If you look at the history of Apple’s stock price, even over the past decade, you’ll see it has gone way up, reached a peak, and declined substantially. Last year, it exceeded $700 for a while, until all the bad news, mostly false, overwhelmed the message of Apple’s record sales. Even when the company essentially matched or exceeded earnings guidance, overinflated expectations from some financial analysts continued to hurt the stock price.

A perceived drought of new products for the first part of 2013 didn’t help matters. Apple introduced a lot of new gear in the fall of 2012. That should have been a good thing, but the situation got muddled when the 2012 iMac was severely backordered. A major update, it didn’t ship until after the new year, thus reducing Mac sales by several hundred thousand in the December quarter, which wasn’t a good thing. Even Tim Cook admitted he should have waited until they had a product they could ship within a reasonable timeframe.

Through the first part of 2013, aside from a very minor product refresh or two, such as a 128GB option for the regular iPad, not much came from Apple. Add to that misleading reports, said to originate from the supply chain, indicated that demand for the iPhone 5 may have collapsed. This turned out not to be true, as sales continued to grow mostly at a good clip. But it was surely sufficient to keep the stock prices depressed, and fuel the ongoing negative spin that Apple had run out of juice. After all, the CEO was a supply chain person, not a product person.

Didn’t Steve Jobs revolutionize a product category every other day? How could Tim Cook even come close?

It didn’t help that the 2012 iPhone 5 came with a buggy Maps app, the infamous MapGate affair. This was Apple’s first foray into replacing Google. The competitive reasons made sense, but the results clearly were not ready for prime time. A simple beta label and a warning prompt on first launch would have helped. After all, Google has done that very same thing, even when you open their navigation app on an Android smartphone, although this nasty truth seems to have been overlooked by much of the media.

In any case, I think Apple did do the right thing, first by having Cook issue an apology, and by giving customers alternatives. As Maps improved, the complaints lessened, although there’s still the incorrect perception that Jobs would never have allowed such a thing to happen. The pundits forget the sarcastic response Jobs gave when people complained about the antenna on the 2010 iPhone 4. That episode came to be labeled AntennaGate. Or his intolerant answer when customers cried foul when the price of the original iPhone was cut by $200 weeks after its release. Jobs remarked that this was the price of technology, before he apologized for his nastiness and offered customers a $100 store credit.

If anything, Cook should be praised for setting a respectful example for a company’s apology to disgruntled customers. But since he’s not Jobs, that’s not going to happen.

The biggest challenge currently confronting Apple is the growth of Android, particularly outside the U.S. In some parts of the world, cheap Android smartphones and tablets have come to dominate the market. A number of uninformed pundits are demanding that Apple produce cheap iPhones and iPads in order to compete, but is that a sensible idea?

It’s an unfortunate fact that those cheap Android gadgets are poorly performing, unreliable, and apparently aren’t terribly usable. That is a reason why the iPad continues to dominate when it comes to Web traffic. Cook has stated several times that he wonders what all those other tablets are being used for, since getting online is a core function. Well, maybe people who have Kindles spend most of their time reading e-books or buying stuff from Amazon. But what about tablets from other companies?

Yet the iPad received 84% of tablet-based Web traffic in the last quarter, despite the fact that the iPad’s share of the market was far lower. How does that mesh with the claim that Apple is losing luster? What are people doing with all those cheap tablets anyway?

So what about the no-name gear sold in Asia and elsewhere? Is that what Apple should be competing with? If you believe the pundits, the answer is yes. Apple should be going downmarket and selling every single gadget they can regardless of profit margins. And don’t forget that most of these bottom-feeder companies make very little from the sale of cheap gear. That’s the uncomfortable fact the media tends to ignore.

Besides, Tim Cook has said on a number of occasions that Apple will not make a cheap iPhone, cheap iPad, or cheap Mac. That’s not corporate spin. It represent’s the company’s philosophy. So long as Apple remains successful, it’s clear that approach is working. It doesn’t matter if Apple only has a minority share of the market, if that share is the segment where the highest profits are made.

So much for facts. The spin machine remains in control of much of the message, unfortunately.

There’s an old saying that proof of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. When it comes to keeping tabs on the tech industry, it’s clear that many so-called journalists and industry analysts might indeed be suffering from some sort of problem. How else can you explain all the falsehoods, which are repeated over and over again despite the fact that many of the falsehoods are regularly exposed?

But rather than questioning someone’s sanity, many it’s all a matter of inattention. They aren’t reading anyone else’s responses to their rantings, which must mean they are living in a bubble. Sure, I understand some creative people would rather not know what others are saying about them, but a journalist ought to be able to do some basic research.

But research doesn’t help when there’s an agenda afoot. So someone writes a negative piece about Apple, and the hit count goes way up. The publisher is happy, the advertisers are happy to pay to put their banners on a site with more traffic, and the writers in question are encouraged to keep things going. After all, they can depend on Apple fans correcting their lies over and over again, and they won’t stop until the hit counts go down.

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In recent days, it has become more and more evident that at least some tech companies, such as Samsung, are engaged in gutter fighting, in part, by faking benchmarks with software tricks. To some, having the gadget that scores better must be a badge of honor. I understand that this phenomenon is particularly evident in Asia, where loads of makers attempt to foist their imitation iPhones and iPads onto unwitting customers who think they are getting something as good as the real thing for a whole lot less money.

Obviously, you cannot compare a knockoff gadget with anyone’s flagship gear. It doesn’t matter which mainstream manufacturer we’re thinking about here. But there are still the unfavorable sales reports that appear to indicate the iPad and the iPhone are fast losing market share to Android gear.

Is that true?

Well, it appears that those who put such statistics together are including all those super cheap “white box” knockoffs, which may often be nearly unusable. But a sale is a sale, so you have to include them if you want to do a proper breakdown of who is selling what. On the other hand, it appears that most of the cheap tablets, as examples, are not really being used to get online. How else explain that recent report that 84% of tablet-based Web traffic can be traced to the iPad? Obviously the iPad has far less than an 84% share of the market.

I suppose it’s possible customers will realize that cheap junk is cheap junk and stop buying that stuff. Or maybe the experience will sour them on all tablets, and they’ll get back to cheap PCs, or cheap smartphones.

But there are certainly legitimate reasons not to want an iPhone, and I’ll cover them, even though you and I might disagree on the assumptions.

So there’s the nasty issue of Apple’s infamous “walled garden,” where you are supposedly locked into a tightly controlled user environment where you have little or no control over configuring your iPhone or iPad, and app selection is limited.

If you want to configure your smartphone or tablet to a fare-thee-well, way beyond just getting things done efficiently, you may have a point. Apple keeps most of the settings simple, and sometimes limited. Apps are curated to make sure that they run properly and do not cause malware to overwhelm your equipment. But nothing stops you from jailbreaking the device, and going to someone else’s app store and doing things Apple doesn’t sanction. Of course, you are responsible if you damage your gear. That’s the choice you make, and the vast majority of Apple customers clearly just want the things to work, and not be bothered with difficult configurations and a “wild west” atmosphere at an app store where there are few protections against junk and malware-riddled stuff.

All right, if Google learns of an infected app, it will be removed, but they do far less checking than Apple. You can also get apps that take over the entire system, such as your keyboard, and provide a different or possibly better typing experience, involving swiping more than typing, or what passes for typing on a piece of glass. Maybe Apple will relent and allow such apps, although it would involve making an exception to the sandboxing scheme that helps protect the system from misbehaving apps.

But don’t forget that, although many apps are available in both iOS and Android form, the iOS version often runs better, delivering a smoother experience. If you’re not sure, talk to your family members and your friends, try out their gear and see.

If you find a 4-inch smartphone a bit too small for comfort, you’d have a legitimate reason to want to consider someone else’s product. Apple hasn’t said no to bigger screens in the future, but it appears they will tread carefully. Again, it’s a good idea to try the bigger smartphone under different lighting conditions. So the relatively large AMOLED displays on the Samsung Galaxy totally wash out in sunlit surroundings. The iPhone may provide a dimmer picture under such conditions, but it’s mostly usable.

Of course, you could always hold your iPhone a little closer to your eyes and that will reduce the impact of the smaller screen. Compared to the 5-inch Samsung Galaxy S4, for example, I got used to the iPhone 5s within a few hours.

Past the question of bogus benchmarks, real world performance is important. Here the iPhone 5s tends to score about the same or faster than other smartphones with the usual benchmark tests, all without fudging. But touch response is much faster, and apps perform more consistently. That can mean a lot. Just simple scrolling of text and pictures on the fastest Android smartphone remains ragged, with thickening text. On the iPhone, it’s always smooth, even on a slower model. Chalk that up to Apple’s tight integration between software and hardware. Android can’t compete with off-the-shelf parts that may, in theory, be more powerful, but don’t provide a snappier response.

One more thing: Yes, I suppose it would be nice to be able to easily swap out the battery on an iPhone, or have more capacity. Here a Motorola Droid Razr Maxx with its large battery may be a suitable choice, if you can get past the Android deficiencies in the user interface and overall performance.

When I first set up a Samsung Galaxy S4, I decided to run a set of benchmarks just to see how well it did. As already reported by the media, it scored more than twice as fast as its predecessor, the Galaxy S3. But it didn’t feel that much faster, if at all. It still bogged down when loads of apps were running, and it was still necessary to use a utility that quit all open apps, or just restart.

So where was the advantage?

Well, I’m not much of a gamer, so I suppose frame rates were noticeably higher, as they should be considering that more powerful graphics hardware had been installed. Otherwise, I didn’t see any real difference. The display was only a tad larger, and Samsung’s penchant for junkware didn’t really deliver a better user experience.

So maybe I wasn’t terribly surprised to discover that Samsung may have “cooked the books” on the Galaxy S4, and the Galaxy Note S3 “phablet.” How? Well it appears they inserted code on these handsets that would automatically switch them into a higher speed mode when certain benchmark apps were run. Consider it overclocking for the sake of raising the scores. Of course, if these handsets were run at such speeds all the time, reliability might suffer, and battery life would be less. It was all in the sake of faking the scores.

Now I wasn’t the one to determine how this scheme was being played. Such respectable sites as AnandTech and Ars Technica confirmed this dirty truth. In one test, the name of a benchmarking app was changed from the default apparently set by Samsung. Guess what? The results were run without overclocking and were thus 20% lower. In the real world, of course, a 20% performance boost really isn’t that noticeable.

So does that sound fair to you?

Well, it appears Samsung is not the only manufacturer of Android gear that’s faking it. In an article from AppleInsider’s Daniel Eran Dilger, “According to testing by Anand Lal Shimpi and Brian Klug of AnandTech, benchmark cheats are not limited to Samsung, but rather pandemic among Android licensees.

The site asserts that, “With the exception of Apple and Motorola, literally every single OEM we’ve worked with ships (or has shipped) at least one device” that to produced false benchmark scores. That means Asus, HTC, LG — well you get the picture, and it’s not pretty.

In the personal computer world, having superior benchmarks is a badge of honor, same as the 0-60 mile per hour ratings on a car. The faster, the better. Sure, in the automotive world, few actually attempt to accelerate as fast as possible, unless there’s no traffic and no waiting police officer to catch you for speeding or driving in a dangerous fashion. But on a PC, it theoretically means that your apps will not only launch faster, but run faster. This means that you should be able to get your work done faster, although your typing speed won’t increase proportionately. But the things your computer does for which you have to wait will be done faster. That’s a good thing.

Certainly, if you’re a gamer, you will cherish achieving higher frame rates along with the ability to run more and more of the high-end animation effects offered by an app. Yes, I suspect there’s a practical limit to how many frames are too much to make a difference, but at least you have figures you can compare.

That is unless the figures are bogus.

Sure, there are lots of ways to check computing hardware, and different characteristics to measure. There are ways to conduct a test that will show off the best a device can produce. But you want to believe that the results are real and not faked.

All right, some of those note-book and mobile gadget battery test results might be a little screwy. To get the maximum amount of time between charges, you may run the gadget with all unneeded services turned off and brightness set to a minimum level. You may run only one app rather than many to consume less system resources. The manufacturer’s claims may be proven, in theory at any rate, but they don’t represent a real world experience.

But the results can be duplicated if you follow the same operating conditions. On the other hand, if the hardware is run in a special mode just to complete benchmarks faster, that’s not fair. It’s just a cheap trick, and you’d think multibillion dollar multinational corporations are above such schemes, right?

Imagine a car that switched on the turbo only when you ran a 0-60 test.

Does Samsung or one of the other blatant offenders really deserve your business because they cheat on the benchmarks of their hardware? Sure, I suppose people who own a Galaxy S4 can claim they have one of the fastest smartphones on the planet, although it does seem that the iPhone 5s generally fares better against Samsung’s fake scores.

However, there’s no accountability in the industry. Most people who believe those high test scores usually don’t read the stories that demonstrate they are fake. The numbers afford bragging rights. False bragging rights, but bragging rights nonetheless.