Aside from adding 4K and HDR support and a few odds and ends, the Apple TV 4K didn’t change much from its predecessor. Well, except for those complaints about the fact that the 32GB model is, at $179, $30 more expensive than the already-expensive fourth-generation model. That doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of sense inasmuch as the 64GB version is unchanged at $199.

Evidently Apple’s bean counters have an answer for this screwy move, but it still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. It’s not that the Apple TV 4K does so much more than the Roku Ultra, which can be had for as little as $69.99 from Amazon.

Well, there is the fact that Apple TV of any sort is required if you are invested in Apple’s ecosystem for iTunes video content and hope to watch the forthcoming TV shows that will probably come to you via Apple Music.

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Are we really and truly in the twilight of the PC era? Is it true that most personal computing is moving towards mobile platforms — smartphones and tablets? Will the PC become the pickup truck, as Steve Jobs once claimed, and thus needed by fewer people?

Now those of you who follow the auto industry in the U.S. will notice that more people are buying larger vehicles, such as SUVs and trucks, and sedans are not doing so well. So maybe things are moving in reverse?

As a practical matter, I suspect most computing chores by regular people are done on their smartphones. The popularity of phablets, models with displays of over five inches, cements it. It also seems that the larger portion of email I receive these days are composed on mobile gear. I gather that from the telltale message below one’s signature indicating which mobile device they were composed on. Well, assuming a Samsung user isn’t putting iPhone there to fool people.

But that doesn’t at all mean that traditional PCs have fallen into disuse. Most businesses I visit still use them, still mostly Windows models, although Macs are doing better. Even the companies that gather data from their customers, such as medical and legal offices, are relying on regular computers for heavy lifting.

Take my wife’s eye doctor. As a corneal transplant patient, she needs to have her eyes checked at least once a year to make sure she isn’t suffering from tissue rejection. Yes, even on corneas. The medical practice had opened a new office nearer to what is now our former home. When we visited them, she was handed an iPad to collect the basic information. However, the rest of the computing functions for this practice are managed by a Windows PC.

That shouldn’t seem at all strange. The vast majority of iPhone and iPad owners use Windows. You’ll see that in broad strokes as we take a brief look at PC sales.

So here is the situation: There’s supposedly a worldwide PC sales slowdown, but Mac sales rose slightly during the March quarter. The company, once almost invisible compared to everyone else, now occupies the number four spot.

Let’s look at the way Gartner evaluated the global market. But understand these are only estimates. Gartner and also IDC are typically prone to undercounting Apple, but not always, such as the December 2017 quarter that turned from a possible uptick in sales to a downturn.

Still with me?

So worldwide market share for the March quarter totaled 6.9%, a tad higher than last year’s total of 6.7%. At least it’s higher. Gartner’s total was estimated at 4.26 million, as compared to 4.2 million in the year ago quarter.

But Macs were not the fastest growing PCs. Of the top five, Dell had the fastest growth, 6.5%, which put it in third place behind HP and Lenovo. The sales numbers, however, were severely weighed down by Asus, with a drop of 12.5%, and Acer Group, with a decrease of 8.6%. These two turned what was otherwise an increase into a decrease. So when industry analysts argue about the state of PC sales, it’s mostly about the results from two manufacturers.

But it still means sales of PCs have decreased slightly.

Now let’s look at how Gartner and IDC interpreted sales in the U.S.A.

In this country, Dell fared better according to Gartner, leading the market with 3.44 shipments. HP had 3.35 million.

IDC had its own set of numbers. They weren’t quite the same, but close enough not to represent a meaningful difference. But remember they are estimates. More often than not, Apple is undercounted, but not always. In the year-ago quarter, for example, Gartner’s numbers were a tad higher than Apple’s, a comparison of 4.217 million Macs compared to the actual numbers totaling 4.199 million.

As surveys go this is pretty close. There are no dire conspiracy theories to explain the disparity other than the errors you’d expect from surveys that are almost always imperfect to some degree.

What it does show is that, in a down market, Apple is keeping up, as are HP, Dell and Lenovo. It may be in fact, that these four are prospering, more or less, because they offer quality gear at reasonable prices. What’s more, since regular PCs are often indistinguishable from one another, it’s understandable that customers may choose gear on the basis of other criteria, such as service and support.

Right now, Mac sales are doing all right. But if Apple sees a near-term future where the Mac must become less of a traditional PC in a fancy dress, maybe that’s when it’ll switch wholesale to ARM processors. Indeed a major consideration in keeping the status quo may well be that lots of Mac users also want to be able to run Windows with good performance. That will be highly questionable if Apple goes ARM, unless they invent a miracle method to emulate Intel with only a minor performance loss.

The speed with which PC sales decrease going forward may well tell the tale.

Consider the crazy situation. Apple screwed up, by failing to flesh out release notes to reveal a key fact about a fix for iPhone sudden shutdowns. The solution was to regulate, or slow down performance of the affected devices if they had deteriorating batteries. It wasn’t a casual matter, of course, not was the cause casual. It was caused by batteries that were unable to handle high load.

On the surface, it was logical enough. Would users prefer unexpected shutdowns or slower performance? But the performance slowdown was noticeable enough for some people to test the result, and post those results on YouTube. More to the point, was it a deliberate effort on the part of Apple to make older iPhones obsolete in order to trick you into buying a new one, as some claimed?

I hardly think so.

Indeed, Apple finally gave its explanation as to what happened and why, and it had nothing to do with tricking you into buying new iPhones. Only thing is that the release notes didn’t explain the reasoning behind regulating or throttling performance in exchange for reliability. Had Apple added a relevant sentence or two, there’d be no problem. Or if there was, it wouldn’t be so severe. There’d be no harm in explaining, too, that a new battery would fix the problem. The iPhone wasn’t obsolete or defective.

Indeed, after the cat was out of the bag, Apple decided to add a battery health indicator in iOS 11.3, also affixed with a switch to turn off throttling. That way you could deal with this problem on your turns, only it switches back on if your iPhone shuts down. But at least you can turn it off again, or maybe just look for the real solution. Since Apple reduced the price of a new battery from $79 to $29 for this year, this all ought to be fully resolved.

But it’s not always that simple. Apple’s lapse was enough to give teams of lawyers the excuse to file class-action lawsuits and some politicians around the world to opt for headlines by investigating the company.

Last I heard, there were lawsuits which are evidently being consolidated for simplicity, and to keep judges from jumping off the cliff I suppose.

Just the other day, there was a report that the consumer protection bureau in Israel was investigating Apple for not telling customers what it did and why. If the agency rules against Apple, there could be a huge fine in a civil trial. But that doesn’t mean Apple is in danger of facing such a penalty in that and other countries looking into the matter.

The concern, overall, is that people might have purchased new iPhones under the erroneous belief the old one was broken or worn out. Past the political postering, however, just how many people really replaced their old iPhones?

And if they did, what sort of solution would you expect? Would Apple have to agree to take back the new phones? How would anyone actually prove they acted because Apple failed to publish detailed release notes? More than likely, a government might exact a civil fine if Apple is found guilty, or an offer to give customers of affected devices free battery replacements.

Indeed, I tend to wonder just how many people participating in those lawsuits hope for free iPhones once the case is settled? At best, they’d get a discount coupon if not the free battery. There’s no possible way they could demonstrate they bought new iPhones because of the throttling.

Lawyers? Lots of money if the case is settled, which is their preferred outcome.

Governments? Prestige for bringing down the big bad Apple, or would an apology and a token fine be sufficient to clear the record?

At the very least, Apple has learned a lesson here. Customers deserve more descriptive information about OS updates, especially if they will have a major impact on the performance of their devices.

I don’t know what Apple really expected here. Did they believe a significant performance reduction wouldn’t be obvious to at least some iPhone users, or was this a serious oversight on the part of engineers or those preparing company documentation who were under the erroneous belief that it would just confuse people.

In that sense, I think Apple deserves having to spend millions of dollars as an object lesson. While it may have done something with the best of intentions — and that’s my belief about this matter — Apple has an unfortunate habit of offering excessively sparse details for bug fixes. This update should have, at the very least, been accompanied by a press release. A problem that caused iPhones to shut down without warning was sufficient to provide full details about the solution. At the very least, millions of people might replace batteries.

Indeed, when asked if fewer people might buy new iPhones now that they know the battery can be replaced real cheap, Tim Cook said he didn’t care. I hope he was telling the truth there.

The iPhone X has taken an interesting journey, more convoluted than most Apple products. When the first rumors about it arose, it wasn’t even referred to as an iPhone X. It was the iPhone 8. Why? Well, it was assumed that the successor to the iPhone 7 must be the iPhone 7s, in keeping with Apple’s previous tradition.

Now maybe that was Apple’s original plan, and they changed the names just to be contrary. That comes across as a Steve Jobs-type move. Or maybe the new names were byproducts of the decision to add a third flagship model to the mix. Take your choice, but does it really matter?

Well, yes, because iPhone X really separates itself from the pack as product identities go.

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