So the media still appears to believe that Apple CEO Tim Cook was extremely forthcoming in his recent interviews for Bloomberg and NBC News, and that you are learning all sorts of new things about him and Apple’s future direction. Or maybe not!

I watched the NBC interview, and read every word of the Bloomberg piece. It’s clear to me that everything Cook said was carefully rehearsed, and no doubt developed to provide the maximum possible buzz in the media. There was very little information that was in any way new. Most of it amounted to nothing more than a retread of the things we already knew based on Apple’s product releases and previous statements attributed to Cook and other Apple executives.

Think about the “revelation” that Apple was investing $100 to bring Mac manufacturing to the U.S. Now you’ve probably also noticed that some of the new iMacs are labeled as assembled in the U.S., which is something Apple cannot promise without meeting a very complicated set of regulations about how much of the product is built in this country.

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So Apple’s stock price began to rise somewhat Thursday after lengthy interviews with Tim Cook were published. I suppose his comments offered a measure of sanity to the crazy world of Wall Street, where rumors and misunderstood stories are enough to cause a company’s stock price to dive.

As you might expect, despite the length and breadth of those interviews, a lot of what Cook said is what you’d expect him to say, nothing more and nothing less. His messages were carefully rehearsed, with just enough juicy tidbits to keep Apple’s name front and center in the tech and mainstream media.

So you know, for example, that Apple plans to build at least some Macs in the U.S. in 2013, and invest some $100 million dollars in making that happen. It’s not that glass and chips aren’t fabricated in this country already, but Apple has been singled out by critics for building their tech gadgets in Asia. In response, Cook has claimed that it’s not the lower salaries that prevents domestic manufacturing, but having a sufficient supply of skilled production engineers, and building the sophisticated equipment required to assemble an iPhone, an iPad or an iMac.

There’s even a separate report that Foxconn, Apple’s main manufacturing partner in Asia, actually has plans to build a plant in the U.S., so you wonder if that’s where at least some of Apple’s investment might go, since Apple won’t be assembling this unmentioned Mac themselves.

But I don’t think it’s hard to guess which Mac is involved. After all, Cook has already promised a replacement for the aging Mac Pro. Even if the new Mac workstation is thinner and lighter than the current model, the complex manufacturing techniques Apple has pioneered shouldn’t be required. There is, for example, no display or hard-to-build casings to consider in the mix. Because of the high average selling price of a Mac Pro, Apple doesn’t have to be concerned about a somewhat higher cost of production and how it might hurt profit margins.

As a matter of fact, sales of the 2013 Mac Pro — or whatever it’s going to be called — are likely to be fairly high in the scheme of things based on pent-up demand. But understand that Cook hasn’t said which Mac is going to be produced in the U.S. It’s always possible production will be limited to custom versions of other Macs, but saying something is assembled in the U.S. is a carefully regulated step, and Apple would have to make sure that the right percentage of domestic content and assembly is included. So we’ll see.

The other tantalizing statement comes in a short paragraph about TVs. In the wake of the statements from Steve Jobs quoted in the authorized biography of Apple’s late co-founder, expectations grew that an Apple branded TV might be coming soon. There are still rumors afoot, but they’re now all about 2013.

Cook only fueled the fires of anticipation when he said: “When I go into my living room and turn on the TV, I feel like I have gone backwards in time by 20 to 30 years. It’s an area of intense interest. I can’t say more than that.”

But he already said a lot, except that it’s still not altogether clear whether Apple will build the TV set, license technology for premium lines built by existing TV makers, or just make a souped up Apple TV set top box.

Here’s the deal: The TV market is highly saturated, and there are loads of good to excellent models already at various price points. Apple’s main advantage would be to the interface, and Apple doesn’t have to build the whole set to provide that interface, just as they don’t have to build cars to have an Apple-inspired interface on some future models. Sure, much of what you see when you watch your TV can be accomplished with an Apple TV. But the actual set up routine for most sets tends to be more complicated than it has to be due to the inferior, unwieldy interfaces. I’m sure many of you hardly notice those set up screens, except maybe when installing a new set and running it for the first time. There are loads of options to spruce up the picture, but those options are barely noticed, and thus you aren’t getting the best those sets can deliver.

Another interesting comment to come from these interviews is the claim that the recent executive shakeup, in which VP Scott Forstall was benched, was all done in the name of “collaboration.” Cook remarked: “You have to be A-plus at collaboration. And so the changes that we made get us to a whole new level of collaboration. We’ve got services all in one place, and the guy that’s running that has incredible skills in services, has an incredible track record, and I’m confident will do fantastic things.”

He’s talking about Jonathan Ive’s expanded duties, and the statement makes it quite clear that Cook felt Forstall didn’t play well with others, among other issues, and that’s why he’s no longer part of the team. And, by the way, Maps continues to get better, but I think we knew that already.

So once again Apple’s stock price was down in the dumps Wednesday, to the tune of some 6.4%, while the overall stock market price increased. What could possibly have gone wrong? Is it possible Apple’s days in the sun are coming to a close, that people aren’t buying iPhones, iPads and Macs in such great numbers anymore? Are they choosing Windows 8 and the Surface tablet instead? Or perhaps a Nokia Lumia 920, the Windows 8 flagship smartphone?

No, that’s not it. Indeed, it appears that Windows 8 PCs aren’t selling all that well, and you will have to travel a long way to find anyone who owns a Surface RT tablet. So what’s going on here?

I don’t claim to be a stock market expert, or to know much of anything about why prices go up or down in huge spurts other than some evidence of a major change in a company’s prospects. Or the fear of change. You almost think that Wall Street investors might have forgotten to take their antidepressants when they sold off their Apple stock.

At the very least, those who couldn’t afford upwards of $600 per share might get a bargain at the current prices, at least until the street gets a spine, a dose of reality, or some combination of the two.

According to published reports citing industry analyst Gene Munster, of Piper Jaffray, as a source, a big part of the stock’s decline was due to misinterpreting a story about iPhone sales in DigiTimes. Seems investors freaked over a story about an expected 20% quarter-to-quarter decline in Apple’s orders for parts in the March quarter. Evidently the investors assumed that meant that sales were expected to decline big time too, but Munster says that figure is nothing unusual for the quarter following the one in which a major product launch occurs. Indeed, expectations are still high for huge iPhone 5 sales next quarter too.

I suppose I could be a little snarky and suggest that some of these investors should maybe take a few pills, and get some reading lessons, so they don’t make serious financial decisions based on flimsy evidence, or no evidence at all. Besides, it’s not as if DigiTimes is considered to be the most reliable source for information about the tech industry.

I think of that unfounded rumor a while back, that Apple had discharged most of the team developing the Logic audio production suite. Within days, the Apple official in charge of that division assured an Apple customer that they are busy working on the next version. Just because something is published about Apple doesn’t mean it’s true. Consider the source of the story, and whether the publication in which it appears has a good track record for publishing accurate information. Would that Wall Street would pay closer attention to such niceties before dumping a company’s stock.

I suppose the fact that Apple’s stock price has fallen by a fair amount in recent weeks may have already made investors more sensitive than usual to perceptions or expectations of bad news. Right now, it does appear that iPhone and iPad sales are excellent, and that the Mac will be roughly even with last year more or less. I suppose the iMac backorder situation isn’t going to help, but it may mean a lot for the March quarter, as shipments begin to catch up with orders.

When it comes to the iPhone 5, production has mostly caught up with demand. You should be able to get the color and configuration you want supporting your favorite wireless carrier almost immediately, or perhaps with a delay of no more than a few days. There’s still a one-week wait for the iPad mini, and that situation may not settle down till the end of the year, which might impact sales to some degree. But that won’t stop you from buying a fourth generation iPad, of course.

With high demand for their products, it hardly makes sense for the stock market to want to dump on Apple. After all, sales prospects appear to be very favorable for 2013, according to industry analysts, and there’s even a report that Apple will control at least 50% of the tablet market through 2016. And you know how Apple is all about exceeding expectations.

Meantime, iTunes 11, a major upgrade, seems to have had a pretty successful debut, though some complain about the lost of cherished features, such as the ability to find duplicate tracks. But it has also been reported that Apple plans to restore that feature and repair others in a bug fix update soon.

When it comes to Maps, I haven’t heard too many complaints lately. Many of more serious bugs that plagued the service in October have been largely eradicated. Sure, it may take months or years of playing catch up with Google before Apple can possibly achieve rough parity. Besides, it doesn’t seem as if Apple’s sales were hurt in any noticeable way because of Mapgate. And maybe Apple learned a lesson not to let something like that happen anytime soon.

As for Wall Street, one hopes that, in a few days, sanity will return. Or maybe not.

Curious that the death of Apple has been forecast for a couple of decades now. Sure, Apple got real close once, with a near-death experience in the 1990s. It has been reported that Apple was mere months away from going belly up. But that was long ago and far away, and it’s impossible to believe that Apple is confronting any such danger now.

Sure, the landscape has seriously changed. Despite the recent drop in the stock price, Apple remains one huge company when market cap is considered, and sales and profits remain at record levels. But every little potential sales blip is being examined with a microscope for the slightest evidence that we no longer care about Macs, iPhones, or iPads. All right, sales of the iPod are going down and down, but the functions of that product have been subsumed by the iPhone and iPad. Other than the iPod touch, most customers seek a cheap music player without the frills, but want to remain in the Apple ecosystem.

It’s easy to say that Apple is going at things in the wrong way, claiming that the alleged walled garden actually restricts customer choice. You are locked into a single place with which to buy apps on your iPhone or iPad, and the Mac isn’t Windows, although you can easily run Windows on a Mac without going through a lot of stress. But when it comes to upgrading a Mac, as you know, the possibilities are slim. You can upgrade RAM on some, not on others, and replacing hard drives on anything but a Mac Pro — which is long due for a major refresh — is a seriously difficult chore. And don’t forget those models with Flash drives that are soldered directly to the logic board.

Why is Apple so user hostile?

Of course, all this is in keeping with the philosophy of the Mac, that it’s a personal computing appliance, not something for PC power users to take apart and replace everything inside. In theory, you want to get work done, not fiddle with your system, which is hardly a productive thing to do.

Yes, you can quibble with some of Apple’s decisions, but those decisions don’t seem to be hurting sales. Where PCs aren’t doing so well, even with Windows 8, it appears that Mac sales are pretty consistent, although don’t expect much or any growth this quarter. The late arrival and limited availability of the 2012 iMac is a key factor. But that doesn’t mean there’s no potential for Macs. Once Apple boosts production to meet demand, things are apt to get better. But Windows PCs are readily available, and it doesn’t seem that customers are flocking to that silly procession of swivel and reversible touchscreens that accompanied the release of Windows 8.

The other argument has it that Apple can’t continue to boost sales of the iPhone forever, and that Samsung is already beating Apple in the number of smartphones sold. True enough, though Apple seems to get higher profits, at least for now. But where is it written that a company must be number one in order to succeed? If that’s the case, why have we been putting up with Macs all these years? It was never number one, not even during Apple’s formative years.

With iPhones, and with iPads for that matter, it’s all about consistent growth in profits and sales. If another company’s products grow faster, so be it. Apple only suffers when revenue is down, and that hasn’t been a factor in years, despite the wishes and hopes by critics that it’s going to happen any day now.

There’s also the silly assumption that Apple has to launch a revolutionary product every single year. Since 1984, the defining Apple products have been Macs, iPads, iPhones and iPads. Other product lines have come and gone. That’s pretty good for 28 years, but hardly an annual revolution, and the jury is still out about the ultimate fate of Apple’s current hobby, Apple TV. And, yes, I know about the LaserWriter and the desktop publishing revolution, but it wasn’t long before you could buy printers of equal or better quality from other manufacturers.

Remember, too, that in today’s accelerated timeline, the iPad, which debuted in 2010, arrived three years after the iPhone. If Apple keeps to that schedule, the next trendsetting product is possibly due next year, and some suggest it’ll be an Apple connected TV of some sort. Or maybe something that hasn’t been predicted by the rumor sites.

Sure, if Apple’s sales flatten overall going forward, and years pass with nothing more than product refreshes, I suppose there will be legitimate reason to believe the gravy train has gone away. Right now, though, except for alleged Wall Street analysts who try to talk Apple’s stock price down — no doubt earning huge profits in the bargain — there’s no real evidence the company is on the skids, or even close.

There’s also the curious contradiction of some people saying, as the result of the surprise fall refresh of the standard iPad, that Apple is releasing new products too quickly, while others maintain Apple isn’t refreshing them fast enough. Need I go on?