In the weeks ahead of the release of Samsung’s flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S4, we heard of at least one high-profile switch from iPhone to Android. Supposedly the Android universe offers a better user experience for those who want to customize their gadgets to a fare-thee-well.

In passing, I am currently using a Galaxy S3, but not because I decided to make a permanent switch from the iPhone. It’s about doing a proper extended review and learning more about Android, although Samsung’s user experience is heavily modified. That it happened around the same time that the well-known tech columnist made his switch with lots of pomp and circumstance is, so far as I’m concerned, sheer coincidence.

It was, however, troubling to read the columnist’s articles about his reasons for the switch, where he kept repeating the same points and made a huge deal to apologize for his decision, assuring his readers he still loved his Mac and his iPad. It came across as an act of reluctance, so why bother?

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It appears to be a common theme these days that Apple is in a huge pickle if a few markets aren’t overturned on a monthly basis. It doesn’t matter that six years passed between the introduction of the iPod and the iPhone, and another three before the iPad came to be. Resting on one’s laurels isn’t good enough.

However, it’s also true that Apple’s competitors aren’t upsetting markets. Samsung may be doing well, but they used the iPhone as an inspiration for the Galaxy S series. Yes, the newly-released S4 may sell out. It has gotten decent reviews, but many of the pundits are also saying that Samsung is just throwing stuff at the wall, hoping some things will stick. At least there’s an “Easy Mode” in the S4, so you can turn off the junk and actually use the thing without app overload getting in the way.

Tablets? Well, Microsoft did tell you that tablets were the future of personal computing, but nobody listened till the iPad came along and created the blueprint for others to follow. For better or worse, except for the Surface, what has come since is heavily influenced by the iPad. Anyone seriously believe Amazon’s Kindle revolutionized the tablet market?

So is Apple the only company that’s supposed to upend the tech industry on a regular basis? Where are the innovations from all the rest? And packing on loads of junk features onto a gadget isn’t innovation. It’s all about bloat and having useless stuff to promote in ads. It’s not whether the iPad mini will eventually get a Retina display, but that the form factor exists in the first place because of something Apple did.

But I can see where the media and the financial community are disappointed because of what Tim Cook said during the quarterly call with financial analysts, that Apple’s new stuff wouldn’t begin to arrive until the fall, meaning in September. Why not earlier? Isn’t there something Apple could toss together to demonstrate that they haven’t lost their cool?

Well, what about the next versions of iOS and OS X? They will apparently be on display at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June (where tickets were sold out in three minutes flat, a record). It makes sense to show late betas, with perhaps a promise to introduce both before the end of September. Sure, OS 10.9, the presumed version number, will be arriving a couple of months later than some expected, or hoped. But it may also deliver some fundamental changes to the interface — ditto for iOS 7 — as the result of Jonathan Ive assuming control of the human interface section. Clearly it would take a little extra time to bake in critical changes. It wouldn’t serve anyone to release buggy products and put up with the abuse just to allow Apple to get something out earlier.

Remember what happened with Maps for iOS 6. If Apple had another three months or so to clean up the worst defects, or maybe even called it a public beta from the get go, maybe the fallout wouldn’t have been so severe. Certainly it fueled the meme that Tim Cook’s Apple lost sight of releasing good products, forgetting the defective stuff that appeared with the stamp of Steve Jobs all over it.

Don’t forget the Power Mac G4 Cube, or the various failed iterations of Apple’s online services under the regime of Jobs. Even iCloud isn’t quite there yet, although there are some 300 million users, according to Apple. However, far too many commentators don’t want to be bothered by facts.

But I do understand why Cook mentioned fall as the start of Apple’s major product intro season. If he hadn’t done so, the media would have been clamoring for immediate revelations about the next great product introduction, and why everything has been delayed. This way, the rumor mill won’t be fully activated until a few weeks before the new gear is announced, but that doesn’t mean Apple can’t do a fast refresh.

Take the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. One report has it that note-books featuring Intel’s new Haswell chips could be in production by May, and perhaps go on sale around the time of the WWDC. It wouldn’t merit more than a press release, but it could boost Mac note-book sales for the June quarter and keep a Mac sales upturn going until fall. Apple might also announce the next generation Mac Pro, or whatever it’ll be called, for release in September. Sales impact to existing product will be minimal, since not that many Mac Pros are being sold these days anyway. A Haswell-based iMac refresh could occur by September or October. Since the 2013 iMac will be otherwise the same as the 2012 model, except for perhaps more powerful graphics engine, production bottlenecks should not occur.

Another question: Will Apple relent and deliver an iPhone with larger screen sizes? Cook referred to the trade-offs of larger displays during the quarterly conference call. That’s step one towards stating that the trade-offs have been resolved, paving the way for a supposed iPhone 5X, with the larger display.

Those hoping for instant gratification will remain disappointed, and the stock market is still digesting the news.

It appears some members of the media imagine that Apple routinely releases news about upcoming products during the quarterly conference call with financial analysts. I don’t know where that idea comes from, but that’s not the typical Apple venue. Unfortunately, facts don’t matter when it comes to Apple.

True, one might have hoped that Apple would have released some great new 2013 products by now. As April comes to a close, the offerings have been slim. They packed more memory into the iPad by introducing a 128GB version, cut the price of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, sped up the 15-inch version, and updated the chip used in the Apple TV. But the new Apple TV is functionally identical to the older version introduced in the spring of 2012.

Making matters worse, Cook’s comments, when it came to new products, consisted of what may charitably be called smoke and mirrors. Yes, there were great products in the pipeline, but don’t expect them to arrive until the fall and throughout 2014. Otherwise, expect a barren desert, although it’s also true that new iOS and OS X versions are expected to be demonstrated at June’s WWDC.

So does that mean Apple must rush out some new products to fill the draught? Clearly that doesn’t work very well. Consider the 2012 iMac, which was plagued by shipping delays. In retrospect, Cook admitted that Apple should have waited until after the first of the year, for Mac sales really suffered in the December quarter. Had the older model, which works perfectly well, been kept in the lineup a while longer, several hundred thousand more units would probably have been sold. People who finally ordered the “2013” version would have been rewarded with relatively prompt delivery. Apple would have looked great starting the new year with a significant product introduction.

Perhaps Cook tried just too hard to show he’s a product guy to prove his mettle. But it may also be that Apple didn’t anticipate how serious the production bottlenecks would be. As a supply chain wizard, you would expect he’d know. But perhaps the situation seemed more favorable in the days preceding the iMac’s introduction. Obviously this is something that we’ll never know unless some real Apple insider reveals the behind-the-scenes by-play, but that’s the sort of competitive information that may not be known for years. Besides, it really only matters to someone who wanted to buy that iMac and had to wait.

Now when it comes to the iPad, if Apple plans major refreshes, such as a thinner and lighter full-sized iPad, and an iPad mini with Retina display, it may take a while to wrap the development process. Announcing these key products prematurely would just put Apple in the same bind as other companies that launch products long before they are ready to ship. At best, would-be customers would have to wait weeks or months to take delivery, which would simply result in a repeat of the iMac situation. There would be a quarter of poor iPad sales without a new product shipping in quantity. The critics seem to miss this point.

As to the iPhone, well perhaps the rumored 5S wouldn’t involve such a huge effort to set up the production lines, since a lot of the heavy lifting was resolved with the iPhone 5. But Apple has traditionally released a new iPhone with a new iOS version. This can be a doubly important packaging decision in an “off-year,” where the improvements to the gadget itself aren’t so major. But Apple could change every single part inside and the critics would still say it’s a minor refresh of the overall design looks the same. Then again, if Apple can resolve what Cook calls the “trade-offs” in designing a larger display, there may very well be a 5-inch iPhone, or at least 4.5 inches, in our future.

Now there are also published reports indicating that Apple’s guidance of lower profits going forward means that a cheap iPhone is in the offing for this fall. But Apple delivered that guidance for the June quarter, blaming the altered product mix for the less impressive numbers. Of course, all this means is that more people want the less profitable iPad mini, or the older iPhones.

This doesn’t mean Apple isn’t going to make a run for market share with a cheaper iPhone by fall. But it may just involve taking older parts, not dissimilar to the iPhone 4s, or today’s iPhone 5, and putting it in a less expensive package. It would be a new model, not a remnant, and if Apple can achieve proper economies of scale, a purchase price of $299, unlocked, wouldn’t be out of the question.

Some critics are simply suggesting Apple used the enhanced stock buyback scheme to placate nervous investors, which is probably true. Others suggest Apple will be concentrating more on software and services than on gadgets in the foreseeable future. But Apple has always been a platforms company. It’s about integrated hardware and software. It’s not the same as one hardware company building the device and installing someone else’s OS. But that’s something still not quite understood by some.

Also not understand is that Apple plays long-term, which means that they do not depend on the results of any single quarter or two to prove to the financial community they are successful. By staying the course despite the intense pressure, maybe Cook did the right thing after all.

In the run-up to the release of Apple’s finances for the March quarter — its second fiscal quarter — the general patter from the critics was that Apple was in big trouble. iPhone sales must be flagging. Reports from the supply chain said so, and, further, Apple must heed the wake-up call and right the ship or continue to suffer the consequences. There were even a few demands to dump Tim Cook as Apple CEO.

Despite the concerns, analyst predictions about Apple’s financial performance actually ended up within the company’s own guidance of revenue in the $41 billion to $43 billion range, with gross margins from 37.5% to 38.5%. If Apple met these modest goals, why complain?

Well, it turns out that this is pretty much what actually occurred. In the March quarter, Apple reported a record quarterly revenue of $43.6 billion and net profits of $9.5 billion, or $10.09 per diluted share. That compares to last year’s results of $39.2 billion in revenue, with a net profit of $11.6 billion, or $12.30 per diluted share. Revenue sat above the high end of Apple’s guidance, while gross margins of 37.5 percent were at the low end. This compares to margins of 47.4 percent in the comparable 2012 quarter.

The sole bad news in these results is that Apple’s profits decreased for the first time in 10 years, but the company is still clearly getting the lion’s share in the tech industry.

Despite reports of poor sales of the iPhone, Apple sold 37.4 million, compared to 35.1 million last year. iPads fared even better, with sales of 19.5 million, compared to 11.8 million in the 2012 quarter. Mac sales were reported at just under four million, a two percent decline compared to last year. But Apple substantially outperformed the PC market as a whole, and forget about the claimed 7.5 decline announced by IDC in one of its typically wrong surveys. The main reason for the slight downturn was due to reduced sales of note-books, according to Apple, which haven’t seen a major change since last fall, and the minor refresh for the MacBook Pro with Retina display hardly counts. In the conference call with financial analysts, Cook also characterized the PC market as “incredibly weak,” and said it was “certainly true” that the iPad somewhat cannibalized Mac sales. He also suggested people are lengthening their upgrade cycles, but still felt the PC space had a lot of potential left.

In a surprising response, Cook actually said that they should have delayed the introduction of the 2012 iMac.”In retrospect, yes, I sort of wish we had done it after the turn of the year,” because customers had to wait a month or two to take delivery. That seriously hurt Mac sales in the December quarter, which only inflated false Wall Street impressions that Apple was in deep trouble. Nobody probably cares, but I’ve suggested the same thing in recent commentaries.

For the current quarter, Apple predicts revenue of between $33.5 billion and $35.5 billion, with gross margins between 36 percent and 37 percent. Apple bases the lower margins on such factors as a changed product mix. Yes, these figures are below Wall Street estimates, but remember the street has been frequently wrong about Apple.

In a development expected by some, Apple’s board also announced an increase in the stock buyback program to $100 billion by the end of 2015. Inasmuch as Apple now has nearly $145 billion cash on hand, and will likely have a lot more by then, this appears to be a reasonable way to deal with all that extra money. In addition, Apple’s board declared a dividend of $3.05 per common share, payable on May 16, which represents a 15% increase.

This decision, and reporting decent sales for the March quarter, may serve to somewhat calm Wall Street’s endless jitters about Apple’s future potential. Bear in mind that these results were achieved without a single major product introduction.

Cook dropped hints, but told nothing new about upcoming gear, speaking only of “exciting new product categories” in predicting great things for the rest of the year, including “amazing new hardware, software and services.” However, Cook indicated that the major product intros will begin to arrive this fall, and continue through 2014. This presages a barren spring and summer, but nothing is certain when it comes to Apple.

Although 300 million people use iCloud, nothing was said about the ongoing problems with the service. The next version of iOS? The next Mac OS revision? I didn’t expect to hear anything about it, and the questions weren’t even asked.

Now when it comes to rumors about a cheap iPhone, Cook dropped one hint that such possibilities should be taken seriously: “We’ve made the iPhone 4 even more affordable, which has made it more attractive to first-time buyers.” That’s a model that first appeared in 2010, an eternity in the smartphone business. This may be a strong reason for Apple to justify introducing a new, spiffier model that would cater to the same market segment, but that’s just speculation. Cook also seriously downplayed the possibility of an iPhone with a larger screen anytime soon, or at least until what they perceive as “trade-offs” in display quality can be resolved.