You can manipulate sets of numbers to prove most anything you want, and even with the best of intentions, there’s a margin for error. Does either situation explain why Mac sales for the September quarter were severely undercounted by Gartner and IDC, two major market research firms? While Apple reported sales increases of over 10% year-over-year, Gartner and IDC estimated flat or slightly declining sales.

It isn’t the first time they screwed up. In the past, IDC claimed that Windows Phone — remember that one? — would eventually achieve a higher market share than the iPhone, thus putting it in second place. While Microsoft surely loved the news, it didn’t work that way in the real world. These days, Microsoft has mostly unraveled its smartphone presence. Market share is only a tad better than a rounding error.

So did Gartner and IDC apologize to the media for providing erroneous sales estimates, or making projections the turned out to be the opposite of the truth? Are they offering refunds to their clients for failing to deliver accurate information?

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While 2017 isn’t over, Time magazine has already published the list of its “25 Best Inventions of 2017.” Now you’ve probably read about this already, but a little explanation is in store.

So after the iPhone X was first announced, the critics lambasted Apple for being late to the party with some of its important features. Take OLED displays, which have already appeared on Android smartphones. It’s important to note that Samsung makes the iPhone X’s display. Whatever you think about Samsung’s penchant for stealing ideas from other companies, it certainly has the chops to build the parts tech companies need, such as displays, memory and other components.

Facial recognition is also nothing new, and Face ID was attacked for being insecure and slow even before the critics had a product to evaluate. So even though reviewers, including Consumer Reports, have praised Face ID, there were complaints about privacy and other matters. The difference is that, for the most part, Apple made it work pretty much as advertised. Yes, I know about the problems with twins and some other exceptions.

The TrueDepth camera that allows Face ID to work is something altogether new and different from the rest of the pack. You can expect the competition is working full time to somehow reverse engineer this technology.

Apple also did away with the Home button, and rather than replacing it with a virtual alternative, which would probably have been the simplest scheme, they devised new iOS 11 gestures to allow you to bypass a physical or virtual button and still get things done. I grant it’s a bit of a learning curve, and it might be confusing to switch back to an iOS device with a Home button, such as an iPad. In the end, you expect the Home button to vanish from those products too as they inherit edge-to-edge displays.

When you add all this and other design factors together, it’s no wonder the iPhone X was included among those 25 products.

Yes, the Time magazine piece concedes that “some of these features first arrived on devices from Samsung and LG.” But clearly Apple made them work better, which is why it was rated “A Smarter Smartphone.” This is in keeping with Apple’s penchant to take features that originated elsewhere and improve and simplify them.

Other top-rated inventions include “Stronger, Safer Football Helmets” and “Guilt-Free Ice Cream.” If you’re dieting, the latter, Halo Top ice cream, touts from 240 to 360 calories per pint. This is in the range of a single slice of pizza from Pizza Hut and Little Caesars, but can you imagine getting a whole pie of decent size with so few calories?

Then there’s a sideways elevator! I’m serious, and this is something written about over the years in sci-fi stories. I know I mentioned it in one of my novels.

Along with being declared “smarter,” the story about the iPhone X is accompanied by interviews from Apple hardware chief Dan Riccio, and chief design officer Sir. Jonathan Ive.

While those interviews have been quoted elsewhere, call me jaded enough to regard some of the statements about Apple’s design process as corporate spin. Apple only wants you to know of its successes, and how it understood when to drop old features in a product and embrace something new.

An example is the headphone jack that was removed from iPhones last year to mixed reaction from customers and critics. We don’t talk about it all that much this year, and Android fans don’t have much of an argument to make in light of the fact that Pixel 2 phones from Google also ship without headphone jacks.

This is part of Apple’s DNA, to know when it’s time to remove old features and move on. You can date that practice back to the arrival of the very first iMac in 1998. Apple ditched SCSI, ADB and other peripheral ports, and eliminated the floppy drive. Instead, they embraced USB which, up till then, hadn’t done much on the Windows platform.

It took a few years before we no longer relied on floppies, and, with adapters aplenty, you could still use many of those old peripherals until it was time to move on.

So today it’s headphone jacks, though they may still exist on the iPad and on Macs for a while. The Home button is clearly on the chopping block, if only to keep the iOS interface consistent among all products. Face ID is also destined to replace Touch ID, perhaps as early as next year, so in that respect the new features on the iPhone X serve as a harbinger of things to come.

Indeed, some day there may not even be a Face ID to unlock your device. Maybe Apple will have an embedded EEG and read your brainwaves instead. While there may be hacker tricks to get around Face ID and Touch ID, brainwaves?

No, I have no inside information about Apple’s future plans. Consider my suggestion about brainwaves to be nothing more than a random idea.

But Apple is a company known to seek newer and better ways to do things, and ditching old, obsolete features, or features the company deems obsolete.

The critics may complain that the iPhone X doesn’t do much that’s original, that perhaps it didn’t deserve the accolades it received from Time. The apparent success of the iPhone X, and how it influences future smartphone designs, though, will probably demonstrate again that the critics are dead wrong about Apple and its abilities to innovate.

When I featured author Bob LeVitus on The Tech Night Owl LIVE last week, he volunteered that he still hasn’t decided whether to keep his newly-acquired iPhone X. Some of the eccentricities in its design, such as the “notch,” and the wider aspect radio (19.5:9 compared to the usual 16;9), may not suit him. But he decided to give it some time to decide; he’s also holding off on completing his review.

Bob also talked briefly about his personal odyssey in buying one. He opted not to wake up early to get first dibs, and thus placed his order later in the day at T-Mobile, expecting not to see one until the end of November. It shipped almost immediately, meaning that supplies were more plentiful than he expected, at least for the 256GB space gray unit that he wanted.

Getting one sooner than expected wasn’t uncommon. Some people who preordered right on October 27th also found them shipping sooner than originally indicated. During its quarterly conference call with financial analysts, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the production ramp up was “going well,” which implied cautious optimism.

But on the day the preorders began, the backorder delay quickly grew to five to six weeks. It didn’t take long to be reduced to three to four weeks, and now it’s two to three weeks in the U.S. and some other countries. But that’s ordering one from Apple’s online store, or from other dealers. If you want to find one at a local dealer, good luck.

That Verizon Wireless salesperson I talked to during a pair of ride sharing runs said he’d sold exactly one iPhone X, which would ship in several weeks. Other customers switched to an iPhone 8 when he explained the similarities. Clearly his argument was persuasive enough to get a quick sale and boost his monthly commission for November.

Where the backorder situation will count is early December, as customers decide if they can risk ordering one and getting their merchandise before Christmas. If the order situation improves at this rate, it may be possible to buy one and receive it in a few days. But the stock situation at stores still appears to be troubling. What about Black Friday next week?

I have no doubt, however, that Apple is on the case and is fully aware of how much product will be available when it’s needed to fill demand. That the backorder delay is being steadily reduced indicates they have things pretty much under control. That said, it will probably be early in 2018 before you can just go to a store and be sure of finding the one you want.

Indeed, even though the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus are supposed to be readily available, I did some spot checking at AT&T stores, factory and authorized, and not all of them were flush with stock. But it appears the Plus model is a little harder to get, because demand has continued to skew towards it.

Compare the real situation to all the fear-mongering before the iPhone X shipped. Unconfirmed reports had it that Apple was confronting serious, unexpected delays in getting product out the door. Backorders might extend to many weeks or months, and Apple’s December quarter results might be seriously impacted.

Add to that the complaints about Face ID and its value even before a single unit shipped. It couldn’t possibly work as advertised. After all, the facial recognition feature on the Samsung Galaxy S8 could be defeated with a digital photo. What about privacy concerns if your smartphone knows everything you’re doing and where you’re doing it.

Of course the privacy fear is simply answered. Other companies regard you as the product, so you can expect that an Android smartphone will be pushing data about you to Google’s servers. One of the arguments made against Siri’s ability to handle your requests is the fact that Apple isn’t gobbling all your personal data as Google does. But isn’t that what machine learning is supposed to accomplish without sacrificing privacy?

And consider this: The reason the authorities have had problems unlocking iPhones used by criminals is because Apple’s security is robust. Not that it’s impossible, and the FBI reportedly paid over a million dollars to unlock an iPhone 5c used by one of the San Bernardino killers after Apple refused a controversial request to add a privacy backdoor to iOS.

As I wrote yesterday, how often do you hear about the police not being able to unlock an Android phone? Remember, there are more Android mobile handsets out there, and thus more criminals must have them, right? So why aren’t there any stories about such difficulties? Maybe there is, but I haven’t seen it yet.

Now about the iPhone X, even if you forget the price of admission, I honestly don’t know whether I’d buy one. I have certainly read enough about it, and reports of its magnificent OLED display are tempting. I am a little concerned about reports of screen glitches, even if the number is low, and I wonder if any other apparent production defects will appear. As I write this article, the iPhone X only began to arrive in the hands of customers less than two weeks ago.

If I get one for review, I wouldn’t refuse of course, and I am working on that possibility. As a practical matter, I have better uses for my money right now, and I still have an iPhone that works just great.

While doing a ride sharing run a few weeks back, I met a sales person who worked at a local authorized Verizon Wireless dealer. I had been considering my options about whether to switch carriers, and this was an ideal time to ask a few questions.

I explained my pricing plan, and asked what he had to offer that was comparable or better. As most of you might realize, while Verizon is reputed to have the best cellular network overall in the U.S., but it’s not necessarily the cheapest, something he had to admit was true.

The “X’ factor on my AT&T deal is an AARP discount; I didn’t see a comparable one for Verizon. At least there’s one advantage of being older, and it applies to the core service and data plan. Indeed, this is also a reason why I opted not to split for T-Mobile; the other was my skepticism that its network will be as robust in outlying areas.

However, when I checked AARP’s site, I no longer saw a similar plan; there was a limited time trade-in deal for people who want to switch. But bear in mind that AT&T’s customer support declined big time after it acquired DirecTV. I don’t have the patience to repeat the war stories, but that is something to consider.

In short, I told the salesperson that I wasn’t going to switch, its least not then.

Just the other day, I ran into him again, and we talked about the wireless business. This time he said he was considering a switch from an iPhone to an Android phone. But why?

While he professed to be a fan of Apple gear, somehow rival smartphones were better in some ways, although it wasn’t able to actually explain how. Well, I suppose it’s true that a Samsung Galaxy S8, for example, may offer more features. Instead of having one biometric feature to unlock the device, there are three. But having more may mean less when you look them over.

So Samsung evidently wasn’t able to embed a fingerprint sensor beneath its edge-to-edge OLED display. It went to the rear, too close to the camera lens to avoid the possibility of smudging the latter. One Samsung owner I encountered during my travels told me she did find it an awkward reach.

Apple reportedly confronted a similar dilemma, which may have hastened the development of Face ID. Perhaps it would have arrived anyway, though it is true that Samsung also supplies Apple’s OLED displays.

As to the other biometrics on the Samsung they appear to be seriously flawed. Both facial recognition and iris sensors are said to be easily defeated with digital photos. Sure, there are reports here and there of ways to bypass Apple’s Face ID. It’s not presented as a perfect solution, but it appears to be far better than the Samsung counterpart. Touch ID isn’t perfect either, and there is that gruesome report that the finger of a deceased person may actually unlock a fingerprint sensor up to two days after death.

But it’s also true that, if someone threatens to do you harm unless you unlock your smartphone, we all know that the smart decision should be.

In any case, I was never quite clear about other ways in which the Android smartphones that the Verizon salesperson was considering were superior to the iPhone in significant ways. Perhaps a feature here and there, assuming they were implemented better than Samsung’s flawed biometrics.

It’s not about this feature or that, unless you need them. Consider the iPhone’s superior security and privacy.

Consider a recent published report about the problems the FBI reportedly had in unlocking an iPhone said to be owned by the suspect in the recent mass shooting at a Texas church. This is the second high-profile attack in which an iPhone appears to be involved. The other was an iPhone 5c reputedly used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. In that case, the FBI first wanted Apple to create a backdoor to allow the authorities to unlock that device.

Apple demurred in a high-profile confrontation. One key reason was the claim that any such move would also make it possible for criminals to bypass security. In the end, the authorities reportedly paid hackers over a million dollars to get the deed done.

So I reminded that salesperson that you only read about the authorities having problems unlocking iPhones. Why aren’t we hearing about them confronting problems unlocking Android mobile gear? Is it because they never have such problems? What about the fact that, except for Nexus and Pixel smartphones, offering the pure Android experience, the chances that customers will receive timely OS updates, or any OS updates, are slim to none? What if the update is needed to address a serious security flaw?

I didn’t bother to mention the “unfortunate” fact that, when it comes to benchmarks and real-world performance, the iPhone generally bests Android gear, even models offering more RAM and processors with more cores. It wasn’t necessary. The salesperson had no more arguments to make about smartphones that bettered the iPhone.

A few moments later, the ride was over.