Some would call me an Apple fan boy. A long time ago, exasperated by another computer operating system, I switched to what Apple then called the Power Book (with Mac OS) and I’ve never looked back.
I currently own a Mac Mini, a MacBook Air, an iPad, an iPhone, an Apple Watch, an Apple TV, various accessories and an Apple display.
I also use multiple Apple applications. I even own an old click-wheel iPod music player, which I could still use (if I could find the obsolete firewire cable).
Apple, the company, celebrated its 50th anniversary on April 1. In its history, the company came close to bankruptcy and then welcomed back one of its founders, Steve Jobs — who would go on to become an icon in the world of business. Apple also became one of the most innovative and valuable companies in the world. (The investment website, Motley Fool, calculated that $2,000 invested in Apple stock in 1980 would today be worth $5.18 million.)
Apple changed our world, beginning with Jobs’ tongue-in-check introduction of three devices that would play music, surf the internet and serve as a portable phone.
Apple junkies know the three devices turned out to be one device, and the iPhone (and other smartphones) would revolutionize how we do almost everything.
I can’t even count all the ways I use mine — banking, editing and posting photos, email, shopping, reading the news and books, cuing up music, recordkeeping, word processing … it’s a long list. Sometimes, I even use it as a telephone.
There’s something in the neighborhood of 2 million apps in Apple’s App Store, and Apple reported selling 247 million iPhones in 2025 alone — and 3 billion since the iPhone was launched in 2007.
Everywhere you go, for better and worse, people are staring at their phones, which means they have less time to talk to other people — or to reflect on who or what is important in their lives.
Even if we can’t resist, many of us now wonder if we have become prisoners of our screens. We even have developed a name for it — doomscrolling (which says something about the phone and something about the times in which we live).
“We’re drugging ourselves with dopamine,” said the Wall Street Journal in an opinion piece this month. “Even grandma is glued to the screen.”
For a long time, Apple has maintained a hip and trendy image. It was Apple that sponsored the iconic “1984” Super Bowl commercial, and it was Apple that sponsored the “think different” and “here’s to the crazy ones” campaigns, ads designed to cause people who bought Apple products to feel kinship with Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Pablo Picasso, Muhammed Ali, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.
In recent months, however, the company’s flirtations with Donald Trump and with the Chinese government left some to wonder whether Apple was still cool or just another corporation eager to inflate its bottom line.
But no one can deny that Apple’s innovations — the iPhone, the iPad, various iterations of the MacBook, iPods, iTunes, its own silicon chip — would become touchstones to new ways of doing things. A whole cottage industry has grown up around chronicling what Apple does and what it might do in the future.
In the beginning, we thought technology would transform our democracy. Until I saw the often-anonymous nastiness of the first online comments, I believed the internet would make possible this wonderful sharing of ideas and good tidings.
What the internet did instead was to allow people to wander off into their own silos, joining groups created to validate people’s biases and allow them to adopt their own set of “facts.”
As audiences went their separate ways, many from the silos soon decided they could do without mainstream news organizations — which left fewer people to report the news, whether it be investigative reports on government screwups or scores from last night’s high school football games.
At this point, not many would say this new way of receiving (or not receiving) information has made us more content. The conveniences afforded us by new technology are amazing. The way technology distracts us and contributes to divisions in our country? Not so much.
But it doesn’t matter. The genie is out of that bottle, and there’s no going back.
Still, some people are trying to recapture the old days, finding ways to pursue a less digital lifestyle. Vinyl records are making a comeback. People promote using a pen or pencil to draw or maintain a journal. At least a few photographers are rediscovering film.
But I must confess. I won’t be giving up my Apple products anytime soon. I like the rush of new information, the way the same work product shows up on all my devices and the many other conveniences associated with computers and the internet.
I do have friends who complain about the rush to new technology – though it doesn’t stop them from emailing and texting and sharing web links now and again.
Pete Golis is a columnist for The Press Democrat. Email him at golispd@gmail.com
You can email letters to the editor to letters@pressdemocrat.com
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