As I wrote in Wednesday’s column, the brand spanking new Samsung Galaxy S8 will be able to connect to a regular PC display and input devices. So you have an interesting slant on a 2-in-1 device — perhaps.

This will be done courtesy of something called Dex, a dock, costing $150, to which you can connect the phone to perform this feat of legerdemain, or at least connectivity. According to published reports, Dex will feature two USB ports, plus connections for HDMI and Ethernet. It will even have a cooling fan to help keep the S8 from running too hot as it delivers a pseudo desktop PC experience.

Well, at least one that puts Android on your desktop, if that’s what you want.

Now all we have are photos of what this scheme is supposed to look like. But it appears to feature a more traditional PC taskbar, and your apps will simply scale up to the larger display. The idea is not unique, but what the fawning articles about it fail to consider is that blowing up an app, designed for a smartphone of five or six inches, to a full-sized PC desktop is going to look downright absurd. They be stretched out with tiny interface elements appearing really large. What a waste of space!

While Apple has more than a million apps that are optimized for the iPad, apps customized for Android tablets are not so easy to locate. Even then, would an app designed to look best on a 7-inch or 10-inch screen really shine on a 27-inch computer display?

I’m assuming here that the graphics hardware in the S8 will manage the task of handing a resolution of 2960 x 1440 pixels regardless of display size. But to put this in perspective, a 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display has a native resolution of 5120 x 2880 pixels. But its predecessor had a 2560 x 1440 pixel resolution. Allowing for a wider aspect ratio on the S8, the picture that is better than Retina quality on a smartphone would be similar to a standard resolution PC display when scaled up.

If you can live with that, I suppose it’s OK.

But it sort of reminds me of the WebTV concept or the computer interfaces that allow you to push your PC desktop to a large-screen TV. It doesn’t look right.

I suppose you can imagine Samsung’s product designers, desperate to add features to the S8 that the next iPhone won’t have. So maybe someone, or a group of designers or marketers, decided that, since a flagship smartphone should be capable of performance close to that of a mainstream notebook PC, they should devise a way to project the desktop to a PC monitor with a standard mouse and keyboard. It’s a perfectly normal practice. I’ve connected my MacBook Pro to projection devices to do presentations before an audience.

In such cases, however, I’m using a computer operating system that’s designed to work with displays of many sizes, and apps will scale according to the resolution setting. Apps will therefore run efficiently. But not so with apps created for smartphones. So this may be one of those things that sounds good on paper, or in a PowerPoint presentation, but doesn’t translate so well to the real world.

To be fair to Samsung, I suppose it’s possible for app developers to take the hint, and if this scheme takes off, compile special Dex optimized versions. The fact that there aren’t many apps designed for Android tablets, however, makes me skeptical that such a thing will happen. I suppose some people will buy it, try it with their existing PC desktop components, and stick it away somewhere. Or if they buy a Dex dock with a display and input gear, they’ll just return it in disgust.

As to other S8 attempts to beat the rumored iPhone 8, Samsung’s choices may sometimes make a little sense, even if they aren’t terribly practical.

So with rumors that Apple considered — and abandoned — a curved edge-to-edge OLED display — Samsung went with it even though it’s of questionable value. There’s also facial and iris recognition, features that the next flagship iPhone may also include.

But Samsung continues to stick with a rear-mounted fingerprint scanner, even though that feature has been criticized for being awkward to use. Or maybe they hope the other security features will make it unnecessary, although there’s a published report that someone was able to bypass facial recognition with a photo. But you also have to consider a user clumsily reaching for the sensor at the back of the unit, accidentally touching the camera lens next to it. So after you actually get the thing to recognize your fingerprint, you’re probably forced to wipe the camera lens before using it.

It will be smudge city!

Now I suppose some might suggest that Apple build an iPhone that runs both iOS and macOS, and switches to the latter when docked to a mythical Mac converter. If you have a “fat” app, it’ll scale up appropriately. This might be considered logical in light of the feeling that Apple is doing iOS-things in recent macOS versions anyway. It might even happen someday, a true all-purpose mobile computer that can be used as a proper desktop.

Someday, but not now. Maybe not ever.

The magic words are $71 more. That’s how much the Samsung Galaxy S8 reportedly costs above the price of an iPhone according to published reports. Before I get to its features, this again puts the lie to people who continue to rant about Apple’s alleged high prices for iPhones.

When you do such comparisons, it’s important to make sure the products actually match. Samsung earns most of its money, but not much profit, from cheap gear. The flagship stuff is what directly competes with iPhones at similar prices. Well, not always similar, because I’ve seen new Samsung gear discounted from Day One with two-for-one sales.

When you look at the specs of the new Samsungs, you might believe the company’s product planners have been reading the rumors about the so-called iPhone 8, and have tried to respond with more. Well, more or less.

Now Samsung also has to try to polish its tarnished reputation as the result of the failure of the Galaxy Note 7, which was discontinued due to a much higher than normal number of failures due to overheating or bursting into flame. Some suggest that Samsung rushed it to market to beat the iPhone 7 by a few weeks, and thus the battery design wasn’t properly tested.

Samsung can reassure all it can, but the reliability of the new gear won’t be obvious until a few million people have been using them for a while. Meantime, the specs appear to obviate the need for a new 5.7-inch phablet.

So there will be two versions, an S8 and an S8+, with curved edge-to-edge displays of 5.8-inches and 6.2-inches. To maximize available physical space, there is no physical Home button. Typical for Samsung, the fingerprint enter is lodged at the rear, next to the camera. It’s an awkward reach to be sure.

But you might not need it, because the new model will have both iris and facial recognition, which may end up being a better solution — if it works. But is it quicker to raise the handset to your face, or just use your finger to unlock the unit? Well, if you can find the sensor quickly enough in that absurd spot. I’m just asking.

Other features include Harman Kardon stereo speakers, a USB-C port, a headphone jack, wireless charging and the ability to feed Bluetooth audio to a pair of headsets or speakers simultaneously. Another tentpole feature is something called a Samsung Dex dock, an add-on that reportedly allows you to connect the device to an external display and input devices, so it can be used as a PC. Well, that assumes PC functions will work properly with Android. When you consider the fact that very few Android apps are optimized for a tablet, how well will it scale up to a full-sized computer display even if the onboard processor and graphics are up to the job?

Oh, and don’t forget Bixby, which is Samsung’s digital assistant that was reportedly developed with help from the folks who created Siri. Or at least the ones who aren’t still working at Apple.

Typical of new Samsung smartphones, the features and specs often sound better than real world performance. I’ve avoided mentioning the processor and onboard RAM, since it doesn’t really matter. Consider the fact that iPhones usually tend to match or exceed the benchmarks of supposedly competitive Android gear even though specs may seem, on paper, to be inferior.

While I can’t say I’m an expert on Samsung gear, the time I spent with a pair of different Galaxy handsets some time ago was disappointing. Performance was erratic, sometimes reasonably fluid and sometimes laggy. Android’s inefficiencies have forced handset makers to use the most powerful components they can get to compensate via brute force.

Google continues to claim that they have been making Android run faster, and we’ll know soon enough once the new Samsungs hit the hands of reviewers. I’m debating whether I should request a review sample. It depends on whether the promise of the new gear can be realized.

I also wonder whether Samsung will release loads of Galaxy S8 variants to confuse the marketplace, or will try to slim the lineup down sensibly to make it easier for customers to figure out what they want.

A big question is how many potential customers were turned off by the Note 7 debacle. I’ve seen surveys that appear to indicate most people don’t care, and one that revealed potential trouble spots. Remember, too, that sales of the iPhone generally beat the high-end Samsungs. The South Korean electronics giant gains most sales from cheaper stuff, and that’s proven to be a problem in China, where there are a number of manufacturers vying for a piece of the low-end market.

As a practical matter, I am very much in favor of vigorous competition. If Samsung’s gear proves to match or exceed the next iPhone, that will, one hopes, spur Apple to do better. Unfortunately, Samsung has a notorious habit of touting fancy features that do not perform as well as they should. So let’s see how well iris and facial recognition work in the real world with real people. The recent arrest of the company’s CEO for corruption, however, has mostly flown under the radar outside of financial publications and, of course, in South Korea.

In the meantime, despite the announcement of the new Samsung smartphones, Apple’s stock price continued to soar to record levels.

Apple released the final version of the iOS 10.3 update on Monday. But for many who had already installed the beta seeds, it was a slightly more full-featured maintenance update to what appears to have been a relatively trouble-free OS release.

But the most significant new feature may be something Apple hasn’t really made a fuss about. It’s about the file system and something called APFS. Short for Apple File System, it’s the first major update since HFS+ arrived in 1998 with the release of Mac OS 8.1. Over the years, Apple has enriched HFS+ by adding additional features, such as journaling, the tracking or logging file changes not yet “committed” to the file system, to better support Mac OS X.

At the WWDC last year, Apple debuted APFS in beta form. It was made available to developers for Sierra, but it isn’t ready for prime time for lots of reasons, including nonsupport for Fusion Drives and file encryption. However, Apple has continued to work on it, and it is now ready for iPhones and iPads.

So APFS is designed to work best with the new generation of Flash and SSDs, and includes such powerful features as file encryption, space sharing, cloning for files and directories, snapshots and other 21st century features. It’s supposed to be a really good thing.

Now some of those who have upgraded to iOS 10.3 remark about multiple restarts and the fact that it takes a lot longer to install. I suppose the situation is worse if you’ve got lots of stuff on your iPads and iPhones, although the articles I’ve read on the subject don’t get that granular. However. I didn’t notice that much of a difference when I first ran the update on two iPhones and an iPad, but perhaps that’s because they aren’t stuffed with apps and multimedia files.

But upgrading the file system is a huge deal, and I suppose there’s always room for mischief, although it doesn’t seem as if the online world is filled with reports of trouble. The iOS 10.3 public betas have been out for several weeks, so there was plenty of opportunity for things to fail. On the other hand, iOS is more of a closed system than a Mac, hence fewer chances for trouble.

The results seem favorable so far. In addition to speedier startup times, it appears that some storage space has been reclaimed, and this is particularly helpful on all those devices with 16GB storage. In most cases, you can save up to several gigabytes (nearly 8GB in an AppleInsider test). But extra space doesn’t seem to happen on all devices. My wife’s iPhone 5c, with 16GB, lost a few hundred MB in available storage, but the upgrade process seemed no slower than when I installed iOS 10. It seemed a tad snappier with iOS 10.3 on it, however. That appears to be due to Apple developers making animations run more efficiently, and that’s a huge deal on slower hardware.

And if something goes wrong, you can restore your device from a backup. You do have a backup, right? Even if you install a “regular” OS update, you should make sure you backup before starting the installation.

So what’s wrong with this?

Well, upgrading the file system is still a huge deal. Even if nothing goes wrong, I suppose there’s a risk, which is why I always make a big deal about being sure you backup first. Alas, Apple has kept this change mostly under-the-radar unless you’ve read the developer information of consulted the tech sites that normally discuss such things. It’s not in the standard iOS 10.3 release notes.

As a result, there’s plenty of opportunity for fear-mongering. Such threatening words as “risky” and “nasty” are being used by bloggers to describe the silent APFS upgrade process, and cautioning readers about the occasionally slow silent upgrade process. Rather than reassure the readers that all is well — you just have to be patient — they are making it seem as if Apple is making a huge mistake in inflicting a more robust file system upgrade on us.

Again, APFS means better performance, better reliability, better security. It may not be perfect, but what it does should represent a big improvement over the patchwork of stuff added to HFS+ over the years. There were even rumors that Apple would adopt a modified third-party file system some years back, and suggestions as to what it might be. Instead, Apple chose to do their own.

My experiences with my iOS devices is that, other than the subtle changes, few will know or care about APFS. It recalls the HFS+ upgrade process, which was more time-consuming and dangerous, but generally completed without incident. Apple clearly sweat the details here, which is why, aside from the occasionally slow update process, you shouldn’t have anything to be concerned about. This is yet another example of what Apple does best, which is to make sophisticated technology easy to use and relatively transparent to the user.

How many iPad and iPhone owners know or care that they have tiny supercomputers on which is now installed an advanced file system to ensure maximum performance, data integrity and security?

Maybe Apple should have been more descriptive about the upgrade process and the reasons for the change. But the end result seems quite positive to me so far. As I said, if something goes wrong, you only have to restore your iOS device and start over. Installing anew on a clean Flash drive ought to be a pretty seamless process.

Meantime, the fear mongering will continue, but the only thing that’s risky and nasty is taking any of that nonsense seriously.

I now await the official release of APFS for Macs, which may come with the next major macOS release.

No major company is necessarily free of of the need for some legal wrangling. In the old days, Apple filed legal actions against Microsoft — mostly over changes of theft of the Mac OS — but, in 1997, the two companies decided to settle and focus on making money. Sometimes that desire converges, which explains why Office for Mac and iOS gets plenty of attention nowadays.

Sometimes the legal wrangling is the result of customer complaints or problems. One notable recent example is Windows 10. If you believe Microsoft, it has 400 million users. The fairly decent adoption rate was no doubt fueled by the fact that, for the first full year, it was a free download to consumers. After that, the price reverted to the usual absurd upgrade fee, which starts at $119.

You may notice that the adoption rate has slowed if you examine the web metrics, but I’m not going to waste your time.

But it does appear that Microsoft went a little too far in trying to coerce Windows users to upgrade. So we had situations where the Windows 10 installer would download in the background whether customers wanted it or not. In some cases, the installer would launch and do its stuff without approval, or with inverse approval.

So, based on a silent user interface change, clicking the “X” on an installation prompt would not dismiss it but start the process. And I recall one instance, mentioned here from time to time, involving a radio talk show host who, while on the air, observed the Windows 10 installation taking over the show’s PC. So it was unusable until the upgrade was complete.

One Windows users won a $10,000 award from Microsoft in a legal action complaining about the nasty consequences of an unwanted and unexpected Windows 10 install.

Some of you might suggest Apple isn’t innocent, for people who selected the App Store option to download OS updates in the background might find a new version of macOS as part of one of those downloads. Aside from taking up extra space on your Mac’s drive, however, the installer will not launch unless you want it to, and you have to manually start the installation process.

Now about Microsoft.

According to a published report in Ars Technica, Microsoft is the subject of a class-action lawsuit alleging that Windows 10 was negligently designed, that the defects were hidden from users, and that, therefore, the upgrade was unfit for its intended purpose.

You know, like the classic definition of buggy software.

The war stories speak of familiar themes, such as someone complaining that the upgrade was installed without permission, and further, that it damaged the customer’s PC beyond repair, which required purchasing a new system. The latter seems more than a little extreme, however.

In a related complaint, the lawsuit asserts that the OS isn’t checking the PC to determine “whether or not the hard drive can withstand the stress of the Windows 10 installation.”

Another complaint cites the case of someone who did accept the upgrade, but it resulted in data loss and the failure of some apps to stop working. But that appears to be related, since data loss could result in damaged apps. This complaint refers to the alleged failure to check the system for compatibility.

Well, you get the picture.

The lawsuit alleges that Microsoft did not “exercise reasonable care in designing, formulating, and manufacturing” the upgrade, and, further, that Microsoft knew Windows 10 had “potentially harmful propensities.”

Despite the extent of the harm allegedly caused by Windows 10 upgrades, the lawsuit seeks more than $5 million in damages, which would seem an especially low figure if these and other complaints in the legal filing are true.

Predictably, Microsoft has denied the claims. In a statement, the company says: “If a customer who upgraded during the one-year program needed help with the upgrade experience, we had numerous options including free customer support and 31 days to roll back to their old operating system. We believe the plaintiffs’ claims are without merit.”

Well, it’s not as if Microsoft is going to apologize for its alleged transgressions, regardless of the case’s merit.

Normally, I wouldn’t pay attention to a lawsuit of this nature. Many are just nuisance actions that any large company might confront in the course of doing business. But I’ve also followed a number of troubling tales about the Windows 10 upgrade process, and these allegations do not appear to be out of the range of possibility.

It is known that Microsoft went overboard to force Windows 10 upgrades on users. Beginning an upgrade without approval means that the customer doesn’t have the chance to check their PCs for compatibility, or even to backup their data in case something goes wrong.

The claims about the lack of checks for system compatibility are particularly troubling, but that claim will require proof, a developer’s review of the upgrade process to see if system checks are really being performed.

At the end of the day, the people who allegedly lost systems due to damage will probably end up receiving a pitiful sum, or a discount coupon, even if they win. But I expect Microsoft will defend this one vigorously, because a loss — or a settlement — could create a troubling and expensive precedent that would result in even more lawsuits.