Let the tech year unfold...
The new Apple event was announced a couple of days
back. And my last tech-episode on the podcast got me thinking about this year
and the current "trends" in tech.
I believe that Apple has one of the biggest
challenges you could ever hear in front of them: adapt to survive WHILE BEING
ON TOP. Steve Jobs was an amazing underdog, a creative mastermind that rose to
the top of the tech community at his time and shot Apple like a rocket to the
summit of the world as one of the most influential and prosperous companies
ever... However, that IS NOT the company that Tim Cook has had to deal with.
Apple is now working in saturated laptop and smartphone markets and is trying
to maintain its innovation and creativity.
People think it is easy to stay on top... Amazon
has had to get all kinds of creative by entering product line, new services
offers and buying pieces of the market they compete in as they did with Whole
Foods. Facebook is saved by the quality of companies like Instagram and
WhatsApp that they have purchased and make people who have left more and
more Facebook to at some point find a use or reason to return and forget
temporarily how little trust people have left for the platform. Samsung has
been able to make people forget and forgive their life-risking mistakes of the
past in a very Samsung way, which is by (after they apologized) drowning it
under an enormous amount of product announcements.
And here stands Apple, at the top of the hill in
every sense. Never before has this company been so heavily criticized, with so
many people wanting to watch it either fail and say they saw it coming, or
succeed and say that they saw it coming… Some people and articles are so blatantly
bias against that the people bias in favor truly seem like much more sensible
and rational people to argue with. It is clear decisions that Apple makes are
divisive by nature, as by any tech company that makes a product that YOU decide
whether you support with your hard-earned money.
Into this crazy, dynamic reality comes the foldable
phone hype with its insanity: they are plastic-screened, crease-hinged,
horrible-softwared, thickly-expensive, experiment of a phone that should not be
sold to general consumers. I do not agree with this trend being set into the
wild without being “tested” by the tech community. This is a necessary step in
innovation, but it also is a crazy idea to lure a group of people that will buy
this. Consumers are not guinea pigs... I believe that every day that goes by we
get closer to the next great tech product, the new innovation, the new software
or hardware or technology. But that is not today and THIS is not it...
I am sure that this year will have great software,
awesome products, interesting new concepts and outstanding third party apps.
But the way that I measure tech today is if it does or doesn't excite me, and
this does not move one thread of excitement in my body. The Samsung Galaxy S10e
excites me, last year’s iPad Pro, the new Tesla Model Y, Google’s Pixel camera
and Call Screen capabilities. There is a lot to be excited about… Let’s hope
for the best this 2019.
