Just when you thought that Apple’s legal team would be working overtime for many years to deal with intellectual property lawsuits involving a number of tech companies and patent trolls, it was announced over the weekend that HTC was no longer on the list.

The Apple/HTC patent wars have been going on since 2010, and HTC has not done so well. In 2011, the International Trade Commission ruled against HTC over a skirmish involving Apple’s “data detectors” patent. HTC, despite being on the losing side, vowed to continue to fight Apple.

Clearly Apple was the driver in the solution, announcing: “HTC and Apple have reached a global settlement that includes the dismissal of all current lawsuits and a ten-year license agreement. The license extends to current and future patents held by both parties. The terms of the settlement are confidential.”

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When asked why Apple’s iconic gear isn’t assembled in the U.S., Tim Cook has pointed out that some of the components are actually built in America. In his recent interview at the AllThingsD Conference, Cook explained that “The glass on your iPhone is made in a plant in Kentucky.” He also said that “the engine [processor] for the iPad and iPhone are built in the U.S. in Austin.”

Today, however, such parts are shipped to Asia, where they are assembled in sprawling factories run by such companies as Foxconn. The assembled gear is then shipped around the world to Apple Stores, dealers and distributors. But things may be changing, particularly in China, where working conditions for factory workers are reportedly being improved, and salaries are regularly boosted. There could come a time when the cost of labor, added to the cost of shipping the merchandise around the world, may make it more sensible to build your next iPhone, iPad or new Mac in the U.S. or another country closer to the point of sale.

Even after you consider the cost of labor, there is also the question about assembling the tool and die facilities to allow a factory to support the complicated machining process of Apple’s products. Cook has also said that, what they can do in China in a few weeks, may take months to accomplish here. In that respect, the Asian factories appear to have an edge over the U.S. alternative, at least for now.

But there’s also a published report that Foxconn is actually scouting potential sites for manufacturing facilities in the U.S. They are supposedly looking at locations in Detroit and Los Angeles. Unfortunately, that story is based on a published report in DigiTimes, which is not known for reliability or consistency. So it may just be yet another unfounded rumor.

If true, however, it doesn’t mean your next iPhone will have a “Made in U.S.A.” label on it. That’s because Foxconn would evidently focus on building LCD television sets first, which are evidently far easier to manufacture and don’t require exotic machining facilities. I suppose there’s always the hope that such move will pave the way for more complex gear to be assembled later on.

But this wouldn’t be the first time Foxconn has moved beyond Asia. They have a plant in Brazil that assembles iPads, predominately for the home market. Foxconn also has plants in Europe, India, Japan, Malaysia and Mexico.

Besides, even if Apple did assemble products in America, that doesn’t mean all the parts were also made in this country. With a worldwide supply chain, individual components are sourced from a variety of locations. And that’s nothing new or unusual either. The traditional American-made auto — and those made in this country by foreign manufacturers, such as Honda, Hyundai and Toyota — generally have, at best, roughly 80% domestic content. The rest of the parts are built somewhere else.

It may also be that Apple is feeding this story because of the ongoing criticism about their decision to move all their production offshore, which actually started in the late 1990s, after Steve Jobs became CEO and hired Tim Cook to manage operations. Apple is not alone in seeking cheap labor around the world to keep prices competitive, and profit margins as high as possible.

As much as Apple gets attacked over building product in Asia, Foxconn also assembles gear for loads of companies, from PC makers, to TV set manufacturers. These include Amazon’s Kindle, the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and loads of other well-known products. So it’s hardly fair to blame Apple for a practice that their competitors are following with equal dedication. Except for the fact that, when there were reports about poor working conditions, suicides and other issues at Foxconn, Apple bore the brunt of the blame. Why not blame HP, or Dell, or even Microsoft, since they are no less guilty of using the same factories for their own products?

More to the point, as much as Americans may prefer that Apple and other tech companies keep all or most of their production in the U.S., how much extra do you want to pay for the privilege? Would you expect these companies to reduce profit margins in order to expand American production? That clearly isn’t going to happen.

But as the people of China become more prosperous, as the traditional middle class grows, there will continue to be demands for higher pay. That means the cost of building gear in factories run by Foxconn and other companies will increase. I suppose they can compensate by adding more automated production methods, more robotic assembly systems. This way, they get extra bang for the buck and remain competitive.

For now, though, even though I realize some of you don’t like Apple’s manufacturing decisions, it’s not as if you can go elsewhere. Very likely pretty much all of the potential competing products on your shopping list will also be assembled in the very same plant, or a similar one in Asia.

So let’s see here: Apple reports record sales and profits for the September quarter. The numbers came real close to financial analyst estimates. But Apple’s stock price took a dive because iPad sales didn’t quite match up to expectations, to the tune of one to two million units.

The basis for those estimates? Well, a guess is a guess, and if a guess is wrong, whom do you blame? Well Wall Street clearly blamed the company, not the guessers. But that’s nothing new.

Now in the wake of Apple’s recent corporate changes, there are suggestions from scattered parts of the media that Apple is in deep trouble. Maybe Tim Cook was flailing about for a solution to software issues, and the perceived dated interface of iOS and OS X. Perhaps he was unwilling to accept dissension in his ranks, an honest discussion and pros and cons. Or maybe he’s hoping the new leadership will collectively deliver a compelling vision for Apple’s future.

While I don’t pretend to know any of these answers, there have been some questions about the selection of design guru Jonathan Ive to handle Human Interface. This is said to be the key to making iOS and OS X simple and elegant. Well, maybe there were a few too many flourishes when outgoing iOS chief Scott Forstall had his way, though it has also been reported that Steve Jobs approved the skeuomorphic excesses that have polarized Apple fans, not to mention critics who feel that you don’t need the appearance of stitched leather to embellish the edges of the Calendar app.

Few would dare deny Ive’s huge talent. But he’s been a hardware person all these years, designing iMacs, MacBooks, iPods, iPhones, iPads, and so forth and so on. How is he qualified to manage software too? What gives him the right?

Of course, Steve Jobs wasn’t an engineer or a product designer. His ideas were brilliant, but he still needed skilled professionals to carry out his wishes, but he was also capable of selecting the right people for the right jobs, and he was also tolerant of excessive behavior from some members of his team.

But where are these concerns coming from. Why are people becoming skeptical of Apple’s future prospects? Why are we reading articles claiming that Apple has passed its peak, and it’s all downhill from here?

Well, one key factor is the bad publicity that arose out of the so-called Mapgate issue, which I’m sure most of you have heard about, perhaps a little too often. Did Apple make a huge error deciding to drop Google and build their own mapping service? How does Apple have the temerity to believe they can rush together a replacement for Google Maps within months, or perhaps a year or two?

Certainly, Scott Forstall’s presentation of Maps during the last WWDC raised expectations real high. All the stuff that Google hadn’t brought to the iOS would be there, such as turn-by-turn navigation. You want to go somewhere, Siri would tell you how. Simple as that.

Well, when iOS 6 and the iPhone 5 arrived, we all learned that mapping isn’t so simple. There were serious bugs and maybe Apple should have cooked Maps a little longer before letting it out in the wild. I suppose it could have been released in a future iOS 6 maintenance update, when Apple’s team was satisfied it was ready for prime time.

Unlike typical software bugs, it was all too easy to demonstrate the problems. Just post a screen shot depicting a landmark in the wrong state or the wrong country, or a melting bridge. It became a joke, and Apple is a real serious company.

Before long, CEO Tim Cook issued that public apology, and the story goes that Forstall’s alleged refusal to sign that statement helped push him out. Maybe it was the straw that broke the camel’s back, or perhaps it his departure was already in the works.

Regardless, it may have been better for Apple to follow the same routine used with Siri and call it, rightly, a public beta. Invite iOS users to report problems, and help make Maps the greatest mapping service on the planet. Sounds good to me.

But just because Apple blew the marketing of Maps, or got it out a little prematurely, doesn’t mean the company has lots its edge. A mistake of this sort doesn’t have to be fatal, and Apple did take control of the problem soon enough to slow the bad publicity train to a crawl. Even Consumer Reports, no friend of Apple, didn’t make a big deal about the problems.

Don’t forget Antennagate, and how Apple had to deal with the fallout of perceived defects with the iPhone 4 and its new-fangled antenna system. Only it was a matter of perception rather than reality. It also happened while Steve Jobs was at the helm, so it’s not Tim Cook’s failure. Screwing up the PR message is nothing new. When first apprised of the problem, Jobs told an iPhone 4 user to just hold it differently. Maybe he was up real late that night, and didn’t have the patience to be cordial.

Now there may be one significant issue looming, which is the fact that the iPhone 5 remains seriously backordered as the holiday season approaches. That could hurt sales this quarter if reported production problems aren’t quickly overcome.

I suppose if you want to believe Apple has become too large to be efficient or creative, or is facing a long-term decline, feel free. That doesn’t make it true. Besides, consider how many times Apple has been declared dead and buried over the years. Sure they came close once, but that was a long time ago, and there’s little evidence to indicate they’re in trouble now, even if some alleged industry analysts want to believe otherwise.

Apple is no stranger to switching processor architectures. Back in 1994, Macs were moved from the Motorola 680×0 family to the PowerPC. In theory, your Mac should have run a whole lot faster, but as a practical matter, it took a while for apps to be redone for the new processor. So you were stuck with an emulator that actually made your existing software run somewhat slower, at least until the PowerPC got fast enough to compensate.

Nine years later, Apple introduced what was meant to be the most powerful PowerPC chip ever, from IBM, the G5. Yes, it was fast enough, but the chip’s life cycle was short. Unfortunately, while very powerful, it ran awfully hot, and sucked lots of current. Some of the faster Power Mac G5 workstations even required liquid cooling to allow the system to run at a normal temperature, and forget about being able to put one of this chips in a note-book.

I recall one quote from Steve Jobs at the time, saying Apple was satisfied with the direction of the G5, but they always wanted options. They chose one in 2005, when the move to Intel was announced. As processor transitions went, it was fairly painless. The first Intel based Macs arrived in January of 2006, and by fall, all Macs were powered by Intel.

Developers took longer to make the move to Intel. In the meantime, Apple offered a translation utility, Rosetta, which allowed your Mac to run the older software with decent performance. Of course some apps never made the Intel transition, or were forced to go there kicking and screaming when Rosetta was removed from the Mac OS beginning in 2011, with OS 10.7 Lion.

Nowadays, the Mac is a minority player in the Apple universe. Yes, they still buy chips from Intel, but most Apple products are powered by use custom designed chips based on the ARM architecture. So it’s natural to wonder whether, as OS X and the iOS become more and more alike, Macs will eventually run on an ARM processor as well.

So is Apple really suffering from a seven-year-itch when it comes to Mac processors? Well, it appears the rumors are showing up all over again about the possibility. On the surface, using ARM on a Mac appears to make sense. Apple is already building their own designs on that architecture. Apple likes to integrate product lines as much as possible, and the gradual iOS-ification of OS X would certainly create a situation where using the same chips makes sense. It would also bring production costs down, since the speediest Intel chips are quite expensive.

But those of you who survived the last two processor transitions no doubt realize it’s easier said than done. First and foremost, Apple needs to build a chip for the Mac that is equal or superior to those from Intel. Sure, ARM is more power efficient, but what about raw CPU power? How would customers feel about buying a new Mac that’s slower than the model it replaced?

Right now, ARM is just moving to 64-bit, which is necessary to allow your new Mac to continue to use 32GB or 64GB of memory. The integrated graphics hardware seems far more promising than Intel’s. Certainly the benchmarks of the fourth generation iPad demonstrate great potential, but how would that scale to a regular Mac?

Today’s best Intel chips offer not just multicore support, but such advanced features as Hyper-Threading, which can make, say, four cores act like eight, and Turbo Boost, where an individual core can run at a faster clock speed when the need arises. These and other processor enhancements deliver great performance on today’s Macs. How long will it take ARM licensees, particularly Apple, to come up with similar tricks or even better schemes?

Even assuming a future Apple chip, say an A7 or an A8, can match or beat Intel in benchmarks, there are other key issues that Apple will need to resolve. The larger issue is x86 emulation, so until Mac apps are rebuilt to support ARM, an equivalent to Rosetta, the switchover could not occur. Now it may be possible to even build emulation on the chip itself, to reduce the performance drag.

There is also the question of virtual machines. One of the big plusses in Apple’s move to Intel was the fact that you could run Windows in a native environment under Boot Camp, and on a high performance virtual machine using apps from such companies as Parallels and VMWare. Up till Macs had Intel Inside, Windows emulation was pathetic. These days, even the virtual machine is fast enough that many of you don’t need the real thing. So if Apple moves to ARM, what happens then?

In the end, Apple might make the move to ARM on a Mac. But it won’t happen soon, despite the suggestions in some of those online commentaries.