In days gone by, when a reporter wrote a story, it was common to examine older material to get a background on the report or on previous reports that may have dealt with the same or similar subject material. On a newspaper, the reporter would examine older editions, the paper’s “morgue.” These days most of the material has been digitized for fast research.

Sure you just use Google or your chosen search engine to bone up on some background material, except that Internet research doesn’t discriminate against real or fanciful stories. But if you check a presumably reliable source, you can find a wealth of material. That assumes the publication in question doesn’t charge you a special fee to research older stories.

But some commentators don’t bother with the research. They just make things up. Once someone else picks up the original false story, the rumors can spread quickly.

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So consider the possible logic of the situation. Palm hires a former Apple hardware executive, John Rubinstein, to head the company. Not long thereafter, Palm releases a new line of smartphones featuring the Web OS, but it’s too little and too late. The iPhone has turned the market on its head, and it would take several years before one company, Samsung, emerged as a worthy competitor.

HP, hoping to make a dent in the mobile space, bought Palm, and released the TouchPad tablet in 2011. The marketplace said no, so HP killed the product, and staged a fire sale. At $99, HP cleared the stock quickly, but it was too late for the WebOS. Rubinstein split from HP (he is currently a member of Amazon’s board), and, still seeking a strategy, HP has since sold off the remnants of WebOS and the Palm team to LG.

If anyone expected Rubinstein to make magic at Palm, they were dead wrong. There was no silk purse in that sow’s ear. But I’m only getting started.

Just this week, the news arrived that J.C. Penney, the venerable retailer, is suffering big time. Founded in 1902 by one James Cash Penney, the midrange retailer had long been seeking a path to relevance in the 21st century, so they hired Ron Johnson, Apple’s retail chief, in 2011. Flush with the very unexpected success of The Apple Store, Johnson was seen as a superstar retail executive who could make miracles.

But his reign at JCP has been a case of struggling to find a workable strategy, any strategy. In reporting a net loss of $552 million for the last financial quarter, Johnson admits he “made some big mistakes” in trying to make the company a relevant competitor. Indeed, it seems JCP has had so many makeovers, it’s hard to figure out just why anyone should bother shopping there. Whether it was special discounts, everyday discounts, coupons, stores within stores, or what-not, it didn’t seem to matter. The company continued to hemorrhage cash, and that could end up creating big troubles by summer unless Johnson can somehow turn the huge ship around.

You wonder in retrospect how JCP might have fared had they just left well enough alone, and allowed the retailer to just stumble along, making minor course corrections along the way. That, in fact, may have been a better strategy for Johnson, although I do not pretend to know anything about running department stores. I’d have enough trouble, for example, distinguishing Macy’s from Dillard’s without the branding. It’s very possible Johnson grew overconfident because of his huge success at Apple and came to believe he could walk on water.

But it’s one thing to build a retail chain from scratch without any baggage and, in fact, without any expectations from customers or the financial community. It’s also true that Johnson didn’t create The Apple Store all by himself. It was a highly collaborative effort, with heavy participation from the late Steve Jobs.

At JCP, Johnson had to deal with an entrenched bureaucracy and hundreds and hundreds of existing stores that would be expensive to renovate. Even after renovation, there were tens of thousands of employees and existing relationships with suppliers to deal with. Making miracles was not something that could possibly occur overnight, although it’s possible Johnson and JCP’s board mistakenly felt otherwise.

Don’t forget that Steve Jobs didn’t save Apple from ruin in days or weeks. It took years and lots of bloodletting to set things right. Jobs arrived at Apple in 1997. The first iMac was introduced in 1998. OS X and the iPod arrived in 2001, the iPhone in 2007, and the iPad in 2010.

And these days, just reporting record profits isn’t enough for Apple. Even though it has traditionally taken a few years to overturn a product segment in the face of strong criticism from the media and financial community, the skeptics are now expecting Apple to start revolutions each and every year. Apple, however, continues to operate by a singular standard that isn’t based on what you or I expect or hope will happen.

With JCP, and even with Palm, it’s clear that just hiring an executive with a stellar reputation for performance comes with no guarantees. But that’s not just true for former Apple executives. Take a look at HP, which hired Meg Whitman as CEO, no doubt, in part, because of her success in building eBay. But running an online retailer/auction house is quite different than managing a multinational corporation that builds tech gear. Today, HP’s best strategy appears to involve making products that may or may not have been successful for other companies, such as plans to release a line up of tablets running Android. And it’s not as if those tablets have anything about them that distinguishes them from dozens of other products from other companies beyond the HP brand name. Is that a strategy?

Meantime, I do hope that Johnson and his team at JCP can find a way to save the company. I’d hate to see yet another retail chain falter and perhaps go out of business. Consider all the employees who will lose their jobs. Consider the original vision of founder James Cash Penney, which nobody remembers anyway.

So a certain Wall Street trader released a bogus report Tuesday afternoon claiming Apple shareholders were prepared to approve a stock split at Wednesday’s meeting. As you might expect, it never happened, it wasn’t going to happen. But the stock price soared for a bit, which likely gave the trader in question a decent profit, but it’s not likely he’ll face any consequences for pulling that stunt.

In any case, not much of significance actually occurred at the shareholder’s meeting. With a certain measure off the table after last week’s court action, the rest of the proceedings were predictably boring for anyone who doesn’t own Apple’s stock.

And so, perhaps because nothing changed, Apple’s stock price drifted somewhat lower during Wednesday’s trading day, even though the market, overall, soared over positive economic news.

Not much of note came out of the question and answer session with CEO Tim Cook either. He said he realized shareholders were disappointed over the stock price, but said that they should look at the long term first, and revenue and profits next. All right, nothing surprising there. He also said that Apple was working on “new categories” of products, but, as usual, that was as far as the statement went. Whether Apple means a smart TV set, or a smartwatch, or both or neither, can only be guessed.

In response to a question about Apple placing second best compared to Android in market share, Cook replied that “success is not making the most.” And certainly, with 69% of handset industry profits last year, he has a point in making that argument. Unfortunately, far too many members of the media, who should know better, keep demanding that Apple enter this or that product space, or add new iPhone or iPad models to better compete with all the varieties the competition offers. Somehow these so-called journalists don’t realize that having too many models may actually dilute the prospects for success. It certainly confuses customers, who wonder which of twelve dozen similar and not-so-similar models should be considered. If you want an iPhone, choose among three, pick the storage you want, select the carrier, buy and enjoy.

The only other announcement of note was that Apple’s plans to move to the new spaceship-style campus was delayed slightly until some time in 2016, and that the company is “seriously considering” returning more cash to shareholders.

Otherwise, the situation on the Apple front is surprisingly quiet so far this year, although the media has been polluted with stories about whether or not the company is in deep trouble and suffering badly compared to Samsung in the mobile platform business. Aside from that slight MacBook Pro refresh on February 13, which surprisingly merited a press release, there’s no indication when Apple will deliver the big product introductions.

Will there, for example, be another set of iPad upgrades this spring, or, having taken care of business last October, will Apple wait until the fall to deliver the next round of upgrades? Will there soon be an iPad mini with Retina display, or are the prices of LCD panels and accompanying components still too high? What about the next iPhone? Will there be a cheaper version? Will Apple wait until September once again, or will it happen by summer? If the latter, you’d expect iOS 7 to be introduced in the next few weeks, ahead of the developer’s conference. The same ought to be true for the next revision of OS X, assuming Apple will continue to follow an annual release schedule.

When it comes to hardware, you have to wonder whether Apple hopes to soon install a Retina display in the MacBook Air, or will there be a separate, costlier lineup with that enhancement? It all depends on how quickly Apple can bring down the cost of raw materials, which means you shouldn’t expect an iMac with Retina display for a while. Indeed, since that model has already had a major upgrade, any changes this year would likely be confined to the usual performance refreshes.

When it comes to the Mac Pro workstation, I’ll accept Tim Cook’s statement last year, in a letter to a Mac user, that there will be an upgrade this year. What form it’ll take is still open to argument, but I’d think that Apple will use the time to streamline the design, making it not just smaller but a whole lot lighter. I expect Apple could incorporate the very same expansion capabilities in a box half the size, and half the weight. Maybe it would have to be thin and long, or square overall, but such a configuration ought to work. The Mac Pro is largely based on an aging form factor, the tower, which has been used in the PC business for ages, and it’s time for something better.

And, no, I do not expect Apple to ditch the optical drive on a Mac Pro, although it may be an option on the next model. Yes, I understand that Apple wants to wean us from optical drives, but there have to be limits, and I expect Apple will demonstrate a common sense approach with this model.

So a story appeared this week claiming that Apple’s U.S. Mac sales rose 31% for the month of January as compared to last year. Since the report came from the NDP Group, which takes direct surveys of dealers, you can believe it. A key reason is most likely that Mac users have begun to receive the 2012 iMacs they ordered last year. At the same time, you still have to wait several weeks to get one when you place an order, unless you happen upon a dealer who has the exact model you want in stock.

Indeed, Apple CEO Tim Cook has already stated that Apple expects iMac supplies to be constrained through much of the quarter due to the computer’s unique screen lamination scheme. Apple has a habit of implementing new and complex construction techniques when introducing new products, and it is normal for supplies to be tight for a while. The iPad mini only recently earned the “In Stock” label at Apple’s online store in the U.S., and the iPhone 5 was constrained through much of the December quarter, which put the lie to stories that people weren’t as interested in buying a new iPhone as they used to be. Indeed, the next closest competitor, the Samsung Galaxy S III, came in third in worldwide sales.

Despite the good news on the Mac sales front from NPD, industry analyst Gene Munster, of Piper Jaffray, concludes that Apple will still move five percent fewer Macs for the quarter than last year. In a published report, Munster points out that international sales have become more and more significant to Apple’s bottom line, which means, I suppose, that he expects sales to decline overseas. That seems to reverse the recent trend, so it’s not as if it makes a whole lot of sense. Assuming Apple gets control of iMac shipments, you’d expect sales to increase worldwide. Munster’s assumptions don’t seem to add up, but what do I know?

At the same time, Munster states that iPad sales in the U.S. had increased by 3% in January compared to the previous year. That’s not a huge change, but it also reverses the trend of declining sales for Apple’s iconic music player, and that would actually turn out to be a positive development even if it doesn’t boost Apple’s revenues by very much. The iPods are too cheap, I suppose, to make a difference, but the same can be said for the $99 Apple TV.

However, it has become common in the media these days to portray Apple as somehow beleaguered, or at the very least rapidly losing steam against the increasing competition. In recent days, Apple’s current TV spots have been judged against Samsung’s and been found lacking. I disagree. Aside from being utterly boring, I find it curious that the color balance of the Samsung TV spots seems off somehow. Colors are muted, almost as if the ads were filmed in cloudy surroundings, and nobody bothered to correct the image before it was released. Or maybe that’s part of the plan, whatever it is.

Regardless, I still wonder how many people are actually buying Samsung products, considering the company’s profits were far less than Apple, and revenues were somewhat lower. It’s also true that Samsung’s product repertoire is far more extensive. The mobile division is just a small part of the picture. There are TVs, appliances, chips and a lot more.

Yet Apple was regarded as a failure for missing possibly overestimated revenue and profit targets devised by some financial analysts, yet Samsung was highly praised for doing worse. As I’ve said in the past, we do indeed live in a Bizarro world where down is up, and something that is inferior is really better. No wonder Apple can’t catch a break. Indeed, the only possible good news about Apple this week is the rumor of a possible stock split at Wednesday’s shareholder meeting. Of course, such a move doesn’t actually make Apple a more valuable company, but it has the advantage of making the stock price cheaper, and conveying a positive image, which might attract more investors. At the same time, this rumor may have simply been spread by a fund manager to boost the price of Apple’s stock and thus increase the value of his holdings.

But, as I’ve said in the past, I make no effort to find logic in the inconsistencies of Wall Street. If I were into wild speculation, I’d rather consider spending a few dollars at the gambling tables in Las Vegas. Since I limit my budget to $20 per visit, I know that I’m not going to suffer very much from the experience.

In any case, I suppose it would be more productive to predict what products Apple will release over the next few months. There are a few clues, and you can certainly expect the usual product refreshes, and perhaps a couple of surprises along the way. But too much about Apple is being revealed across the supply chain these days, so keeping real secrets for very long is becoming increasingly difficult. It may not be what Apple wants, but that’s the way it is.