The Future Of Everything

Futurism is a notoriously unreliable trade. For the best results, canny practitioners produce as many wide-ranging predictions as possible, then conveniently only point back to the ones they got right in hindsight. But the surest way to guess wrong is to extrapolate directly from what has come before, assuming everything will persist as it has along straight lines. The world likes to take the scenic route, with its myriad twists and turns, and sometimes even picks another destination along the way.

This past year, we have seen either the preludes or culminations of such presumptions reaching their upending. Apple specifically has found itself entangled in some messy product line reshuffling, under protest from pockets of its retail workers, and legally threatened by both competitors and governments in order to change how it runs its business and aspects of how it makes its products. Next year may bring the end of the Lightning port, the exclusive iOS App Store, and even the enclosed battery. Meanwhile, other tech titans have seen their projects or fortunes founder with ill-fated transitions (Meta's VR push), money-losing promotions (Amazon's Alexa), and whatever is happening in social media as Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Snap, and even former outliers like Mastodon are dealing with whipsaw challenges. AI is supposedly coming for our graphic artists, our newspapers, and our school essays. Supply chain snarls! Armed robots! What kind of future are we facing?

We will take the measure of what Apple looks to accomplish in 2023, and even beyond, and thus how we might position in turn. We will look at the shifting sands for the tech-connected business (which is basically all of them by now) and where opportunity lies during these periodic reorientations. And we will look inward, to the role and format of this very group in keeping abreast of those changes as they come.

After the locked-down constraints of '20-21, I hoped that this year would bring a return to better attended in-person meetings by we Apple Professionals. But for whatever reasons – timing, location, etc – that has not proven out. So we will take some time to discuss what might be the best format for this group and these topics going forward. Chat server? Podcast? Streaming? I encourage anyone who has not been able to join us of late to chime in via message or comments as to what you would like to see next year, and we will share some ideas perhaps in late January. But I still hope to see you tonight for some cajun spice and cool brews as we plot our way through the uncertain dark ahead.