Think Different was about respect for creators. It was about creativity, unconventional thinking and real courage, to change people’s lives, turn the tide, bring education and humanity and a better understanding of the world to the masses. Think Different was about having people like that as your heroes, and wanting them and other people to have a tool that met them halfway and let them focus on what mattered to them.
It was a justification to do something differently than the behemoth.
Today’s event was about an Apple that may still have their sights of some important values compared to other behemoths, but where the focus is on the fervent belief that whole-banana-ism needs to extend to every corner of everyone’s life. Behemoths like Apple, Amazon, Google and Microsoft act as if they need to have fingers in every pie, provide solutions to every problem, build complete stacks.
Even people who loved Think Different and who still love Apple know there’s more to reading News than Apple News+ (or indeed the normal Apple News app), more to games than Apple Arcade (and indeed indie games have been turning conventions inside out for decades) and more to TV than Apple TV+. Regardless of whether they include good products, Apple is starting to insult both the people who use their products and the heroes they hopefully still respect.
The Internet has torn down walls and connected people, and even though everyone has a full stack and a streaming platform, no single place is a catch-all any longer. Every bucket of “exclusives” is a dated prayer for a dream of control and containment and world domination. What we all crave is for a world that understands interests and respects choice and diversity, where you choose what you want without juggling worries of incompatibility. Not snooty, self-important “curators”, claiming themselves the world’s greatest in fields they have not entered into before, when they can’t even keep fake “antivirus” apps out of their own decade-old App Store, stabilize spiraling software quality years in the making, and when their user interface vocabulary has you pressing a “Share” button to use a “Find on page” command.