Apple’s done innovating? Be serious

Everytime anyone says there’s no innovation left at Apple, I think of the big innovation that made so much of the technology we take for granted possible back in 1895, when Guglielmo Marconi successfully transmitted a radio signal over two miles. 

After all, if you’re in the mood for lazy analysis, you could argue that everything that ever followed that invention is just the same rehashed idea, all the way from Bluetooth to Wi-Fi, TV, LiDAR, and 5G. It’s all just Marconi redux. Everything we’ll ever do already happened yesterday, it’s all over. 

Of course, I’m not in the mood for that kind of analysis. Because not only is it not true at all, it also ignores what innovation actually is. Innovation, in truth, is a substance that happens in small tweaks, not broad strokes, and what look like huge steps forward today usually rely on a whole subsystem of smaller innovations that paved the way. (Marconi relied on a whole host of innovations taken from research into electricity, for example.)

The power of nothing

All the same, in our post-truth era, the most tangible realities seem to have become those most easily defined by ignorance, in part because the great thing about untruths is that arguing against them makes you look too cool for school, no one likes you and you have no friends. “What are you? Some kind of liberal?” 

Ignorance is bliss, and people seeking to hang onto their quiet lives stay quiet, leaving headline writers free to appeal to prejudice because it’s easier than educating, illuminating, or campaigning for their audiences. I considered this while reaching for the empty space on my shelves where my Vision Pro headset would almost certainly sit if Apple had done the right thing and sent one to me for “research purposes” (It’s not too late – Ed.). 

“This is just electricity,” I imagine saying in a scathing tone as I fling the expensive headset to the ground. “There’s nothing new here,” I might spit, making a disappointed click and muttering about Marconi. Of course, even electricity probably started with a single, flint-driven spark.

Spoiled brats

In truth, we’ve been spoiled — not by an endless supply of things that genuinely are new and exciting, but by an unyielding buffet of electrical gadgets that claim to be. Many of them are pretty great, but tech does tend to suffer from the PJ Barnum factor with a multitude of promises made but little deliverance. (Apple has recently been guilty of that with contextually-savvy Siri in Apple Intelligence.)

What happens when you over-promise and under-deliver is that you erode trust in what you claim. You also whet the hunger of your audience for things that do meet the mark, even when they don’t yet exist. 

Marketing promise by marketing promise, you destroy the thrill of the new, replacing it with a dull ding as your empty tryst meets base metal and the spark don’t strike. It makes people think there’s nothing going on; it takes the fun out of things.

This, of course, is really what people who claim Apple is done innovating are thinking about. It’s not so much that Apple has stopped making things, because it quite provably has not — unless you think the billions invested in this year’s all-new C1 modem didn’t create a new technology or consider the superb M4 chips to be nothing new at all. The company continues to innovate and invent…

Reality distortion

But we don’t care about that because we’ve become addicted to the big promises. New phone factors will change our lives, this computer will make you tall, that tablet can make you irresistible to would-be love interests, or even those tariffs that raise the prices you pay will somehow make everything great again. 

We’ve been over-sold to the extent that we confuse reality with promise, and many have become so dedicated to believing what they want to believe that even a provable counter-argument can’t quite cut through.  We’re all lost in our received illusions, waiting for Marconi to turn flint sparks into communication signals until we’re surrounded by so much communication we cease to see the forest for the trees.

But the more cynical we become, the more tightly that fake reality grips. It doesn’t matter whether it’s true. Everything is experiential, nothing matters anymore. Nothing counts.

Rock and roll

Anyway, coming in the next few months will be a huge wave of new Apple products, including new inventions and product families; even then there will still be some who say the company has done nothing new. Perhaps they have a point. Perhaps there has been nothing new since that first primitive flint spark. Perhaps it really is time humans returned to banging the stones. 

The next few months will again prove that sentiment wrong.

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