How Will Apple Change the World Next?

Apple’s product launches deliver leaps forward that are both technological and philosophical

Photo by Ales Nesetril on Unsplash

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with Apple products. On one hand, even as a member of Gen Z, I’m not exactly what you would call a tech person. I’ve spent as much of my life online as most millennials, but I’m sometimes embarrassed at just how much of this digital world still hovers above my head. I don’t know how to code, and I expect I’ll never have the mind to take apart one of these computers and put it back together.

And yet, when September rolls around, I can’t help but get caught up in the zeitgeist of Apple’s new product releases. I watch videos that traffic in technical terms I can barely understand, and I feel an unexpected sort of excitement at the incremental changes between frame rates, screen resolutions, and camera specifications that each new iteration introduces. It isn’t because the leap between the iPhone 14 Pro to 15 Pro has represented a drastic difference in my day-to-day life that these new product launches excite me.

To look at the last few years’ worth of updates from Apple, it would be easy for many to believe that the company’s improvements are only incremental. In some ways, they are. There are predictable advancements in battery life and photography capabilities. Buttons are removed for efficiency’s sake and a few years later new ones are enthusiastically welcomed in their wake.

From year to year, it’s true that these leaps aren’t always seismic. Gone are the days when each new iPhone represented a colossal leap forward in computing technology, many will argue. But in this common critical complaint lies a nearsightedness. The criticism is built on the notion that each year we should expect technological improvements that shake the ground beneath our feet. That every revolution around the sun should amount to irreversible changes in the way we live our lives.

The mentality has helped usher in a culture where our tech companies are effectively forced into releasing new products at this frenetic pace. We’ve moved a light year beyond the era when seasons passed and the world could remain a stagnant place.

Septembers mark the new year in more ways than one. They mark the return to school for many kids across the globe. They often coincide with the Jewish New Year, too. But they also delineate the moments when new technologies sweep in to reorient the world. These annual, vertiginous shifts have become our expectation.

Our frenzied rate of change is so staggering that we’ve become desensitized to what it means when AI grows in prevalence, VR headsets begin to appear, and the phones in our pockets start to record videos we can reinhabit already today if we merely put on the company’s futuristic white helmet for a few minutes. And still, each year’s product releases are reliably greeted with complaints that people were, “expecting more.” We earnestly lament that we’re not moving even faster.

Oftentimes, the biggest reveals of Apple’s new events are spoiled weeks and months beforehand. The rumors around the line of iPhone 16s that will release on Monday predate the phones by entire years. As with the Christmas music that seems to inch further up the calendar with each approaching holiday season, the fanfare around September’s tech unveilings has led to a whole subculture in which writers and content creators begin to speculate about the products long before they actually hit store shelves.

Some of the improvements expected to be announced this year follow a familiar pattern. Cameras will improve alongside battery life, and we may or may not see the introduction of a new button. The reports still vary significantly. But one source of consistency between the disparate spectra of predictions is that we can almost certainly anticipate the official launch of what Apple is calling, “Apple Intelligence.”

Apple rarely makes any decisions as a company without forethought or symbolism behind them. Why exactly they’ve chosen to differ from their tradition of Tuesday product unveilings has given way to a hotbed of rampant speculation. Some believe that it means we’re in store for a paradigm shift come Monday. To others, such lofty hopes sound superstitious. 

As artificial intelligence has pervaded more and more of our daily lives, the company that brought us both iPods and iMacs has remained suspiciously quiet when the subject is introduced in interviews. Apple representatives have skirted around the questions with a political ambiguity. And yet, every time the subject reemerges, their attempts to meander and equivocate are betrayed by a characteristic — almost eerie — confidence. In one telling moment, Tim Cooke audibly laughed when asked about how the company had lagged behind before reassuring the interviewer that Apple hadn’t forgotten about AI, and was simply working on its own take on the technology behind the scenes.

Apple has a history of judiciously delaying the release of the same features as its competitors. The tech giant rarely leaps at opportunities prematurely.

From portable music devices to FaceID and Smart Watches, Apple has dipped its toes into each new technology with poise rather than haste. The company is conscientious about the way it braves new waters. It creates boats that it’s sure will endure beyond the horizon before beginning the journey on the first makeshift vessel it can find. Their approach to technological development is an elegant embodiment of the, “Just because we can doesn’t mean we should” philosophy.

Of course, Apple bears its share of responsibility for this digitized world we’re now living in. But it’s routinely exhibited a restraint and a prioritization of privacy that’s distinguished it from companies that have taken more full-speed-ahead approaches. Compared with OpenAI, for example, Apple’s attitude toward this new AI technology appears downright cautious and measured.

Apple isn’t typically the first to cross the finish line, but there’s a reason that it’s achieved such a juggernaut status within the world of tech. Apple has held off on offering their version of artificial intelligence this long because they want their pass to be so intuitive and familiar that these AI tools can finally begin feeling commonplace. Just as iPhones progressed from a luxury item to a source of passing shrugs within only a couple of years, artificial intelligence will soon start to seem mundane.

Apple didn’t release the first smartphone the moment that they were able to. They waited until they’d honed the product for long enough to guarantee its takeover.

Whether AI image generators, ChatGPT, or this burgeoning new generation of bots and scammers, few of us haven’t encountered AI in our lives to some degree or another. But Apple’s Monday announcement may be what it takes to skyrocket the services to a place of ubiquity.

It’s not every year that Apple changes the world. To look back at where we stood as a species only a decade ago, though, it’s clear that much of where we are today falls at the feet of the tech titan. Sometimes, the transitions between years are so enormous that they call for anthropological inflection points. Pauses where we sit and ponder this world we’re rapidly pioneering. Pauses we’ll never grant ourselves.

From the advent of home computers to the phones inside our pockets, so much of this strange internet age stands directly on the company’s shoulders. We’re digital creatures, and it’s these new products and their clockwork releases that tell our story now.