Opinion
SAYS THAT IN THE CURRENT ERA OF TECH MADNESS, IT’S VERY WELCOME FOR APPLE TO BE A BIT BORING SOMETIMES
When I sit down at my fine mahogany desk and dip the quill to begin writing these columns – at my leisure, safe in the knowledge that the magazine’s errand boy must wait in the rain until I’m good and finished – I’m obviously looking at the biggest tech stories around as a starting point for ideas, to see whether there’s anything that’ll affect us Apple users. And I’m looking at leaks and rumours about future Apple products to see if I have something to say about Apple’s likely direction of travel, and what that tells us.
On a day like today, when the stories are all about what an incremental change the Apple Watch 9 and iPhone 15 will be, and how Apple won’t launch a folding phone for three years if it ever does, I’m not exactly filled to the brim with excitement. My instinctual response to this news is that I absolutely refuse to write a(nother) column about how Apple, and the tech world, isn’t interesting anymore because all the ‘new’ tech is maturing. I have ploughed this furrow well in the past; we’re all ries in a cage used to this new normal.
But then I flick past all the stories about how X (née Twitter) had to take down the sign on top of its building (put up due to the fact the old sign couldn’t be removed because the company didn’t have the permits) because it was brighter than the sun, or the latest update on the Elon Musk versus Mark Zuckerberg cage match, or about how the new cryptocurrency from the creator of ChatGPT (ooh, that’s bingo!)… and I think “Good old boring Tim Cook. And good old boring Apple. Long may they stay this way.”
The tech world is coming off the rails. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that large parts of it are funded by a venture capital system that demands giant growth no matter what’s happening in real world. Maybe it’s due to all the companies run by people who’ve never lived a normal day since college. Every day is delivering some fresh new source of “What!? Why!?”
I find it pretty unlikely that Tim Cook will attempt t
