Over the years, Apple’s naysayers have come up with a similar argument whenever another company comes out with a new tech gadget: Apple needs to deal with this competition and do something better real fast! You hear that meme playing out over and over again.

So we know, for example, that Samsung is coming out with a new line of smartwatches real soon now. Commentators are egging Apple on to deliver their own solution. Of course, it’s also true that there aren’t a whole lot of buyers, at least not yet, for such a gadget. Sony has been selling smartwatches for several years, with sales reported in the hundreds of thousands. By sheer numbers alone, it’s hard to believe Apple is going to care, at least when it comes to the current generation of such gear. It doesn’t matter if there are 100 companies making smartwatches, or a thousand.

This doesn’t mean Apple won’t get on board a product segment that seems to have potential if given the proper treatment. So Apple TV remains a hobby, even though they have sold over 13 million of them. How many companies have sold 13 million smartwatches?

When it comes to wearable devices of some sort,  it’s clear, based on what CEO Tim Cook has already said, that Apple is interested, but that doesn’t explain the direction that they will take. Sure, there was a published report a while back that Apple had hired 100 engineers for an alleged iWatch development project. But with tens of thousands of employees, Apple certainly has the resources to allocate a fair number of people to look into a new product category, but it doesn’t necessarily mean something will come of it.

Of course, if Apple doesn’t deliver an iWatch this year, some will suggest Apple is falling behind the curve yet again. Others might claim that there were production and/or development problems; anything to avoid admitting that they were dead wrong. We’ll just have to see how this plays out, but Apple won’t make an iWatch because tech and financial pundits tell them it must happen.

With the Apple TV, clearly development is continuing. There’s even a story this week that Apple is, once again, trying to strike deals with contact providers for an Apple branded TV set. The report specifically mentions a smart TV, although any new content deals ought to work just fine on the set top box. It doesn’t seem to justify building the whole widget. Another story has it that Apple is, once again, looking build a TV subscription service of some sort, which would put the company in direct competition with cable and satellite systems. But that’s nothing new. Claims of that sort have been published for several years, and it’s still clear that getting the major content providers on board is proving to be difficult.

That may explain yet another story that had it that Apple was trying to make a deal with Time Warner Cable to put that service’s content on Apple TV. So instead of using TWC’s own DVR and interface, you’d manage your service in an Apple TV environment. I suppose that’s entering TiVo territory, but a TiVo set top box has its own storage. Apple’s solution would be cloud-based, and that raises the question of how you’d deal with your ISP’s bandwidth caps, and most have them, if you’re streaming HD signals all day long on one or more sets. So if Apple introduces such a service, they might very well have to make an accommodation with the broadband providers to handle bandwidth issues.

Of course, the media doesn’t always deal with such complexities. They merely want to tell Apple what to do, and why the company’s well-paid executives are clearly not smart enough to see what’s really going on.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t legitimate markets that Apple has yet to tap, markets that suit their particular capabilities. The TV arena is one, wearable devices another, and what about the post-tablet or post-smartphone space? More and more people are buying smartphones, and the time will soon come when sales will mostly go to existing customers looking to upgrade; in other words, the same situation you see in the TV business these days. It’s still early in the game for tablets, but you get the picture.

So where does the market turn next? Or are the tablet and smartphone form factors sufficient to carry any company through the next 10 or 20 years? I suppose, by building more and more features formerly the province of a personal computer, and perfecting a voice recognition system that actually works, these two markets can sustain themselves for a long time. Even if the chips themselves are fabricated with new technologies, sporting new ways to crunch numbers, the basic form factors can survive.

It’s a sure thing that Apple and loads of other companies are looking at the future. But how they get there will probably not be determined by today’s tech and financial bloggers. Maybe a sci-fi writer.

In the old days, when I was young and foolish, I’d upgrade my desktop Mac every two years. Foolish? Well, it’s a sure thing that there was probably a healthy performance boost, not to mention a larger hard drive. Since I could get a decent return on selling my old Mac, the net cost wasn’t so high.

I fared even better back in 2009, though, when I acquired a 27-inch iMac, souped up with a few items selected on Apple’s Customize list. I bought the entire package, with an extra FireWire 800 backup drive, for less than $2,500, delivered. This was a fast decision; I had purchased a 2008 Mac Pro, with just a few options, when it first came out, and I was able to sell that huge box, along with a 30-inch Dell display, for $3,000. So I actually ended up ahead for once.

Segue to the summer of 2013. I still have that iMac, and it’s fast enough I suppose, though I have halfheartedly considered replacing the internal 1TB drive with a solid state version. Even if I wanted to go through the drudgery of opening the case for that exercise, the drive and upgrading from 8GB to 16GB RAM, would still cost upwards of $1,000. Would that be worth it for what would clearly be a noticeable performance boost? Maybe.

Another oh-so-obvious solution would be to await the arrival of a 2013 iMac, which will probably happen in October or thereabouts. I assume it’ll be faster than the 2012 model by 10-15% or so, and maybe Apple will find a way to reduce the upfront cost of going all solid state. If not, a Fusion drive (combining solid state and mechanical drives) seems just the ticket, and perhaps what I get for the older computer will cover half of the purchase price, or maybe a little less.

Other than the financial considerations, I am not as eager to upgrade a Mac as often as in the past. For one thing, the performance boosts year-over-year are no longer as substantial. There’s more of an emphasis on power efficiency, which doesn’t mean a whole lot on a desktop computer. Maybe Intel is hitting a wall, although their integrated graphics have improved considerably, making discrete graphics a less compelling option.

Overall, it does appear that people are upgrading less often, and when they do, they are apt to buy tablets rather than traditional personal computers. Certainly PC makers have seen falling sales. Mac sales aren’t immune, not that Apple has made huge strides in Mac refreshes in recent years. Yes, the MacBook Air has the “all day battery,” and the looks of the iMac were spruced up last winter, although you have to look at the thing from the side to notice much difference. The forthcoming 2013 Mac Pro is a huge sea change, but one that will only impact a small number of potential customers.

What this means is that the incentive to buy a new Mac is no longer as compelling. If published reports about the developer releases of OS X Mavericks hold true, and I see no reason for things to suddenly change, pretty much every Mac than can run OS 10.8 Mountain Lion will be upgradeable. That covers Macs from four to six years old, and if they are still working productively and efficiently, why replace the old box?

The days where a new Mac was a must have are gone. It is surely the twilight of the PC era, and if you think Mac advancement has slowed, take a gander at the Windows platform. The only real differences are tablets that very few want to buy. Windows 8 has done nothing to convince customers to upgrade; in fact, it may have convinced customers that they can survive quite nicely, thank you, with their current PC and Windows 7.

Sure, if Macs sales are no longer increasing by huge degrees, it doesn’t matter so much. Apple continues to invest in the platform, and OS X Mavericks, though it doesn’t appear so different, has loads of improvements that actually make Macs run better, and Finder tabs and other enhancements should make you more productive. If installing the OS is as smooth as usual, the incentive for you to buy a new Mac is lessened. Your existing machine will continue to work, and may even be a tad faster and, if a note-book, more efficient at using battery life after Mavericks is installed. How can you miss?

So when OS X Mavericks is released, I fully expect to download a copy the first day. Assuming no deal breakers, I’ll install it right away as well. The chatter from those with prerelease versions is that OS 10.9 is running remarkably well even ahead of the final release.

When the next iMac comes out, I’ll look at my checkbook and credit card balances and see whether upgrading makes sense. But if my current iMac continues to do what I need it to do, maybe I’ll just save my money.

On the surface at least, it would seem that the iPad is losing market share real fast. Just this week came a published report, citing IDC — which is sometimes wrong I might add — that the iPad’s share of the Chinese market has slumped below 30%. Overall, Apple had a 32.4% share across the planet in the last quarter, way down from over two thirds at one time.

Even worse, iPad sales slumped compared to last year, according to Apple’s last earnings report. To be fair, last year’s June quarter came on the heels of the launch of a new iPad, whereas the current lineup dates to last fall. That’s practically vintage for mobile gear.

But don’t get me wrong. I’m not making excuses for Apple. It may well be that the iPad is being pummeled into submission by lower-priced competitors, but is that a problem Apple needs to solve to keep sales at a reasonable level for the iPad? Is the $329 entry-level price for an iPad mini just too much, particularly for a tablet that doesn’t have a high definition or Retina display?

Well, the answers appear to be more complicated than that, and it raises the question about the value of all those tablets that are being counted in various sales reports and surveys. First and foremost, IDC is estimating shipments and not sales. It’s not uncommon for manufacturers to flood the channel with stuff just to make their numbers look favorable. But they have to pay the piper somewhere along the line if a lot of that inventory remains unsold. Think about Microsoft having to take a $900 million write-down for the Surface tablet.

But even if the shipments and sales eventually align, at least for the most part, there is a huge issue to consider: What are the tens of millions of people who are buying tablets without an Apple logo doing with them?

A basic function of a tablet is going online. Even if users aren’t growing their app libraries, they will use email and a browser of some sort. Yet we have this ticklish number from Apple that nobody is disputing, which is that 84% of the tablet users going online have iPads. How do they know? Well, when a browser calls up a site, it sends a user agent code indicating the app and the OS. If you have your own Web site, you can consult such statistics in a logging app.

So out of all those other tablets, growing far faster than the iPad, only 16% are getting online, or at least getting online in a way that the traffic can be measured with standard Web analytics. Now the Amazon Kindle may not account for much, since many of its owners are using Amazon’s own storefront to buy things rather than to visit their favorite sites — other than Amazon. But I’m just guessing here.

No when it comes to apps, the App Store does better than Google Play. Although the number of tablet-optimized apps for Android is growing fast, most developers take the cheap way out, which is to just scale up the existing design, rather than optimize the presentation to look better on larger displays. That sort of trick would probably get the app rejected from the App Store. But it also means that an Android tablet isn’t necessarily providing a superior user interface compared to a smartphone, other than taking up more space.

Now the cheap out approach may mean that owners of Android tablets will buy fewer apps. Understandable, but how would that keep them from using Google’s perfectly serviceable browser to do a little online surfing? Does that make sense to you?

Now it may be that those cheap no-name tablets are barely usable. People buy them because they happen to resemble the more expensive brands at a lower price. Being dirt cheap, they are junk that will deliver a poor user experience or just stop working after a while. In that respect, these tablets are barely above toys.

This would be something for an NPD Group or IDC or some other surveying organization to consider. But it’s also true that even the branded tablets aren’t always so reliable. I’ve read all those reports about early failures or inconsistent performance on the original Google Nexus 7. It got great reviews last year, but doesn’t seem to be quite as capable of a long-lasting experience. It’s too early to determine how well the 2013 version, with an HD display, is holding up.

Now for those who look at sales or shipping numbers and little else, it would seem that the demand for the iPad is falling. But if customers care about what they buy, maybe sales for those cheap tablets will soon collapse, just as sales collapsed for netbooks after the iPad arrived.

I would hope customers would prefer to buy gadgets that actually work — and work consistently.

All right, so one of the recent rumors about that alleged forthcoming iPhone 5s speaks of a gold-colored version. All right, I’m OK with more colors, though one hopes it won’t take months for them to show up in quantity. Let’s not forget the white iPhone 4 that never made it until the spring of 2011, months after the original release of the black version.

Sure, that happened when Steve Jobs was still Apple CEO, and he was always perfect, and Tim Cook is still imperfect. At least that’s what some media commentators want you to believe.

In any case, the latest rumor about a gold iPhone 5s comes from no less than AllThingsD, which, as you no doubt recall, is a tech blog run by the Wall Street Journal. As such places go, that site is known to deliver reliable information about Apple and the company’s plans. So this may be a lock, as is the earlier report of an iPhone launch event on Tuesday, September 10. That it’s all happening the day after my birthday is of no significance whatever, of course.

So here’s what we are all expecting: An iPhone 5s, which will look just about the same as the iPhone 5, but will sport a fingerprint sensor among the new parts. The rest will be natural upgrades to existing hardware, making it faster and all that stuff. I’ll separate iOS 7 from the picture, since it’ll also run on tens of millions of older iPhones.

In addition to a new flagship model, more and more speculation, some of it from authoritative sources, is focused on a plastic-cased iPhone 5c, essentially an iPhone 5 in a new dress, and thus less expensive. But it’s also possible that the iPhone 4s will become the low-end model, at, one hopes, at an even lower-end retail price. Unless Apple changes the 4S from the Dock to Lightning connector, there will still be one device in the lineup that doesn’t support the new cabling scheme.

So is there any reason to doubt any of this? Well, there are also reports that Foxconn is gearing up to produce millions and millions of the new iPhones, in order to give Apple a fairly plentiful supply to sell on the day the gadgets officially go on sale, which would be on or about September 20. But there are also reports of difficulty ramping up production of the iPhone 5s because of the new fingerprint sensor.

But notice that few mention NFC networking, which is common issue on the higher-end Android smartphones. No doubt Apple will have something to say about that, such as the lack of consistent standards and the lack of support. Now this may not mean much in the scheme of things, but I’ve had extended encounters with two Android smartphones equipped with NFC, and I’ve never, ever, seen the need to turn that feature on. The merchants I visit don’t have huge signs saying, “NFC supported” or some such, nor do the financial institutions with whom I deal send me emails about the great near-field networking feature. Or whatever.

The other differences are debatable. Will there be a spiffier processor, dubbed the A7? What about the camera sensor? Will it still be eight megabits, or will Apple jump to 12? What about just a better lens and superior low-light performance. How many megapixels do you need to take great pictures and use them for anything smaller than a large poster?

What’s more, other than the fingerprint sensor, if it arrives, will there be a compelling reason after all to upgrade to an iPhone 5s? Why not find an iPhone 5 on closeout? At best, the new model will be a little bit faster overall, capable of better pictures, and maybe there will be some other goodies that the media hasn’t talked about yet, but will those goodies be enough to hang an upgrade on? What about the rumored 128GB version? Well, for Apple, it’s great, because the higher storage versions are hugely overpriced.

Now the larger audience for the iPhone 5s — and again that assumes that’s the model designation, and the configuration is close to what the predictions indicate — will be new customers, those leaving other smartphone platforms, and those who have expiring contracts and are ready for the latest and greatest from Apple.

Regardless, Apple’s critics will continue to claim that the company cheated them out of a compelling upgrade, not that the upgrades to other popular smartphones have seemed all that compelling. Take the Samsung Galaxy S4, with loads of useless features, which apparently hasn’t sold quite as well as the company expected.

There is also one other left-field possibility, and that is a “Maxi” iPhone 5 with a 4.5-inch screen, or something in that range. As much as Apple has been skeptical of using bigger screens, it’s an undeniable fact that the flagship models for most other companies continue sport bigger and bigger displays. For some the 4-inch iPhone 5 screen seems a tad small, and if Apple has put in hooks in iOS 7 to make it easier for developers to accommodate more display configurations, maybe it’s not such a huge deal.

Is there something in the new iPhone that will amaze Apple customers, and even some of the skeptics? We’ll all know soon enough.