Apple’s hobby, the Apple TV, made an inauspicious debut back in 2007. At first, it was mostly a way to store your digital content from iTunes on a built-in hard drive, and play that content on your TV. To Apple, the new gadget was little more than a hobby. The first version, closely resembling the Mac mini of that timeframe, contained a 40GB hard drive with which to store you content; a 160GB version arrived two months later.

But, as I said, most people probably didn’t notice. Things began to change in September 2010, when a new, cheaper version was announced. Sporting a tiny black case with curved edges, the new Apple TV was about one-fourth the size of the original, and, at $99, a third of the price. More to the point, this was a clear harbinger to the future, since it used internals that were reminiscent of an iPhone, not to mention running a special version of iOS.

The new Apple TV wasn’t designed to store much data. There was 8GB onboard flash storage to provide a decent buffer for streaming content, but there was no way to actually store that content. Apple also provided a smattering of content services in addition to iTunes, including Netflix. With the introduction of AirPlay, you could use an Apple TV to stream content from your IOS device or Mac to your TV. This was yet another way to transition you to Apple’s expansive ecosystem.

Today’s Apple TV isn’t altogether different. It has a more powerful processor, with support for 1080p video. Apple continues to regard it as a hobby, but Tim Cook nonetheless recently admitted that the company has a “grand vision” to conquer your living room. Meantime, sales are increasing. Of 13 million, according to Cook, half were tallied in the past year.

The conventional wisdom had it that Apple planned to eventually deliver a connected TV of some sort, and some even use the iTV designation, although that trademark is identified with a British TV network. It’s not as if the present iTV would be willing to surrender that name, even if Apple waves a huge paycheck in front of them. So maybe it’ll be a variation on the Apple TV theme.

Another possibility is that Apple is going to revolutionize your TV experience with a souped up version of the set top box. But it may also be possible for Apple to take a stealthy approach, and gradually make the Apple TV an indispensable companion without changing the hardware.

How so? Well, with content mostly. The offerings have expanded over time. In addition to sports networks, you have Hulu Plus, a service that focuses mostly on TV network fare. Just recently, Apple added HBO Go, which allows you to watch your favorite HBO movies and TV shows, such as “Game of Thrones,” “True Blood, and “The Newsroom.” All right, I’m sold.

Now at first, some cable and satellite customers were unable to use their accounts with HBO Go, but that’s being remedied as we speak. I’m already able to login with my DirecTV account.

Coming later this year is the CW network, owned by CBS and Time Warner, which caters in programming for a somewhat younger demographic, and features such fare as the action drama “Arrow,” based on the “Green Arrow” DC comic book, and “The Vampire Diaries.”

There’s also a published report that Apple is in heavy negotiations with Time Warner Cable to bring their content to the Apple TV. If that happens, you can bet that other cable and satellite providers will be rushing to get with the program. What this means is that customers of Time Warner and other services may be able to dispense with their clumsy set top boxes and watch their shows via Apple’s elegant interface. Maybe. That depends on how the content delivery services handle time shifting.

Right now, most services simply use a DVR, with a big hard drive, to store the shows you want to record. Since Apple TV only offers a buffer for streaming, is there another solution? Sure, the cloud. The content services could simply stream the content you’ve selected for recording direct from their networks via an on-demand scheme. But that solution may be troublesome if it counts against your ISP’s bandwidth cap. But if you already subscribe to the broadband provider that delivers your TV service, it won’t be a problem. If you don’t, or use a satellite provider, you might have a problem if you’re a voracious TV watcher.

Now I suppose one possible workaround would be to design an Apple TV with a coax port that would hook up direct to your cable or satellite provider. You’d retrieve content same as you do now with your DVR, direct from the provider’s own network. But that solution would require replacing your Apple TV, unless Apple could provide some sort of interface adapter that taps your cable or satellite connection directly when you’re using their app. An updated Apple TV would allow for a direct hookup.

Possible? I suppose. Meantime, if the story about adding Time Warner to the Apple TV is accurate, you may wake up one day and find out that Apple’s TV revolution is already here. Only you didn’t notice.

It wasn’t so many years ago that many of you no doubt felt that Apple was fated, or condemned, to occupy a niche status in the PC market. With worldwide sales, and U.S. sales for that matter, in the single digits, how could it be otherwise?

Sure, Apple would regularly release new versions of OS X and new hardware arrived several times a year, but it was still pretty much status quo as far as the computing world was concerned. Creative people used Macs, by and large, the rest of the world used PCs, and nothing could change that state of affairs.

Except…

The change may have started here: In 2005, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would switch from Motorola/IBM PowerPC chips to Intel’s x86 processor family. The news came at the WWDC, and I’m certain developers didn’t relish the idea of having to rebuild their apps for a new processor family. But Apple did take steps to smooth the migration, including bundling a utility, Rosetta, which allowed you to run PowerPC apps on Intel Macs with good performance. Rosetta was discontinued when OS X Lion came out, but that’s another story for another day. In any case, the full transition was completed by the summer of 2006, months ahead of the announced schedule.

There was a happy side effect that went by almost unnoticed until a certain app appeared that allowed you to run Windows apps on a Mac. That had been done before, but the translation from x86 to PowerPC took its toll, and performance was barely acceptable. But now with Macs running native on Intel, things changed. Between Parallels Desktop and Apple’s Boot Camp, you could run almost any Windows app with performance barely distinguishable from a real Windows PC; other virtual machine solutions from VMWare and elsewhere came later.

Sure, games worked best with Boot Camp, but this cross-platform environment made it far easier for people to migrate to Macs. Any performance advantage of Windows over the Mac was, except for somewhat lesser graphics performance at the time, erased. Same processors, same memory chips, so why not?

In recent years, Apple would regularly announced that roughly half the people buying new Macs at an Apple Store were new to the platform. For the most part, Apple’s sales grew ahead of the overall PC market. Even when Mac sales declined somewhat in the last quarter, they declined far more for Windows PCs.

And now there’s a report from NPD Group that, in the U.S. retail market, the MacBook Air holds a 56 percent share of the thin and light note-book space. This is the category that is now dubbed “Ultrabook” by Intel, and it represents a particularly innovative area of PC hardware, at least when it’s done right. Clearly Apple knows the way, because they are selling an awful lot of MacBook Airs. But the NPD Group’s survey only covers the first five months of the year. Apple refreshed the MacBook Air lineup in early June, with somewhat better performance and improved power efficiencies; the later the result of using Intel’s Haswell chips, along with a beefier battery.  Suddenly a Mac note-book delivered essentially the same battery life as an iPad, and things are destined to get better when OS X Mavericks appears. No doubt sales increased noticeably as well.

In yet another surprising development, when you price an identically equipped Ultrabook against even the $999 MacBook Air, you’ll find that Apple’s price structure is extremely favorable. When it comes to a touch-enabled Ultrabook, which is required to get the best user experience from Microsoft’s Windows 8, Apple has a significant price advantage. How could that be?

Well, Apple has realized that using a touch screen on a regular note-book represents an awkward and potentially painful reach for users. Apple’s touch features are limited to the trackpad, where they appear to make the most sense. This is an area where PC makers will add features not because of their value, but because they have something extra to boast about in the spec sheets.

To add insult to injury, Apple’s profits from the Mac platform are reportedly higher than the combined profits of the next five PC makers. Sure, some of them sell more units than Apple, overall, but PCs are hardly much of a profit source to most any company aside from Apple. At a time where many were skeptical that Apple planned to invest significantly on Macs, there’s a spanking new Mac Pro on the horizon with a unique cylindrical form factor that is intended to render the age-old and traditional PC minitower obsolete. Some will argue that there should be more internal expansion, but if there are enough external devices and breakout boxes that support Thunderbolt 2, maybe it won’t matter. Clearly Apple put a lot of time, energy and development dollars into recreating the Mac Pro.

As to OS X Mavericks, the feature changes are largely focused on the needs of serious Mac users, who depend on the platform to actually get work done. The Finder enhancements, which actually aren’t especially unique as file browsers go, are particularly useful. iCloud Keychain works for both consumers and businesses, and if it’s reliable, will reduce or eliminate much of the drudgery in creating secure passwords and actually being able to have them recalled whenever you need to log in to something. There’s not much visual flash in Mavericks, but the under-the-hood changes also promise improved performance and better battery life.

In contrast, how does Windows 8 improve performance, power efficiency, and more important, productivity? Maybe it’s more efficient for note-book batteries, but the convoluted touch features, and the awkward means to use them, hardly make anyone more productive.

I won’t predict when the PC era will be largely history, except for a small number of power users. But Apple has clearly taken the right approach in enhancing the Mac platform, and meeting the needs of both consumers and content creators.

There’s a published report, in the Washington Post, that Apple has applied for the iWatch trademark in Japan. The filing with the Japan Patent Office, made June 3, has been made public, so it certainly appears to be true. In addition it was later revealed that Apple applied for iWatch trademarks in several other countries on the very same day, so it is naturally assumed that this is a prelude to the possibly imminent arrival of a product bearing that name. It has to so, for why would Apple bother otherwise?

This may, of course, be the correct assumption. There was another published report a while back, never officially confirmed, that Apple has 100 engineers working on a wearable device of some sort, which is presumed to be an iWatch. There’s also the assumption that Apple, stung by the large decline in stock price since late 2012, is busy trying to invent the next great thing, and this must be it.

Or so they say.

Now I’m not going to assume that there is no iWatch in Apple’s development labs. There are no doubt loads of potential products in various phases of development, it is quite possible such an animal might appear, eventually at any rate. But that doesn’t mean that there is a crying need for a connected watch, or that Apple can or will offer a viable solution.

Meantime, other companies are looking into the possibilities of a connected watch of some sort. Sony is selling something called SmartWatch, which runs a version of Android, and is meant to serve as a wearable accessory for a smartphone. The theory goes that, if your smartphone is stuck in your pocket, and you receive a phone call, you aren’t put in the position of struggling to get it out. Just tap your SmartWatch, which uses Bluetooth to connect to your Android smartphone. The first product labeled SmartWatch debuted last year and retailed for $149.99. A new version, known as SmartWatch 2 ,is promised for September.

But Sony’s solution isn’t unique. Other tech companies, including Samsung, are working on wearable products that might, to some degree, be designed to head off Apple at the pass. Google thinks it requires glasses. However, all this assumes Apple has a strong interest in entering this nascent market, or that their solution will also be a smartphone accessory.

I suppose so-called smartwatches might, to some, be in the same category as digital music players in 2001, before the iPod came along. In those days, the presumed successors to the Sony Walkman didn’t attract many buyers, and they were particularly clumsy in the way they functioned. The iPod provided the first consumer friendly solution, with speedy downloads, easy syncing with iTunes and a simple, intuitive interface. It took off by wildfire, and the competition, which eventually included the Zune from Microsoft, never came close.

But a wearable device in the form of the SmartWatch faces a severe obstacle. Young people were quick to embrace the iPod, particularly when Apple introduced relatively inexpensive versions. But children these days don’t wear watches all that much, so where’s the potential? Well for those of us somewhat older, I have always had a watch of one sort or another, usually with lots of dials and buttons, so I might be number one on the list of potential smartwatch buyers. My wife wears a watch when she goes out, sometimes, but mostly as jewelry. She never bothers to look at it.

My son, now aged 27, never bothered, and he’s typical of his peers. It’s not encouraging to read that Sony claims to have “over half a million customers” for their smartwatches since 2007. Apple would expect to sell that number of devices in the space of a few days to make an iWatch viable.

Consider how the Apple TV has fared. Apple has sold 13 million copies; half of that number in the past year. To Apple, 13 million sales represents a hobby. Half a million would represent an outright failure, except, perhaps, for a high-end workstation such as the Mac Pro. To think Apple would build an iWatch without the expectation of tens of millions of potential sales in the first year is a stretch. Indeed, it doesn’t make much sense.

This doesn’t mean wearable devices of this sort don’t have potential. The right approach could likely cause a market revolution, and I wouldn’t presume to have the answers as to what that approach should be. On the surface, though, I’d think a successful iWatch would be capable of performing at least some functions as a standalone device. I’m thinking in terms of a clock, calendar, telephone , and perhaps keeping tabs on your exercise routine. If Apple embedded some of the circuitry, such as the wireless antenna, in the band, I could see where a tiny gadget of that sort would be viable. Or maybe Apple could put everything in the watch itself, and you could use any band or bracelet you want.

I can see where there would be complications. If you get a phone call, do you really want to bring the thing to your mouth to answer the call? Would there be a speakerphone to hear the caller, or would it come with a Bluetooth headset to manage those functions? However, the fact that Apple is already in the trademark registration mode indicates that the iWatch may indeed have advanced to the point where it may actually be a real product that will be released in the near future. That says a lot.

Apple is great about setting expectations. So recent OS X releases have each had over 200 new features. Why not 150? Why not 300? Well, evidently 200 sends the appropriate marketing message, although the numbers might be fudged just a little bit.

Certainly, if you look at the full feature sets of Lion and Mountain Lion, they do exceed 200, sometimes by a decent margin. But there are features and there are features, such as adding something to the menu bar, or an extra command that may or may not be useful. So in Mountain Lion, for example, Apple added the awkward Command-Shift-Option-S keyboard shortcut for Save As. Some might have preferred that Apple return to Command-Shift-S. In addition, the Share button and Share sheets, although they are merely variations on a theme, count as separate features.

However, there are also 15 features specifically designed for Mac users in China. So does that mean that rest of the world only got 185 new features? No, because there were a couple of dozen extra features in the list that gave Apple plenty of breathing room. So the phrase “more than” was quite correct, even if some of the ones included were, at best, minor enhancements. Apple doesn’t rate the worth of each new feature.

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