home radios from one manufacturer, Insignia. There are tuners and receivers that support the format from a handful of audio companies, such as Denon, Marantz and Yamaha. But they can get quite expensive.

You’ll fare better in your car or truck, where most of the manufacturers are now offering HD either as standard equipment or as an option. I experimented with the technology on recent test drives of the Kia Optima and Mazda6 and found HD Radio is pretty much as advertised. AM reception is crisp and clean, though with a bit more digital haze than you hear on satellite radio. It wasn’t quite FM quality but not far removed. In contrast, FM was pristine and definitely a step above what you normally receive from an analog signal. The rollout, though slow, is similar to what was originally offered with satellite radio, where only a few car makers offered the feature as an option, and most required a dealer installed add-on. And, to this day, there are still very few home receivers that receive satellite signals, but mostly because of the awkward antenna setup, which requires moving the thing around so it has a clear path to the satellite.

But the real issue is actually finding an HD station in your city. In the Phoenix area, I found half a dozen AM stations that offer HD, and many more on the FM band. While the technology seems to work well enough, I wonder about its long-term future, although iBiquity Digital, which created the technology, claims that some 2,144 U.S. radio stations supported HD as of March 2012.

To be sure, traditional broadcast stations are fighting a huge battle for survival and advertising dollars. But they also counted radio dead and buried when TV came along, and it didn’t happen. The huge difference nowadays is that you can get radio in many formats, both programming and technology. It doesn’t matter. People will not stop listening.

As Microsoft continues to confront the problem of hundreds of millions of PCs still using the ancient Windows XP, Apple’s strategy to make OS 10.9 free appears to have paid off. According to Net Applications, which tracks Web traffic, Mavericks is now installed on some 32% of the Macs currently in use. Remember that Mavericks was only introduced on October 22, so this has been one huge upgrade cycle.

But that doesn’t mean all Mac users will get with the program. A stubborn 20% insist on sticking with OS 10.6, better known as Snow Leopard. But there may be critical reasons for that. You see. Snow Leopard is the last OS X version that supports Rosetta, the translation utility that lets you run PowerPC apps on an Intel-based Mac. So Mac users are confronted with either finding an upgrade to the affected apps, if one is even available, or doing without. Clearly they can’t always do without. It’s also true that some of these Macs won’t support Mavericks, so an upgrade will never happen.

That’s a very different situation than the one that impacts Windows users, where many of the PCs that are using Windows XP can probably be upgraded to Windows 7. There are various reasons why it hasn’t happened. One is that a system migration may be time-consuming for a business with lots of PCs deployed. Mission critical apps may have to be updated, potentially a costly proposition, assuming the updates will even work with current versions of Windows.

My chiropractor is an example. His office uses Windows XP Professional, which is required for the office management software installed on all their PCs. When I asked if they’d ever consider switching to Windows 7 (Windows 8 is out of the question), it was a matter of buying new computers, along with the prospect of maybe having to switch to a different management app to run the office. It’s never easy or cheap, and Microsoft’s decision to declare Windows XP as an “end of life” product in 2014 isn’t going to help. People will still use it.

When it comes to OS X, Apple made a smart decision with Mavericks, which is to support pretty much the same hardware as Mountain Lion. Whether that’ll apply to 10.9’s successor is anyone’s guess, but it will certainly ensure that the adoption rate will grow. And making it free doesn’t hurt.

But there are Snow Leopard users who might have other reasons to avoid later OS versions other than Rosetta and hardware limits. The few interface changes, with the scrollbars as a blatant example, — which brought OS X more in line with iOS — are not always treated with respect by some. There’s the ultimate fear that Apple will pull a Microsoft and merge OS X with iOS some day. But I don’t expect anything like that to happen unless Macs join Windows PCs and come in convertible note-book form, which work as swollen touchscreens in addition to the normal personal computer functionality. While there are reports that Apple might embrace ARM processors on Macs some day, that doesn’t mean you’ll have an iPad/MacBook combo.

But despite the concerns about the iOS-ification of OS X, I really haven’t seen much of that actually happening. That some apps share the name and basic functionality doesn’t count. That Apple has grafted a more minimalist interface on such apps as Contacts and Calendar on the Mac reflects nothing more than a decision to remove the skeuomorphic excesses. There will be more of that, more consistency in the sometimes scattershot approach seen in OS X, but none of that should impair the user experience to any serious degree, or force you to learn new things.

As I’ve written previously, the early Mavericks experience is actually quite favorable. There have been some issues, and one hopes they will be addressed soon in expected maintenance updates. According to published reports, Apple is actively testing a 10.9.1 update, though it’s not certain when it’ll be out. There was already a Mail for Mavericks update, but it appears more work needs to be done to fix Apple’s email app, so maybe more fixes are forthcoming.

However, compared to most versions of OS X, the first maintenance updates were already out by the first month. On that score, it appears Apple is doing better this time, or maybe the lingering problems require more work to fix. The most serious issue, one that involved the possible loss of data on a Western Digital external drive, does appear to have been addressed with updated utilities from WD. I don’t know if that issue involved Apple-related issues, but what’s done is done.

I suppose, then, that it may be time to consider what Apple has afoot for 10.10, or whatever it’ll be called. Would it be known as OS 11, or OS XI? I don’t think it looks as good as a branding exercise, so maybe it’ll be something in the OS X family for the foreseeable future, although an OS 10.20 may seem a bit much.