It’s weird not to have your phone. My beloved 13 mini is getting a badly-needed battery replacement, and hopefully the next one won’t be as urgent because Bluesky has fixed their app to cut down on power drain, but for a window of two hours during a workday I am away from home with no phone. It feels like time has rolled back about 20 years, as I wander around with a backpack looking for sufficient free wifi to get online and work. No podcasting, no streaming, just bouncing back and forth between windows and trying to stay in the shade.
Apple ignited the personal computing revolution twice: once with the Apple II, and once with the iPhone. That’s what caused cyberspace to evert; now we don’t go online, online is all around us. I have everything I need for work on my laptop, other than 2FA. I have everything I need for personal use, other than a phone number, on my iPad. But only my iPhone can cover both. The phone has become an extension of my brain, the appendage I use to see into the parallel universe around me. It is the reason I can walk off in a random direction in a foreign city I’ve never visited without hesitation or concern. It is the reason I can stay stretched out in bed until an hour into the workday without missing a beat on actually doing my job. It’s where most of my social life is. Apple’s old PowerBook advertising slugline is far more appropriate for their most successful product: what’s on your iPhone is you.
And this is why that iPad ad is worrying: absolutely tone-deaf given the present situation of tech. Made in-house where nobody thought to say “hang on a minute” first. Symptomatic of a company that in the last twenty-seven years has gone from the brink of extinction to the richest company in tech, the prestige brand in hardware, and ironically the only company at the forefront of technology whose profit stems from goods and services rather than advertising and data mining…other than Microsoft. And lo and behold, here comes the DoJ to break up a monopoly, and irrespective of the merits of the case, the fact remains: Apple has become The Man.
But that’s because technology has become The Man. The Silicon Valley ethos was allegedly a reaction against the mainframe IBM do not fold bend spindle or mutilate computing culture. But at some point, that got completely swamped by the get rich quick ethos pouring out of Sand Hill Road and Stanford and washing along a tide of the kind of people who would have been junk bond traders from Wharton rather than CS50 dropouts in Shallow Alto if it hadn’t been for the 2008 financial crisis. And just like then, the money decided it must be the brains, and now we have what we have now: a cult of VC awash in ayahuasca, eugenics, freshman-dorm-pothead philosophy and the rock-solid belief that they are the highest caste stood on the edge of paradise if only their lessers would have the decency to submit.
Tim Cook isn’t a bad guy, Auburn and Duke affiliations notwithstanding, but he is a logistics guy. He makes the trains run on time. Under Tim, you know what’s coming: there’s going to be a new iPhone announced on the second Tuesday of September every year and it will be in stores on the third Friday of September, and a new upgrade version of iOS will be released on the third Wednesday of every September not because it’s ready, but because the new phone drops in two days. The process is a fine tuned machine, the envy of the industry. But he outsourced taste to Jony Ive, and as a result, everything crept up to become ever thinner, ever more expensive, ever an expression of design rather than design for life. Pace William Gibson, being able to tell that something was designed is a sign it wasn’t designed well, and one decision after another – USB-C only for everything on the Mac, flat design on iOS with a minimum of visual cues, a smaller battery in the phone to make way for risible 3DTouch technology and then the removal of the headphone jack to get the battery back up to snuff – suggests that actual utility was trumped for a decade by Jony Ive’s vision.
Now the wolves are at the door. The Vision Pro is the first AR headset worth criticizing, but it’s also $3500 and selling like hemorrhoid cream. The creative community that sustained Apple through its darkest years is genuinely pissed off and not without reason. And the Silly Con Valley fixation on AI as the new blockchain, the new Bitcoin, the new get rich quick scheme that doesn’t require actually making anything, means that now Apple has to either keep up with producing bullshit as a service or craft a meaningful story as to why their vision for machine learning is actually better and more sensible and safer and reliable. And there are rumblings that like so many head coaches in the age of NIL, Tim Cook is looking at the changed landscape and thinking “this would be a lot easier if it were someone else’s problem,” and at that point, who knows. It’s not hard to see a new Amelio or Spindler running the company into the ground – after all, their dominance is largely American; the rest of the world runs on Android and WhatsApp. I could get by without Apple on a personal level – it would be less elegant, more of a pain in the ass, and my whole life would be constantly filleted for advertising and training large language models, but I could get by. (The Google Pixel 8A is actually a very attractive device that should be lighting a fire under Apple in the $500 space, but who even knows if they want to sell a phone for less than four figures any more.) But my entire professional livelihood for that entire 27 years has relied on the Mac and other Apple goods, and I have probably fifteen years before I can retire.
I really need Cupertino not to fuck this up.