Do you remember October 23, 2001? As the nation was still grieving over the 9/11 terrorist attack, Apple CEO Steve Jobs was busy changing the world in his own way. That’s when the original $399 iPod was demonstrated at a media event. It arrived with the promise of 1,000 songs in your pocket.

The iPod went on sale the following week for $399. The release schedule was in keeping with many Apple products, where shipments start within a week or two. As you know, though, some Apple gadgets may not ship for weeks or months after the initial demonstration.

So on January 9, 2007, during a Macworld Expo keynote, Steve Jobs took the wraps off the iPhone. It was touted as a three-in-one gadget, consisting of “a revolutionary mobile phone, a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, web browsing, searching and maps…”

But it wasn’t released for sale until June 29, 2007. One of the reasons for the early announcement was said to be the need for FCC certification, which would result in premature revelation of the iPhone’s existence.

Now it’s rare for Apple to introduce a new gadget six months before you can buy it. Apple’s usual posture about far-future gear is that they do not comment on unreleased products.

So with the original iPhone, the 2013 Mac Pro and other gear, Apple did announce the new products months ahead of release to spark demand and, no doubt, to freak the competition.

In the case of the first iPod and the first iPhone, it didn’t replace anything. Well, the iPhone certainly replaced the iPod for most people; it was a next generation product that integrated a number of key functions in a single gadget. The 2013 Mac Pro arrived after the product hadn’t received a serious update in a while.

But if there is an existing, thriving product, pre-announcing the next version is apt to gut sales big time. Why buy the old model when something new is a few months away? This would explain why sales of any Apple product will stall ahead of the expected announcement of its replacement.

Lately, though, the chatter about new products has released such intensity, it may well be that existing customers are taking it seriously enough to postpone their buying plans far earlier than usual. At least that’s one reason why Tim Cook claims there was a “pause” in iPhone sales for the March quarter. So sales were slightly below 2016 levels, which were, in turn, below 2015 levels. But there was also the claim that, due to a higher level of inventory management, there was more sell-through this year, and thus sales that seemed lower were actually higher.

All right, it might be a numbers game, but high customer expectations may indeed be a genuine problem. For months, you’ve been reading about the prospects of a rumored iPhone 8, sometimes known as the 10th anniversary iPhone. It actually started before the iPhone 7 arrived. So the iPhone 7 was supposed to be a minor refresh, basically an interim model that was meant to help Apple bide time until the major revision arrived.

Compared to previous upgrades, the iPhone 7 may have closely resembled its predecessor, but it was a fairly big refresh overall. If you look at the changes in previous iPhones — minus any changes to the case design or the size of the display — there were a number of useful enhancements.

Regardless, it goes to show how sales of existing Apple gadgets can be hurt by expectations of a new model, real or otherwise. If there’s an exception, it’s the Mac Pro, where Apple is only revealing that an all-new version, modular, easy-to-upgrade, is being worked on, but there is no firm release date. All we know is that it won’t come until next year.

That announcement was forced on Apple by the threat that professional users might soon abandon the Mac. Even though sales of the current Mac Pro, which were probably no great shakes anyway, would be impacted, Apple realized it had to make this move. At the same time, there’s a fire sale of the current model; the existing model is selling for up to thousands of dollars less. Maybe some Mac users will make do, and Apple can unload any leftover inventory. Or build some more product if demand warrants it.

But you can see why you won’t read any official news about the next iPhone until Apple is almost ready to ship. However, there is a certain alleged industry analyst who suggests Apple might nonetheless stage a demonstration at the WWDC in June.

I won’t mention the name, since I don’t feel it’s necessary to embarrass people who display such evidence of incompetence.

So if Apple doesn’t plan to release a new iPhone until fall, why would it destroy the current market in such a foolish way? Where’s the benefit in that?

This doesn’t mean you won’t see any new hardware at the WWDC. I suppose there might be a couple of Mac refreshes, particularly news about forthcoming professional configurations for the iMac, since that would be an appropriate audience; at least, if the release is only weeks away.

What’s more, if Apple has made substantial progress designing the next Mac Pro, it may be demonstrated there too. Remember that the 2013 trash can revision was first unveiled at a WWDC, but it didn’t actually ship until nearly six months later, and then only in very limited quantities.

So if Apple plans on shipping a 2018 Mac Pro in the first quarter of that year, showing it off in the next few weeks would be a terrific idea. It would surely help reassure professional users, some of whom might be skeptical about Apple’s promises. That move would make sense. Displaying a new iPhone months before it ships would be a sign of arrant stupidity, and Apple’s management is definitely not stupid.

One of the more interesting results in Apple’s March quarter financials was not iPhone sales. I’ll get to that soon. Instead, it was the growth of Mac sales. Despite the fact that only one new model was refreshed in recent months — the MacBook Pro — sales increased slightly from 4.03 million to 4.2 million. But total revenue was up by over 14% due to higher average sales prices.

I wouldn’t suggest how long this might last, but those who assumed the MacBook Pro was a huge fail because it was allegedly overpriced and underpowered for a professional notebook are largely off base. Clearly decent demand still exists, but it wouldn’t hurt to see other Macs receive updates real soon now to keep things going. All right, we know the Mac Pro won’t arrive till next year, but what about the MacBook, Mac mini and iMac?

And here’s the inevitable comparison:

While the media wants to pretend that Microsoft is the PC hardware maker to beat nowadays, Surface sales aren’t doing so well, such as they are. In the last quarter, they totaled $831 million, which is practically nothing at Apple’s scale. This was down from $1.3 billion in the year-ago quarter.

Perhaps to rescue the product, Microsoft is making an educational push, a Surface Laptop lineup that was introduced along with a restricted version of Windows, Windows 10 S. Did I say restricted? Well, yes, because you’ll only be able to load software from Microsoft’s App Store, which I gather is still a fairly barren place. I just wonder how long it’ll take hackers to wipe that limitation away.

Somehow Microsoft hopes to compete with the MacBook Pro at a lower price, but also make gains in the educational market, which is more and more dominated by cheap Google Chromebooks. This seems awfully contradictory to me, since the MacBook Pro isn’t Apple’s educational model.

But it’s doubtful cash-starved school systems would be inclined to buy notebooks that start at $999. Evidently Microsoft hopes other PC makers will manage the cheap stuff.

Or maybe this is a desperate excuse to resurrect the failing Surface line. After losing the mobile handset race big time, I suppose Microsoft could use a win somewhere.

Now about Apple’s sales, while Mac sales improved slightly, iPhone sales dipped once again.

Overall, Apple reported revenue for $52.9 billon, with a net quarterly profit of $11 billion, or $2.10 diluted share. This compares to revenue of $50.6 billion, with net profits of $10.5 billion, or $1.90 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. An improvement yes, if below analyst estimates.

iPhone sales totaled 50.8 million, down from 51.1 million in the year-ago quarter. That said, average sale prices rose due to higher-than-expected demand for the iPhone 7 Plus. During the quarterly call with financial analysts, Apple made excuses for lower sales, such as claiming that the inventory mix meant that the sell-through was higher.

I won’t comment on this number’s game. Apple may be right of course. That said, Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed that, “Earlier and much more frequent reports about future iPhones” evidently caused a “pause” in sales of the current model. But that should be nothing new, since rumors about the next iPhone routinely spread far and wide months ahead of the introduction of the new version. Why should this year be different?

Well, perhaps because expectations are higher than ever, amid reports that a special iPhone is being developed for its 10th anniversary. You know the score: An edge-to-edge OLED display, virtual Home button and other snazzy features. Even though prices may be higher than the usual iPhone, demand may be huge because customers have been holding off upgrading their older gear. Well, it’s a good theory.

iPad sales continued to slip, but not as quickly as in recent quarters. So last year, Apple moved 10.25 million iPads, falling to 8.92 million this year. Cook was ready with the positive spin there too, that, “iPad results were ahead of our expectations. We believe we gained share during the March quarter in a number of major markets, including the U.S., Japan, and Australia. iPad remains the world’s most popular tablet, and it’s the primary computing device for millions of customers around the world.”

Did the arrival of a cheaper 5th generation iPad, with a starting price of $329, make an impact? There probably wasn’t enough time, since it debuted without much fanfare near the end of the quarter. Meanwhile, little is being said about the expected major upgrades to the iPad Pro lineup, including a model with a 10.5-inch edge-to-edge display, which was rumored to arrive in the last quarter. So when, if ever, will that happen?

But there are two areas where Apple doesn’t have to equivocate or make excuses about sales. Services revenue totaled $7.04 billon, compared to $5.99 billion in the year-ago quarter. That covers such services as iTunes, Apple Music, iCloud, App Store sales and so forth.

Revenue for “Other Products” totaled $2.87 billion, compared to $2.19 billion last year. That category includes the Apple Watch, Apple TV, Beats headphones, and the still backordered AirPods. Did that increase represent a boost in Apple Watch sales, or was it mostly driven by unexpectedly high demand for AirPods? Maybe both, since it was reported that Apple Watch sales more than doubled compared to last year.

This quarter, Apple is estimating revenue of between $43.5 billion and $45.5 billion. It would represent an increase compared to last year, where revenue totaled $42.4 billion.

Wall Street will have its own judgement. I suspect it’ll be mixed, although the market is apt to be freaked by the unexpected dip in iPhone sales.

I don’t have to repeat the obvious. Better late than never, Apple finally came to realize that its 2013 revision to the Mac Pro was a big misfire. Well, they didn’t use those terms, but it was the polar opposite of the previous version. Where the so-called cheese grater Mac Pro made it simple to add extra stuff inside, the Mac Pro pushed most expansion outside. There were lots of ports, but no place inside for extra drives or expansion cards.

I’m not making a point of the lack of twin CPU ports, because Intel has solved that problem by adding more cores to its Xeon silicon. So if you need 12 cores, it’s better to have them all on one chip than two. You get the picture.

Apple isn’t going to say how long it took to get a clue about what it did wrong. You’d think complaints from professional users would be enough, or maybe Apple thought they’d eventually get used to it. But in saying they are working on an all-new model, Apple executives did claim to have talked to pros. Sometime. Somewhere.

Why’d it take so long to do the obvious? I wouldn’t care to guess why Apple had such a bad case of tunnel vision. The point is that the message was finally received loud and clear, Apple has more or less made its apologies for being so obtuse, and has promised that a hardware team is working on the new model.

Now some might suggest that it would be extremely easy to deliver that replacement, and professional Mac users shouldn’t be forced to wait at least a year for satisfaction. Maybe Apple should look to the Hackintosh community for inspiration.

Or at least that’s what is implied in a fairly detailed article on the subject in Ars Technica. We have perhaps thousands of people taking off-the-shelf PCs and installing macOS on them by jumping a few hoops. And it does appear the hoops have become fewer as the hobbyists get a better handle on the process.

So far Apple has treated this practice with benign neglect. It’s not as if these people are going out and selling undocumented macOS clones. If they did, Apple would stop it — and they’ve done that before. What the Hacintosh demonstrates is that people are so dedicated to the platform that they are willing to spend time and money assembling a Mac that meets their needs.

But these are not unique designs. Desktops are mostly regular PC minitowers, perhaps in the tradition of the ancient Power Computing boxes. It’s of secondary importance, since the real creativity is in choosing the proper internal components that are known to be adaptable for use in a Hackintosh. But it also means these boxes are easily expanded with extra drives and expansion cards, meaning they are built in the spirit of the original Mac Pro.

So the simple solution would be for Apple to restore the cheese grater model with new parts. This would be a simple solution that shouldn’t cost a whole lot in development dollars. It could still have USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports, and even support for a keyboard with a Touch Bar.

Sure, Apple could perhaps refine the cooling system, and even make it slimmer and lighter without detracting from its fundamental expandability. It could even come in dark gray or black if Apple can find the right color scheme and casing.

For now, Apple is expecting customers to buy the current Mac Pro at a lower price to make do, or wait. Some might just build their own Hackintosh instead.

Clearly, Apple isn’t taking a year to refine a Mac Pro minitower unless there are other design factors involved. But that takes us into a wide area of speculation into what a proper computer workstation should be in 2018 and beyond. Obviously Apple knows about the roadmaps for its silicon vendors. They know what Xeons will come from Intel — and it’s not as if this information is necessarily top secret. They know what AMD is doing to compete, if anything, plus the future design goals for its graphics chips. They know what’s coming from NVIDIA.

But what if Apple plans to build a Mac Pro with its own graphics hardware? Obviously that is being done for future iPhones and iPads, witness the recent news that they are phasing out use of GPU intellectual property from Imagination Technologies. Apple has already hired its own GPU engineer, but why should it be restricted to iOS? What about macOS?

It’s not the same deal as switching from Intel to ARM for Macs. Graphics technologies span platforms, so if Apple has a better idea, more tightly integrated into the macOS platform and its own needs, maybe going its own way is the better idea. So why not start with a state-of-the-art computer workstation that can go toe-to-toe with graphics from Intel, AMD and NVIDIA?

Maybe the delay is not so much the form factor as completing and testing its own GPU design. I suppose if it all doesn’t come together in time, meaning by next year, Apple could always go to its current chip partners and continue working on its home-built solution for use at a later date.

After all, why should it take so long to design a modular Mac Pro?

Almost from the first day the Apple Macintosh arrived in 1984, the company was urged to license the Mac OS and allow other companies to build compatible computers. That, after all, is what helped Microsoft take control of the PC marketplace. Even though Apple has gained market share to some degree in recent years, as the overall market for personal computers has eroded, Windows remains dominant.

It got really bad when Windows 95 arrived. It was Microsoft’s first truly functional release of its graphical OS. While not as fluid and elegant as the Mac OS, it was good enough. That’s all it took for some people to give up on Macs for good, since Microsoft had built a far larger app ecosystem, especially as Windows compatible software soared.

Apple relented and agreed to a Mac OS licensing program, and several companies were signed up to build Mac clones. Chief among them was a scrappy startup, Power Computing, which took cheap PC cases and sold them for prices that seriously undercut Apple’s. When new PowerPC chips arrived, Power sometimes released products with them first because it didn’t need as many as Apple.

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