More and more, I see nonsensical articles from alleged tech pundits catching fire online. These hacks make outrageous comments, somehow imagining they are being relevant, or at least controversial enough to attract attention. More often than not, they will regurgitate some myths about a company, often Apple Inc., and expand upon them as if they were true.

So there’s an article from a certain highly confused writer — and there will be no link here — in which he refers to Apple is delivering a “rabbit hold of enforced computing” in explaining why Microsoft isn’t betting the farm on Windows 8. He has succumbed to the illusion that Apple’s so-called walled garden restricts what people can do on their Macs, even though he seems to be confusing OS X with the iOS. Even then, he’s very much off base.

Sure, Apple curates the software you buy in the App Store. But that doesn’t mean that there are any significant restrictions that impact most of you. For the few who want to run a handful of apps that Apple wouldn’t allow, there’s always jailbreaking. In the scheme of things, I suppose it would be nice to have a back door to running unapproved apps, but since Apple continues to enrich the platform, I don’t feel that I’m somehow restricted. That the vast majority of iPhone and iPad users love their machines argues against the illusion that they are being forced to do things they don’t want to do, and not do things they want to do. Besides, having the apps examined before approval helps prevent malware from seeping through, and the apps at least have to meet a minimum threshold of usefulness.

Unfortunately, the alleged pundit in question doesn’t seem to understand the difference between desktop and mobile computing platforms (and maybe Microsoft doesn’t either). That’s the reason for confusing the structure of the iOS with OS X.

Yes, OS 10.8 will deliver a Gatekeeper feature, which can, in theory, limit the apps you run on a Mac. But there are three options, one of which allows you to run anything, just as you do now. And a context menu option lets you bypass even the most severe restriction, which is to limit yourself strictly to apps you get from the Mac App Store. Regardless, once an app launches the first time, there are no further impediments to using it on your Mac. More to the point, there are loads of third-party utilities that allow you to customize your Mac extensively, by making changes in the Unix core. Sure, some of those changes may cause you trouble, but those utilities usually have a restore feature to fix the damage. If you use Terminal directly, though, you are free to screw things up for yourself without Apple coming to your door to rescue (or take) your Mac. Enforced computing indeed!

In any case, the silly article in question goes on to discuss Microsoft’s unfortunate obsession with widgets and some extremely questionable desktop elements over the years, along with a few lame attempts to tamper with the traditional Windows desktop. One notorious example was Bob, which made you wonder how Microsoft could have been so foolish as to think it would ever catch on.

Now Apple has played with widgets too, in the form of Dashboard. It’s still part of OS X, but it stays out of the way unless called upon. You never have to deal with it otherwise, since it’s not in your face. By the way, I’m down to just three widgets, one of which, a utility to check running system processes, seems to have problems with the Mountain Lion prerelease.

Rather than give up on widgets, Microsoft has taken their obsession to the most extreme level possible, with the Metro layer of Windows 8, where you have widgets, or tiles, running rampant on your PC’s display. While I suppose Metro works well enough for people who don’t have lots of apps in Windows Phone, it is a poor choice for a personal computer operating system.

Now the blogger in question also admits to having concerns about the usefulness of Metro, but posits a solution, that some third party will offer a way to hide Metro and restore the traditional Windows desktop shortly after Windows 8 is released. What this means is that you will supposedly be able to enjoy “the faster boot times and higher reliability of the Windows 8 experience,” but you won’t have to contend with Metro.

So let’s see here: You will allegedly want to upgrade a PC to Windows 8 to boot the computer a little faster, or maybe shave a few seconds when you restore the computer from idle mode. Maybe Windows 8 will need fewer restarts. Is that it? Is that any reason to buy an OS with a poor user interface, and then pay a shareware developer to get rid of it?

I hate to use the term galactically stupid, but I really don’t understand the logic here. If Windows 8 isn’t a useful upgrade, my advice to Windows users is don’t upgrade! You shouldn’t depend on some third party hack to make it worthwhile.

All in all, I hate to predict failure. But Windows 8 is going to be a hard sell for Microsoft, especially for the enterprise. They need to have a Plan B, and that plan definitely should not involve a third-party Metro remover.

There has been so much speculation about what Apple would announce during the WWDC keynote that I hesitated to take much of it seriously. But I will focus on the reality and some of the key fictions, and maybe a few just-misses.

But the opening, with Siri doing the intros, was certainly in keeping with the pop culture mystic about Apple’s flawed personal dictation assistant. At least people will no longer criticize me for bad jokes; Siri is the champ. Not even the Unknown Comic comes close.

Now in his opening presentation, CEO Tim Cook revealed one telling tidbit about App Store downloads, and that is that most of the downloads are free, or available for very low-cost. Consider that 30 billion apps have been downloaded since the App Store debuted in 2008, but developers received just $5 billion. That’s an awful lot of money, though, far more than any other mobile platform has delivered to developers.

Ahead of the WWDC keynote, one commentator wanted to remind you that Apple hasn’t released most hardware updates at a developer event. But right after a video was presented depicting the many ways in which the iPad has enriched people’s lives, VP Philip Schiller came onstage to announce, first, the 2012 MacBook Air. So much for trying to prejudge Apple. This was going to be a long session as WWDC keynotes go.

Despite all the speculation about the arrival of a Retina display, never confirmed, both the revised MacBook Airs and the refreshed 15-inch MacBook Pro both had the same displays as the previous model, and retained the same basic designs. Specs were predictably enhanced, and prices were the same except for a higher-end configuration of the 11-inch MacBook Air, which lists for $100 less. No new 17-inch model was announced, and it’s not certain if that will ever happen, since that configuration has been axed from Apple’s site, but I’m still hoping Apple will eventually deliver the bigger model, which suites my portable workflow far better than the 15-inch version.

As predicted, a new generation 15-inch MacBook Pro was also announced, one with a Retina display. And, as expected, it’s thinner, even thinner that Schiller’s fingers, .71 inches thick, but no tapering. And it weighs over a pound less than the current MacBook Pro. Actual specs: A 15.4-inch screen with pixel density of 2880×1800, which amounts to 220 pixels per inch. That’s definitely in Retina territory.

But here’s the bad news: Retina displays aren’t cheap, so the stock configuration, with a 2.3GHz quad-core processor, 8GB RAM, GT 650M 1GB graphics, and 256GB of flash storage, is $2,199, representing a $400 price increase over a standard MacBook Pro with a similar configuration.

Predictably, Apple’s apps are being updated for the Retina display. The Final Cut Pro X update is already available, and Adobe Photoshop and other third party apps will soon get retina graphics updates. Apps that aren’t upgraded to the new retina graphics will simply be scaled up, and will thus look a tad fuzzier compared to the rest, meaning they will appear the same as they do on a MacBook Pro with a standard display.

Also as predicted, there is no optical drive and, in fact, no Ethernet or FireWire 800 ports. You’ll have to use a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter for wired networking, and a Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 adapter for your legacy drives. But Apple will be shipping these cables. At least there are two Thunderbolt ports plus one HDMI. Unfortunately, the new 802.11ac Wi-Fi standard was not mentioned, but all the USB ports on the new MacBook family now support USB 3.0.

Switching to Mountain Lion, Craig Federighi, senior VP for software engineering, revealed that the bill of particulars includes not the 100 new features previously announced, but 200. This is in the same range as other OS 8 reference releases. Indeed, there may be more meat and potatoes here than with Lion, based on my preliminary reading of the new features. But, despite claims that adoption of Lion isn’t so great, it was revealed that 40% of the Mac user base (estimated at 66 million) upgraded to Lion within the first nine months on sale.

The feature presentation was similar to the one in February, when Mountain Lion was launched. One new feature, Power Nap, updates your MacBook Air (second generation and later) and Retina display MacBook Pro while it’s in sleep mode, including Time Machine backups. As expected, there will be Face-book integration for both Mountain Lion and iOS 6. But the OS 10.8 version will evidently ship later as an update, according to Apple’s press release.

One of the more useful features of Mountain Lion is Dictate, which provides system-wide dictation capability, even to third-party apps such as Microsoft Word, without the need for special updates. Since Dictate can use your Mac’s built-in mic and doesn’t require training to learn your voice and speech patterns, I can see where third-party apps, such as Nuance’s Dragon for Mac, are in deep trouble. But Apple has been known to license technology from Nuance, so many the impact won’t be as severe as it might have been.

Mountain Lion will ship in July, with a download price at $19.99 for users of Lion and Snow Leopard. Well, I thought it might be free, but I’ll take a $10 price reduction any day. I’m curious, now, how Microsoft will handle Windows 8 pricing.

Scott Forstall, the iOS VP, came onstage to take the wraps off iOS 6. In keeping with the 200 new feature benchmark, there are a load of them, but the list on Apple’s site is still very incomplete. A highlight for iOS 6 is improved Siri support. The enhanced version, arriving eight months after Siri first appeared with the iPhone 4s, essentially flesh out the capabilities in different ways, such as getting sports scores and team and player stats in response to simple questions. You’ll also get expanded ratings for restaurants courtesy of Yelp, and movie schedules and reviews. And, Siri can also launch apps.

Siri will also grace many new cars, with BMW, GM, Mercedes, Land Rover, Jaguar, Audi, Toyota, Chrysler and Honda committing to Siri integration, known as Eyes Free, within next 12 months. Siri will be called up with the voice command button on your car’s steering wheel. But that’s not a reason to hold off buying a new car if you need one now, or you prefer a different make. Siri will also be coming to the new iPad, but it’s not at all clear whether “she” will shed the beta label yet.

Along with the expected social-related enhancements in Safari, the iOS 6 Mail client with added a VIP Mail feature, same as in Mountain Lion, where you will be alerted if you get a message from someone you declare to be a VIP. Mail will also offer a partial solution to the attachment dilemma, by allowing you to insert videos and photos from within the app. That eliminates the need to go to the app first and start your email from there.

And, yes, you will have the ability to use set up a separate signature for each email account in iOS 6. I’ve been asking for that one for years, although it would be better to have selectable signatures for each account, in case you use one address for both business and personal use, as some of us do.

A Passbook feature manages tickets, from such places and movie theaters and concert arenas, along with airline boarding passes, all in one convenient place. Guided Access, designed with children suffering from autism in mind, let’s you circle controls to disable certain interface elements to make them easier to use. A Single-app mode lets, say, a teacher limits a student to one and only one app on an iPad during a classroom setting. No messaging allowed.

As the analysts predicted, Apple also introduced what they call a “ground up” mapping solution to replace Google Maps. Included is turn-by-turn navigation, using Siri if supported, and the ability to take note of traffic conditions with an “anonymous real-time crowd sourcing” capability. 3D maps data has been gathered, in part, by Apple flying over cities and recording the information. Of course, some countries wouldn’t allow Apple aircraft for overflights, and they are not in the business of spoofing Wi-Fi networks, as Google did.

So the next time your car dealer wants to sell you a navigation system, you may want to think again, unless it’s the only package you can order to receive the fancy radio and other goodies. Third party navigation apps are also an endangered species, but you had to expect that turn-by-turn navigation was coming.

iOS 6 is now available in beta form for developers. The shipping version will be released this fall, and will support the iPhone 3GS and later, the second and third generation iPad (but not the original), and the fourth generation iPod touch. It will now doubt arrive a few days before the expected release of the iPhone 5, probably the first week of October.

As far as the rest of the Mac lineup, there was a very minor enhancement to the Mac Pro, a standard configuration offering a 12-core processor from the older Intel Xeon lineup. There’s still no support for Thunderbolt, which is tailor made for a high-end workstation, or USB 3.0. It was all so disappointing, though I suppose we can always hope for more later on this year. An iMac and Mac mini refresh would also seem a given, but maybe Apple will hold them off until Mountain Lion is released for download. According to David Pogue, of The New York Times, you should expect a new iMac and a more significant Mac Pro upgrade in 2013. That statement has since been confirmed by Apple. In addition, an email to an Apple customer from Tim Cook promised something “really great” for the Mac Pro next year.

As WWDC sessions go, the OS upgrades stand front and center. The MacBook Pro with Retina display will probably be gobbled up by content creators, but it’s debatable whether others will buy one, at least until the price of the screens comes down.

You know the old saw about the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Well, when Apple was down in the dumps, lots of industry pundits seemed to want them to fail; goodbye, kaput. Whatever they did was fated to fail, because only Microsoft was allowed to succeed. In recent years, as Apple has grown faster than anyone had a right to expect, Google joins Microsoft as one of the companies that is fated to dominate.

Indeed, it doesn’t seem that some of these media critics will allow Apple to catch a break. When the iPod was first announced in 2001, they howled. What business did Apple have in entering the consumer electronics market? They seemed to have forgotten Apple’s forays into digital cameras (QuickTake) and mobile computers (Newton) in the 1990s. Oh, right, neither product succeeded.

When the iPod took off, with ever-increasing sales, you were told it must only be a temporary phenomenon. The “real” consumer electronics companies would respond with their own gear, and set the world right. Forgotten was the fact that they all had their chance, in the years before the iPod arrived. They ended up building junk that few purchased.

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So there’s a report from IDC claiming that the Windows Phone platform will overtake Apple’s iOS by 2016, if only by a slight margin. This particular survey presents Android as remaining number one, and evidently iOS as falling, with Windows Phone grabbing a fair share from Apple’s share.

Now to be perfectly fair, IDC previously pegged Apple as due for a fall in 2015, but has since changed their tune. You wonder whether that 2016 date will slip to 2017 next year. But all that depends on how Microsoft’s mobile platform will fare after Windows 8 arrives. But it’s just as possible that Windows 8 will do well with the consumer market, but it won’t lift Windows Phone at all.

What makes it all the more confusing is the story that Microsoft evidently won’t provide an upgrade path from the current version of Windows Phone, 7.5, to version 8. That approach merely repeats the mistake in the Android universe, where only a small fraction of smartphones are running version 4, Ice Cream Sandwich, which shipped last fall. You also have to wonder how people who are buying the Windows Phone flagship, Nokia’s Lumia 900, are going to feel knowing that the OS their gadget is running is a dead end.

In the larger scheme of things, I wonder if any independent statisticians have ever taken IDC’s estimates and actually bothered to measure how accurate their prognostications really are. And if they are seriously incorrect, why would anyone pay them to deliver an analysis? Shouldn’t accuracy be the first priority?

Now part of the problem is that Apple is constantly underestimated. Ever since they got into the consumer electronics game in a big way with the original iPod, so-called industry analysts have said they are destined to fail. Even when the iPod dominated two thirds of the market, with all other contenders left behind, a fall was considered as inevitable. When Microsoft begat the Zune, that original rebadged Toshiba digital music player was crowned as the ultimate iPod killer. It didn’t happen, although Microsoft only recently retired the Zune brand. That’s a rarity, because Microsoft will usually beat a product into the ground over and over again and seldom gives up. Often billions of development dollars will be wasted in the hope that, if they throw enough money into solving a problem, they are destined to succeed.

Well, it did work with the Xbox. The latest version of Microsoft’s gaming console does earn profits, but not if you count all the money that was squandered to boost it over the years. The jury is out on Bing, which seems to have mostly cannibalized search traffic from Yahoo!, which also uses the Bing platform. So it’s a no-win. Google retains two thirds of the share market in the U.S., give or take a few points, while Microsoft and Yahoo! continue to bring up the rear. I would hate to see Google continue to own the market, but I would have hoped that would-be competitors would have learned a thing or two. But billions of dollars later, including an expensive TV ad campaign, and Microsoft still isn’t doing very well with search.

Now in the real world, Apple’s greatest success with the iPhone is that it’s hugely profitable. Apple’s profits from smartphones continue to outpace the industry. Sure Android might deliver larger numbers, but they are spread over dozens of models — often barely distinguishable from one another — from a number of manufacturers. Since Google is giving Android away, the only profits to come their way are from ad clicks. Even there, income growth could be better. Worse, 38% of the people buying new iPhones these days switched from Android or BlackBerry. That’s not good news for the long-term prospects of Google’s mobile platform as the smartphone market gets more and more saturated.

The industry analysts will continue to tout Android’s growth as an indication that Apple is in trouble. But as long as the iPhone’s year-over-year sales growth remains high, it’s a dumb argument.

With tablets, the industry analysts keep revising their figures, hoping against hope that someone’s tablet du jour will gain a few legs up on Apple. It may have happened for a quarter when the Amazon Kindle Fire arrived and seemed to give the iPad a run for its money at the low end of the market. But Fire sales have tanked since the first of the year, so the skeptics are hoping for better action when Windows 8 ships this fall.

But it’s not that Windows 8 represents an easy path to tablet heaven. There will be two versions, one for Intel processors — similar to the current crop of failed Windows tablets — plus an RT version for ARM processors. The latter won’t run Windows apps unless they are recoded for a platform with limited resoruces. But I’m not seeing much love from the media when it comes to Windows 8. Even though some praise the Metro interface, the chinks in the armor are growing wider. One columnist from ZDNet, part of the CNET division of CBS, called Windows 8 a “design disaster.” I regard it as schizophrenic, and poorly organized, so perhaps we came to the same conclusion. But industry analysts continue to believe that Microsoft is destined to succeed.

I wonder how many industry analysts and tech pundits have speculated about Microsoft’s Plan B, and what the company should do if Windows 8 tanks. Right now, I don’t think Apple has much to fear from Windows 8. My gut opinion — and I wouldn’t take it to the bank — is that Windows 8 will be a middling success, and Microsoft will have enough ammo to tout the speed of migration to the new OS. At the same time, they’ll be figuring out a way to rush out a Windows 9 to straighten this mess out.