Every so often there is a huge event hosted by Apple where they wheel out all the stuff they’ve been working on, because of course they do. It’s marketing — invite a ton of press to an event and they’ll write up all kinds of content about what’s about to hit the market. Apple takes the initial reactions from this press to fine-tune the product before it gets released.
In the early days, these events were loaded with the Apple Fanboys — the original draft of the modern-day nerd who spent a lot of time thinking about computers and all the custom stuff you could do with them. Apple stans are still around but they are more about flexing the expensive stuff they can afford as Apple isn’t exactly known for their custom builds.
This year’s event they announced that the iPad would finally get a calculator app. Mind you, this is the same vent they announced the iPod and iPhone at years ago — stuff that changed the world.
Also: you can now schedule when iMessages are sent and place app icons anywhere on the screen. Not to brag, but I’ve been doing this on my not-apple phone for years.
This is what passes for innovation. No wonder people are keeping their tech for longer — there’s nothing worth upgrading for. It says a lot when the biggest competitor digital camera companies are facing is film. Or that there is a YEARS long wait to get your record produced and pressed on vinyl.
And as much as I love rolling with anecdotal observations, people who are way smarter than I are observing it in real time. “Economists have long struggled to understand why aggregate productivity growth has dropped in recent decades while the number of new patents filed has steadily increased. I offer an explanation for this puzzling divergence: the creativity embodied in US patents has dropped dramatically over time.”
Innovation was never about technology. Innovation is about challenging the way you think in a world that fetishizes the status quo. Innovation is about doing something wholly new and insane and “you can’t be serious…” but yeah, I am, and I can see that it is making you a bit nervous.
Instead, we have this “innovation” to see who can find ways of making stuff quickly and cheaply to extort the largest profit margins from a population who is making do with the “whatever” options they get served. Nothing is new, nothing is innovative. There is nothing on the horizon that will change the way we live like the iPhone did. And don’t come at me with the headset tech or the AI stuff we’re kicking around, they are little more than the same ideas in a different suit.
I think, I know, we fear creativity. The true, base, archetypal drive to create something unique from the way we observe the world. There is no room to think expansively, nowhere to do it safely, and no audience we can trust with genuinely new ideas. I can’t blame you. In centuries past those with the “new ideas” were thrown off boats, to the wolves, or torched at the stake. Today, we risk unemployment and homelessness which I think is far more horrifying than having your guts dragged out by a wolf.
And it’s not just you and the hobby you’re avoiding. It is everywhere. From the stockroom to the executive suite, creativity doesn’t happen when there are monthly revenue goals and quarterly quotas. If a campaign is yielding a 5% conversion rate and your profit margin is perfectly balanced, why would you want to change a damn thing? A creative risk could mean a drop in performance or a loss of customers. Then again, it could also mean discovering the next iPhone.