On the surface, this may be a silly question. Apple has never admitted that the so-called iWatch has been delayed, or even that any such thing is being considered. Yes, Tim Cook has admitted Apple’s interest in the wearable devices space, but that’s not an admission that a watch, a ring, or even a headband is under development, and certainly not a pair of “smart” glasses.

But with few product intros since last year, speculation is high about what Apple will do next. A minor MacBook Pro refresh earlier this year wasn’t enough. The more extensive revisions to the MacBook Air, including the all-day batteries, have not been regarded as that important, except to people who appreciate such improvements. OS X Mavericks and iOS 7? Well, they aren’t due until fall. Some suggest the former isn’t very compelling, and doesn’t look so different from OS X Mountain Lion, even though there are significant productivity improvements. iOS 7 is just fancy eye candy, and aren’t the fonts too thin for readability in bright surrounds? Well, it’s been reported that Apple has apparently opted to use thicker fonts for some functions, but maybe the critics didn’t notice.

So all eyes are focused on what might come this fall. An iWatch?

Here’s what we’ve heard so far. First, that Apple added 100 engineers to the alleged iWatch project. Later, that they were applying for trademarks for the iWatch name in a number of countries, though they might have to buy the rights in other countries. But that’s not unusual. The iPhone trademark is licensed from Cisco. Apple can well afford to make an attractive offer to an existing trademark owner.

There are two more stories. One has it that Apple is hiring even more people to handle the iWatch project, after recruiting Paul Deneve, former chief executive for a fashion designer, Yves St. Laurent, to oversee “special projects” for Apple. In passing, let’s not forget that Deneve worked for Apple in Europe during the 1990s. It’s not that he’s unfamiliar with the company.

Are you with me so far?

The next story is that Apple has postponed the iWatch project until some time in 2014, perhaps because it is taking longer to complete design and engineering. Supposedly this means bad news for Apple.

So even if an iWatch never shows up this year, those who believed it was going to happen can say, “see it was delayed until next year.” Obviously this pronouncement can’t be proved, unless or until an iWatch actually shows up at some time in the near future. Besides, how many of you will remember failed predictions a year from now, since you’ll already been inundated with many more failed predictions?

By why hold Apple responsible for a product that the company has never announced? Well, crazier things have happened when it comes to commentaries and speculation about Apple.

At the same time, there are published reports that Microsoft’s Surface team is working on a smartwatch constructed of translucent aluminum. For a second, I was thinking of the phrase “transparent aluminum” used in the 1980s sci-fi flick, “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.” That’s the film in which chief engineer Scotty programmed the construction plans on an original compact Mac, using that “quaint” keyboard.

When it comes to something Microsoft might be working on, I can almost believe the story. Microsoft is notorious for leaking information to reporters, hoping, against hope, that they will somehow make potential customers lust after the new gadgets.

But even if Microsoft does release a Surface Watch or whatever it’s called, will anyone care? It’s not as if the Surface tablets have gone anywhere. Right now, there’s a fire sale in progress, with prices reduced by roughly $150, depending on the model. Such a drastic reduction in the face of poor sales was clearly meant to move product fast, even if profit margins are reduced to the vanishing point. That possibly desperate decision appears to come direct from Amazon’s playbook with the Kindle tablets. At least Amazon hopes to make up for lost profits as the result of people buying other stuff via the Kindle’s storefront. What’s Microsoft’s excuse? It’s not that there are huge sales of Surface apps.

Indeed, if you look over the reports of the goings on in the tech industry in recent months, you’ll find that a number of companies, including Samsung and Sony, are also working on smartwatches of one sort or another. But whether they come to be, or whether anyone cares one way or the other, is an open question.

As I’ve said before, it has yet to be proven that the current concept of a smartwatch, an accessory for a smartphone or tablet, has any real chance for mass market success. Apple is well known to take moribund markets, such as digital music players and tablets, and devise a compelling solution that does deliver success. But that would also mean that the iWatch that Apple produces, should one actually appear, will not be like other smartwatches. At the very least, I’d suspect it would have the potential of working as a standalone gadget that doesn’t require the presence of another device to do its thing. But that’s the beginning and end of my prediction. It remains to be seen whether the rumored Apple iWatch will ever see the light of day.

One thing is certain, and that is that Apple is extremely selective about which products to produce. Or at least that’s how it is nowadays. During the 1990s, before Steve Jobs returned to the company, you almost wondered if Apple would soon be selling refrigerators and toaster ovens. The product lineups were so extensive, you wondered what they wouldn’t make.

In those days, Apple sold printers, cameras, and other gear not quite related to personal computers, not to mention the Newton MessagePad, an early mobile computing device. There were so many Macs, even the executives would have difficulty telling one from another. But that was little different from other tech companies who pursued the same strategy, to market as many product lines as they could handle, and maybe they went too far, with loads of slightly different models to target all sorts of real or imagined product segments.

In one of his first acts, Steve Jobs cut the fat, the unproductive products, or the products that moved Apple into what he perceived as the wrong direction. Even printers, which helped the Mac gain credibility in the 1980s as the result of Adobe PostScript and desktop publishing, were history.

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Maybe it’s David Letterman’s Top 10 list, but some people just can’t get away from making lists. The 10 Worst, the 10 Best, the 10 Most Annoying Things — you get the picture. Sometimes the lists will have different quantities, but when you hit 25, you must have an awful lot of material that you regard as of important. So when I read an article entitled “25 things my new Android phone does that makes my iPhone feel like it comes from the 1990s,” I had to wonder just what Apple has done wrong. Isn’t Apple supposed to be on the cutting edge of technology?

Indeed, the title itself is the dead giveaway. I won’t give the writer any publicity by mentioning his name, nor will I post a link to the site where this misguided article was posted. The premise is simply outrageous. It almost seems as if he created some PowerPoint bullet points of features that are not on an iPhone, and thus concluded that it makes the product reminiscent of technology that’s 20 years old. I wouldn’t suggest he used Apple’s Keynote, since it’s clear that he doesn’t understand Apple or its design philosophy.

I’ll cover just a few of those reasons, but the focus of this hatchet job will be obvious. To be fair: Yes, some of the complaints may even be valid, but they represent design decisions that some accept and some don’t. It doesn’t mean Apple refuses to embrace new technologies.

So there’s the familiar complaint that you cannot just pop open the case and replace the battery. Actually this complaint covers two parts, since there’s a complaint that you can’t easily remove and replace the back of an iPhone. Of course, Apple isn’t the only company to embrace the sealed box philosophy. Ask HTC. But it has nothing whatever to do with whether the technology is current or not. Besides, as Apple finds more and more ways to extend battery life, the need to easily replace a battery becomes less relevant. Clearly they aren’t relevant now to hundreds of millions of “retro” users of iPhones, iPads and iPods.

Yet another complaint is the inability to insert a memory card. Well, I assume if Apple was inundated with such complaints, it would respond appropriately. But the lack of such internal expandability doesn’t make the iPhone ancient. Apple makes the iPhone and other iOS gear available with different memory configurations. You can just buy the one with the capacity you need. However, the liberal use of iCloud does noticeably reduce the amount of storage you require on the hardware. You can also sync content with a Mac or PC via iTunes, wired or with Wi-Fi. So there are ways to deal with the inability to add a physical card with which to transfer content.

And, yes, the use of iTunes is, to the writer in question, a negative, though it’s no longer necessary for syncing.

Apple is also dinged for not supporting NFC, a near-field networking scheme with very little support, or with wireless charging, another scheme that has yet to demonstrate a crying need. These represent more examples of looking for missing feature sets as bullet points, but failing to see if they are truly useful.

Two more complaints: That you can’t see files and move them somehow, via drag and drop or another method. Since there are iOS file management apps, some free, I’ll just suggest the writer is misinformed on this score. The complaint that the iPhone lacks a 1080p display is absurd, since it’s unnecessary. Apple’s “lesser” Retina display, with 326 ppi resolution, is not visibly inferior to the Samsung Galaxy S4’s 441 ppi resolution. Indeed, text and other content often seems sharper on an iPhone due to Apple’s superior handling of fonts and better integration with the graphic chips. All things being equal, what’s the good of boasting about a spec you can’t see?

I could go on, but I’ll just summarize briefly. Most of the rest of those alleged 25 Android advantages relate to spec and feature differences, or to the fact that you can customize an Android gadget more than an iOS gadget. That’s good or bad, depending on your point of view. If there’s a way you must customize your smartphone that Apple doesn’t support, you can either jailbreak the device and get some unapproved app, with the attendant security risks, or choose a different platform. Simple as that. If you imagine that having better specs somehow enhances your user experience, at least in theory, so be it. Buy what you like.

But to suggest that Apple’s decisions about which features to include and which features to avoid somehow makes an iPhone seem ancient just doesn’t make any sense. A company’s design and engineering choices do not necessarily mean one product is necessarily more advanced than another. Only different.

Besides, if the writer in question doesn’t like his iPhone, then why not just sell it and just stick with his Android handset? I fail to see why this merits of most of those 25 alleged complaints (yes a few are valid), unless, of course, it was done strictly to attract Web traffic. That being the case, I’m glad I’m not providing a direct link to such an ill-informed rant. Unfortunately, such articles are fairly typical for Apple’s critics.

So you’ve probably read all the chatter in recent months that the iPhone 5 was a huge failure, that it didn’t meet Apple’s expectations or the expectations of industry and financial analysts. This meme has played out over and over again, even though Apple continues to report higher year-over-year sales for iPhones.

Well, there’s one analysis, from Canaccord Genuity, an investment bank that claims to operate in 12 countries, which reports that the iPhone 5 remains a success around the globe, and was the top seller last month “at essentially all global carriers.” Now the assessment comes with some cautions that I’ll get to in a moment. But understand this news comes only a couple of months after Samsung’s highly praised Galaxy S4 smartphone appeared. So we’re talking about a product that’s aging according to smartphone industry standards, having been introduced last September, yet it still outdoes its fiercest competitor.

To be fair, this survey is a half-full and half-empty document with some downsides, aside from not being based on actual sales from the manufacturers of course. One is that Samsung is catching up to Apple; another is that Samsung is ahead of Apple when all handsets are counted. But that’s nothing especially surprising. Apple sells a current model iPhone and two older models. Samsung sells loads of different handsets, some of them exclusive to a specific country. There’s no way you can possibly do a direct comparison, except for alleged sales totals. Besides, Apple still earns higher profits per unit. Although Samsung also gets good profits, it’s doubtful they come from all those cheap handsets with which they clutter the market.

Yet another caution is the claim that sales of high-end smartphones are softening, which may be based on the fact that the Galaxy S4 isn’t meeting expectations. I suppose we’ll see what happens when the next iPhone appears.

One problem, as I’ve said before, is that Apple is judged by a different standard. The company is expected to reinvent a market every six months, even though such revolutions are rare, even for Apple. I understand the “what have you done for me lately” concept, but it’s not that Apple is actually late in delivering new products. But maybe they were early, witness the fourth generation iPad, which came out last fall. That model would probably have arrived this spring otherwise, at which point Apple would have been credited with delivering a new product on schedule. Besides, Apple has already promised new gear for this fall, so wouldn’t the complaints be justified if they failed to fulfill those promises?

Certainly, we know what some of those products are now, because they have already been announced. There’s the Mac Pro, for example, which can certainly be credited with being one of the most unusual personal computer designs in recent memory. Some want to connect it to the failed Power Mac G4 Cube (from cube to tube), but Apple is touting power ahead of the unique looks this time. Sure, some may rightly complain about the lack of internal expansion. But those who need the most expandability are already using external peripherals, since the existing Mac Pro doesn’t offer enough expansion for the needs of some. Apple is betting that six Thunderbolt 2 ports will provide greater flexibility. I suppose we’ll see what sort of peripherals accompany the Mac Pro when it actually goes on sale. Anyone who complains about that now is wasting their time, and ours.

iOS 7 is also getting its share of brickbats, but it seems that many of the criticisms focus on the new theme, rather than functionality. You almost think some of the complainers just can’t get past the thin lettering. But it least Apple can, since it’s reported that iOS 7 beta 3 uses thicker fonts in some places, supposedly to improve readability, particularly in bright surroundings. Once the final version is released, we can see how it works in the real world. Indeed, some of the most vociferous complaints may come from people who don’t seem to have used the betas; they just looked at the pictures.

As to the iPhone, there seems little doubt that there will be a new version by September, and maybe there will be a cheaper model as well. That Apple continues to sell older iPhones makes it clear they understand that many customers don’t care about the top-of-the-line, or just don’t want to pay extra for the luxury. The real question is whether a cheaper iPhone will be affordable without a carrier contract. Regardless, Apple is not going to go to the gutter to compete with Samsung and other handset makers on price. After all, who makes money on that cheap stuff anyway? Samsung is already warning Wall Street about reduced profits.

In any case, the argument over Apple’s alleged failure to innovate after the death of Steve Jobs in 2011 will never end. It doesn’t matter how well Apple does when the quarterly financials are released later this month. Some are never satisfied, at least where Apple is concerned.