The iPod at 20: the one that started it all

Apple provided an unsolicited reminder on Monday of just how much disposable income I’ve channeled its way over the last 20 years. It wasn’t pretty. The company’s latest Event (grandiose capital E intended) opened with a slick video of a bespectacled youth in his garage (Silicon Valley, we presume) firing up old Apple devices to sample their start-up chimes, thumbwheel clicks and even the snap of an AirPods case being closed. The samples were then combined into a piece of vibrant groove music with which to fanfare CEO Tim Cook, apparently standing in a field outside the Apple campus in Cupertino, for his introduction to the company’s presentation of new MacBooks for, mostly, creatives.

As the 90-second clip spun past, I caught sight of an original ‘jelly-coloured’ iMac, and the first iPod, which was launched 20 years ago today. These were the gateway drugs that hooked me on Apple, committing me to at least three generations of iMac, four iPods and their natural successor, the iPhone, along with iPads, MacBooks-numerous, a MacMini, and an entire drawer full of accessories for all of them. All in the space of 20 years. I shudder to think how much it has all cost.

To go back a little further, I started using Apple products professionally in the early 1990s, learning the art of desktop publishing and layout work for magazines and print advertising on the job thanks to intuitive hardware and software that made it so easy. On my first morning in Sky TV’s Creative Services department I was sat in front of a Mac, shown how to use QuarkXPress and Adobe Illustrator, and six weeks later I was driving past a 96-sheet billboard for The Simpsons on the A3 that I’d designed myself. I would subsequently spend hours drooling at Apple laptops in the window of a high-end computer dealer in Chiswick, like Mike Myers coveting the white Stratocaster in Wayne’s World. Alas, they were all well beyond my pay packet. Then, in 1998, Apple launched the iMac, and instantly made home computer ownership fun, accessible and, to a certain extent, affordable. I eventually bought one in early 2001 when I moved to Silicon Valley myself. My apartment was a 10-minute straight-line drive from the Apple HQ in Cupertino, which meant that I was soon drinking the local Kool-Aid. 

Armed with a relocation allowance, I bought an iMac from the local Fry’s Electronics toy shed, the very first PC I’d ever owned that hadn’t been provided for me by an employer. By acquiring that iMac I’d bought into the “digital lifestyle” that Steve Jobs had started pitching. “Rather than just hear about megahertz and megabytes,” an Apple press release for the iMac trilled at the time, “customers can now learn and experience the things they can actually do with a computer, like make movies, burn custom music CDs, and publish their digital photos on a personal website.” In other words, a ‘digital hub’. All these things were still embryonic (especially the idea of uploading anything to this new-fangled thing called ‘the Internet’), but Jobs had the uncanny ability of envisaging the technology people needed - or didn’t know they needed yet - and unlike most major figures in the tech world, had the charisma to sell it to them. 

Even in 2001, some time after the Dot Com bubble had burst, Jobs was able to apply his quasi-rock star appeal (well, as close to rock star as a technology leader could resemble) to turning the functional business tool that most PCs were into a desirable piece of a consumer electronics. Key to this was a shift in connectivity that Jobs had foreseen, particularly enabled by the emergence of FireWire technology that could attach digital cameras and other peripherals to PCs, enabling content to be quickly extracted and then, with easy-to-use software, turned into something creative. Thus, he commenced the ‘consumerisation’ of professional applications, turning applications like Final Cut Pro into iMovie, which enabled anyone to make something polished of their holiday videos (the same philosophy was applied to making music with GarageBand, launched in 2004, providing anyone with a Mac - and, now, even an iPhone and an iPad - with the means to record their own compositions).

2001 was a significant year in many ways. Whether it was the arrival of the actual year of Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey, or the first year-proper of the 21st century, in technology terms, it was the year that Apple moved into fifth gear. When I arrived in California in March that year, the previous decades consumer tech boom was already giving way to other things, like biotech and healthtech (“Tech of all kinds – we already sound like 15th century Mexico,”, if I can borrow Boris Johnson’s dad joke the other day…). Apple, however, was laying the foundations of the imperiousness that, by 2020, made it the first US company to exceed a market cap of $2 trillion. Today it has a higher value than the GDP of Russia, Canada, South Korea and Italy.

On 9 January, 2001, Jobs announced iTunes, an app partly purloined from elsewhere (SoundJam) which, in a music industry-baiting move, enabled CDs to be ripped using the latest version of the iMac’s optical drive, making it easy to build-up a personal digital music library, eventually allowing it to burn compilation CDs like mix tapes. I’d previously seen music stored digitally on a PC at former Skids frontman and TV presenter Richard Jobson’s house, and was enamoured by the idea of a digital jukebox. I didn’t care, particularly, about any perceived loss of sound quality from listening to compressed digital music as I just loved the simplicity of clickable access to music. 

What was missing, however, was portability. By the mid-1990s, the travelling music fan still had to pack CDs and even cassettes to listen to on clunky portable players. Sony’s MiniDisc at least attempted to miniaturise music into a smaller form factor, while Philips’ failed Digital Compact Cassette was merely a means of extending patent revenue from the humble magnetic tape with the addition of digital recording. Audiophiles gave both DCC and MiniDisc a notable swerve. The advent of the MP3 digital audio standard in 1994 led to various companies launching players, like Diamond’s Rio in 1998. Most, Steve Jobs told his executive team, according to biographer Walter Isaacson, “truly sucked”, and tasked Apple to produce one of its own. 

Jobs pulled together a team that included former Philips manager Tony Fadell (who’d worked on the Velo and Nino Windows CE devices I helped launch in the UK) and Apple’s hardware engineering lead, Jon Rubinstein, to come up with something better, challenging them to have something ready for an October unveiling ahead of the Christmas sales season. Isaacson’s seminal (and substantial) authorised biography Steve Jobs explains in forensic detail the process that saw the product take shape, with Jobs himself giving - as was his tendency - fastidious daily feedback on what he, as a music fan, wanted from the device, prescribing his desire to make the product simple to use, with navigation restricted to a “three clicks” maximum. Another of Jobs’ insights was that the device had to work with the iTunes app on the iMac, making the computer the primary interface for music library management. Further discussions were held, with Jobs now adding his views on the minutiae of things like the colour of the accompanying headphones, with Apple design chief Jonny Ive throwing in his thoughts on the product’s white-and-polished stainless steel colour scheme. Then came a back-and-forth about the device’s marketing, with the eventual execution of “1,000 songs in your pocket” emanating from one of the Apple CEO’s encounters with Toshiba in Japan, who first flagged the idea of a 5-gigabyte hard drive that could store such an amount of music.

On 23 October 2001, the result of all this rapid endeavour was revealed. Barely a month after 9/11, a world numbed by the atrocity was introduced to the iPod. This would be the device which, arguably, set in train Apple’s evolution and light the touch paper of a technology-led transformation of cultural life and even social behaviour. Journalists had been invited to Cupertino for what was, by today’s standards, a relatively modest Apple event, but one in which they’d been teased cryptically - “Hint: it’s not a Mac.” On stage, Jobs theatrically produced from his jeans a small white device to which he  declared: “This amazing little device holds a thousand songs, and it goes right in my pocket.” 

Compared to the 160GB capacity iPods Apple would later offer, the 5GB hard drive of that first model seems modest now, but surely a music player capable of storing 1,000 songs had instant appeal? Not, according to some critics, who branded the device too expensive at $399 and limited in what it could do. Some even went as far as suggesting that Jobs and Apple had, once again, bitten off more than the brand could chew, the last time being the failed Newton PDA. But Jobs stuck to his conviction: “Music is a part of everyone’s life,” he said, “and because it’s a part of everyone’s life, it’s a very large target market all around the world. It knows no boundaries.” 

We didn’t know it at the time, but this was a very loaded statement about where Apple would go as it broadened out of being just the ‘cool’ computer brand. Sales of that first iPod, and the quickly added second, 10GB, model weren’t stellar, but in the months after 9/11 the world understandably had other things on its mind. Apple, though, had done it again, introducing something that already existed and created a category out of it. History has been more kind to the first iPods, with many believing that it was the first truly great MP3 player. Jobs’ instincts about the digital music player field had been right. The iPod was a milestone in portable audio, but more importantly, it sparked Apple’s transformation from relatively esoteric computer brand, somewhat secretly - and smugly - coveted by creative professionals, to become one of the biggest companies on the planet. 

That first iPod and its many descendants would ultimately give way to the iPhone (the iPod Touch is even a hybrid of both), in which Apple repeated the principle all over again and reinvented the nascent smartphone category which, in turn, would turbocharge the digital lifestyle Jobs had imagined with the iMac to begin with. It’s worth remembering that in October 2001 there was no social media as we know it today, and Napster had been a relatively momentary irritation to the music industry, so the idea of a pocket device that could connect to always-on streaming services over super-fast, low-latency mobile networks was a long, long way off. Facebook was, back then, just a college dorm idea, so people weren’t uploading their holiday photographs to the Internet as they do now. Television was still linear, so in 2001, the notion of binge-watching an entire season of, say, The Sopranos, while sitting on the top deck of a bus was, frankly, not even a concept.

The iPhone has, of course, coalesced many functionalities into one platform - music, camera, television, cinema, e-mail, Web browsing and so on - but without the iPod to begin with, Apple might not have gone anywhere near phones, AirPods, iPads, TV set-top boxes or any one of the myriad product lines that I seem to have spent a stupid amount of my hard-earned on over 20 years. And you know what? I don’t regret a single penny of it. At one point in time I had the crazy idea of buying several iPod Shuffles, the inch-square music players with a 2GB capacity that were available in six colours. The idea was to have different genres of music on each of them, to be chosen per occasion or mood, like Thunderbirds’ Virgil Tracy choosing a pod (that word again) for Thunderbird 2 to fit the mission. Ludicrous, I know, but this is Apple’s marketing strength for you. While I resisted that idea, I’ve certainly succumbed to the iPod’s appeal, owning four. 

© Simon Poulter 2021

At the beginning of September I was digging around in that drawer of Apple bits-and-pieces and found the second iPod I owned - a third-generation, 30GB model from 2003, a fifth-generation model with a whopping 80GB capacity, a 16GB fourth-generation iPod Nano bought, on a whim, in Los Angeles, and a even cuter seventh-generation Nano bought, again, on a US trip in 2012. While hardly Indiana Jones stumbling across the Lost Ark, the discovery of that later Nano found its way into my pocket for the start of my return to office commuting. The firmware or the Bluetooth or some such aspect of its performance needs upgrading, but it still works. That, though, wasn’t the attraction of reviving it: it was the fact that the neat little music player, just 9cm long and weighing little more than a stack of credit cards, was such a sexy piece of technology, with its anodised aluminium casing and flash memory replacing the weighty hard drive of the original iPod.

When the definitive history of Apple Computer gets written, it will no doubt be the iPhone that commands the most attention, but the iPod deserves its place. In fact, more than that - it deserves acknowledgement for its singular contribution to culture. It has become, according to Leander Kahney, who wrote The Cult Of Mac, “the signature technology of the digital music era” and “profoundly” changed music culture. While Apple’s appeal until the iPod and certainly the iMac had certainly been amongst professional creatives, the iPod had a universal appeal. The Queen, it is claimed, has owned one, and the late German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld reportedly possessed more than 70 containing his entire CD collection, transporting them around the world in their own suitcase. “We had no idea this thing would get this huge,” Apple marketing executive Phil Schiller once told USA Today. 

In his book, Kahney draws attention to how the iPod would impact music listening in general, arguing that it ripped up the decades-old custom of listening to entire albums from start to finish and (even if ageing hipsters like me have embraced the vinyl revival), and that record ownership could only be visualised by shelved libraries of albums on various formats. Apart from anything else, Kahney says, with those white headphones plugged in, and the library stored on that hard drive, no-one needed to know what you were listening to, though as we all know, aggravating sound leakage from headphones readily gives away someone’s musical tastes, especially on public transport. Kaheny does, though, make the interesting point that the iPod may have even opened up musical tastes as people started experimenting with genres they’d previously not dipped into. The iPod also became a replacement for radio programming; ‘podcasts’ derived their name from the device, becoming an online sub-culture in their own right, with professional and amateur productions of all kinds covering every possible niche and mainstream interest; DJs took iPods into clubs to play tracks from them instead of turntables, mixing between multiple devices; and you could say that the iPod proliferated the entire business of music being available legally online. 

Whether Steve Jobs’ intention, in 1998 when he unveiled the iMac, was to turn Apple into the giant it is today is not fully known. The iPod, though, gave that process a significant kick, although compared with today’s marketing expenditure for Apple products, the company only spent $25 million on launching the first player in 2001, building its market share largely through word of mouth. Experts agree that the iPod’s appeal grew somewhat organically - an incongruous point given how Apple markets its products today. But whether by instinct or design, Jobs revelled in the “disruption” that technology wizards like talking about. 

Apple started out challenging the notion that computers could only be beige, and that managing them had to be clunky. Steve Jobs saw that technology offered something more rewarding in people’s lives - ironically, a vision that has proven stupendously rewarding for Apple itself.  The iPod was, perhaps, the point of origin for that vision, and I don’t think it hyperbolic to say that has directly influenced much of Apple’s product development history over the last 20 years. I don’t think it hyperbolic, either, to claim that the iPod and its lineage has contributed to a single-handed transformation of modern life. Which, I know, is quite a claim.

I'm back, back, BACK - to the living room

Picture: Microsoft

It’s not often that I return to work from a holiday and not feel a pang of regret. Or, at least, exhale a grumpy “frnrhhhrrr” as the morning alarm intrudes my first morning back after a final blissful night of not-working sleep. This time I didn't fall back into slumber and therefore waking an hour later with a lot of agitated F-wordery in the manner of Hugh Grant in Four Weddings And A Funeral. No, this time, none of that. My two-week staycation did the job perfectly, and I returned to work yesterday relaxed and refreshed, as holidays are supposed to render you. Well, I say "returned to work" but, er, not back at work, as in the place of. That, once more, is as it has been since early April - the living room. And it will continue to be for the foreseeable future, despite Boris Johnson advising Britain to “cautiously” go back to work from the beginning of this month.

My company - very wisely - is, like many others, neither encouraging the mass return to office life nor extensively facilitating it, for now. Plans are being drawn up to make it happen when the time is right, but on the basis that productivity-wise, we're all doing alright from home and have been since March, so there's no immediate requirement to bring everyone back in. Not that doing so would be straightforward. When I started my new job in April, the whole lockdown thing was still only envisaged as temporary. Coronavirus deaths were low - England had recorded just 403 by 5th April -  but with exponential leaps of 5, 14, 25, 70 and 188 in the week leading up to it. The total UK death toll is now over 46,000, with 311,641 cases reported. Deaths are down, but the number of cases is rising. With that in mind, Boris and his ministers would still love us back in our offices, eating in local restaurants or buying lunch at sandwich shops, spending money again on suits and business shirts, and getting them dry cleaned in the same vicinity, thus stimulating the sub-economies that exist around places of work, especially in cities.

However, the appetite amongst both employers and employees to restart commuting, and therefore mingling with The Virus, is decidedly low. Analysis by The Guardian found that working-from-home would remain the norm for many big companies at least until September - a month later than the 1 August date Boris had set to get people back into the workplace. Some companies, like Google and the NatWest Group, have even said that home working would remain in place until next year. For many employees, the kitchen, spare room or, if they’re lucky, home office, will remain the de facto place of work for the foreseeable future. Some companies are even reinforcing the WFH culture, providing employees with subsidised desks, office chairs and Bluetooth headsets. Others, though, are trying to lure staff back into the office by offering free food and drink, and other perks. Investment bank JP Morgan has installed thermal cameras and stationed a nurse in the lobby of its Canary Wharf office. The accountancies PwC and EY as well as the banks Lloyds, HSBC and Barclays are all working on the principle that limited returns to office working will take place in September. But it’s still all very tentative. All major employers, with substantial amounts of office real estate, still have to get their heads around social distancing. In order to reopen, shops and restaurants have had to go to extraordinary lengths to put down direction arrows on floors, install plastic screens or simply provide staff with PPE. Offices have the added complexity of how to transport hundreds of employees to office floors by lift, even if the general government wisdom is that employees sitting amongst each other for eight hours a day should be safe.

Getting to your desk is one thing, but getting to the front door is another thing entirely. Commuting by public transport has not - and is unlikely to - returned to pre-pandemic levels. Our street serves testament to this, normally being used as a free car park for the local Zone 4 railway station a five minute walk away. Even taking August into account, parking is still freely available to us residents. People, clearly, are not going back to work. In the City of London, more than half a million people usually work in the financial district, almost exclusively travelling by public transport, but, according to the Institute of Directors, there isn’t likely to be a “mad rush back to the office” this month, according to its chief economist, Tej Parikh, who told The Guardian that this reluctance was down to public transport and childcare concerns. “Adjusting workspaces can take time, and isn’t without costs,” he added. Simply put, the summer holiday months just aren’t the time for offices to staff up again (assuming they’re not making people redundant). But clearly some companies are looking even further than than the summer.

My own experience of working during the pandemic has been defined somewhat by the fact that I started work at my company three weeks after the UK officially went into lockdown. Apart from my boss and his boss (with whom I met for my interview), and one other team member, I’ve never spent any time in the physical company of the myriad people I now work and interact with on a daily basis. In a past life, I actually embraced working from home: I could get things done (not easy in an office shared with boisterous sales people). But it’s really not all that it’s cracked up to be. Getting up, travelling on the Tube, grabbing a coffee and then firing up the laptop, before reversing the whole process several hours later has its benefits. Distance, mainly. An opportunity to separate work from home.

I’ve been in the workforce for 34 years and operated out of a variety of environments and team situations. But for younger employees, especially those on the first rungs of their career, being forced into whatever work-from-home set-up they’ve had to adopt - which includes bedrooms and shared kitchens - they’re missing out on the office. Even the annoying things, like your desk neighbour’s toxic Cup-a-Soup, loud phone conversations or inane football banter (actually, that’s alright). Not even The Sound Of Colleagues website, with its background sound effects of real offices, can recreate the experience.

A few weeks ago The Times interviewed Generation Zers about how they were coping at home, and found many to have enjoyed the freedom of sitting in your pyjamas all day long, with no ghastly commute to cope with, but have increasingly found that they were missing out on networking and socialising - yes, including the running commentary from across the desk on their colleague’s romantic travails. One very wise 24-year-old even noted that he was losing out on the benefit of sitting alongside older, more experienced colleagues. “Video conferencing will never be the same as meeting,” he said.

In some respects, the pandemic has occurred at the worst time for everyone. As April and May came around, we enjoyed glorious weather in the UK, and while June and July were oddly less good, summer’s continuance with the sort of hot sunshine we’ve been having so far this August, is clearly not going to chase people back into the office, even if the lure of professional-quality air conditioning is quite a draw. Of the UK’s 15 million people who’ve been working from home throughout the crisis, more than two-thirds - according to the Office for National Statistics - worry that going back to workplaces carries too much risk. “The overwhelming majority of British people work in offices, the London School of Economics’ Professor Tony Travers told The Times recently, adding that services now accounts for 80% of British GDP.

However, a recent study by Morgan Stanley found that only 34% of Britons have so far returned to work since Boris ended the “work from home, if you can” guidance. and announced that people could return to their place of work at their employers' “discretion”. Morgan Stanley found that three-quarters of Germans, Italians and Spanish had already returned, with as many as 83% of French office staff back (though there's no clarity on whether they immediately buggered off again to enjoy les grandes vacances). British office workers seem to be even more stubborn: nearly half of office staff are still working from home five days a week, with just a quarter returning on a part-time basis. Perhaps a lack of official clarity is partly to blame. Just two days after Johnson gave his guidance, the government's chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said: “People who can work from home should continue to do so". In London, public transport is still operating at only 25% of normal passenger traffic, a telling figure despite some evidence of arterial roads creeping back to their usual congestion.

All this raises the question of whether things will ever return to normal. Maybe they won’t, or at least, we won't return to 9-to-5, Monday to Friday office working. The functional need for workplace distancing and the social adjustment that millions of workers have, abruptly, had to make since March, could change the working culture forever. But we will still need some place to physically attend, even if it’s for weekly team meetings, or collaborative sessions that can’t be done over Zoom or Google Hangouts. Furthermore, many workers will, over time, simply grow tired of their working from their home environment, and desire the alternative that an office provides (which also means not suffering the vagaries of iffy broadband). Tech giants like Apple and Google have continued to invest in vast architectural wet dreams in which to house their workers, with the former’s chief executive, Tim Cook, even insisting that “Nothing yet replaces human interaction” and dismissed the idea of his people never again not working in physical proximity to each other. The problem is, no one at the moment wants to be in physical proximity to anyone who doesn’t reside in their ‘bubble’. Unless they’re crowding out Bournemouth Beach. When they’re supposed to be working from home.

Into the Valley

I seem to have made something of a habit of visiting Silicon Valley at the same time as its wealthiest resident makes a splash. Four years ago this week I was in Santa Clara with a group of French journalists on the day Apple staged its "Wish we could say more" 'special event' a couple of miles down the road in Cupertino. It was during this that Apple launched the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, Apple Pay and the Apple Watch, as well as gifting 500 million iTunes subscribers an unsolicited copy of U2’s brand new album, Songs Of Innocence, which no one, it turned out, really wanted at all.

So to be sitting in an office, last Wednesday, just 15 minutes' drive from Apple's latest launch had a feeling of déjà vu about it. But, then, so often these Apple events do. Even without paying direct attention to the event, occasionally glancing at the video stream on Twitter, I could see it was exactly the usual format: big black screens, Tim Cook opening with the latest numbers of how many gazillion iOS products have been sold, a slick film with design chief Sir Jony Ive intoning his philosophy on the look, shape and feel of things, followed by marketing chief Phil Schiller’s sales pitch.

Picture: Apple

As impressive - and as eye-wateringly expensive - as the new iPhone XS and XS Max are, they are - along with the fourth generation Apple Watch also announced - merely incremental. A new 'Bionic' chip, better OLED displays and a few more wizzy gizmos under the skin might be enough to send frenzied fanboys out to queue in front of their local Apple stores with a deckchair and a flask of tea, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s just this year's new model. If, like me, you’re considering replacing an older model, then, also like me, money will be burning a hole in your pocket. But it’s nothing essential, no matter how Apple pitches it. Wall Street takes a similar view. The new iPhones will, no doubt, trouser Apple another huge pile of cash to add to their existing $260 billion stash, but gone are the days when the company can announce something irresistibly must-have, and see its stock price rocket. In fact, Apple shares have a habit of dropping if financial analysts give a "meh" reaction to another slew of nice but relatively uninteresting new toys.

Now I think about it, gone are the days when Silicon Valley produced anything that made the world sit up and take notice. Google Glass, anyone? No, me neither. When I first professionally entered the technology world in 1995 it was still possible to create something totally new. These were the heady days of the dot com boom, where ideas born in bedrooms and garages could attract the largesse of venture capitalists and, consequently, the attention of Porsche salesmen. Silicon Valley had, when I made my first business visit in the late 90s, taken over from Hollywood, 400 miles further south, as the world's dream factory. Just as I’d marvelled at the sight of studios like Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox and Paramount when I first visited Southern California, I was equally as slack-jawed several years later driving through San Francisco Bay Area cities like Mountain View and Sunnyvale and seeing the logos of Intel, HP and the-then Internet giant Yahoo! emblazoned on corporate real estate.

Then, tech hardware was the thing. Today the Valley is a sea of code as software, data and algorithms churn through its myriad campuses. Whereas once we bought TVs, HiFis, PCs and cameras separately, today all that functionality. can be crammed into a single iPhone, with its monster screen and (as promoted this week as a virtue), high quality speakers with extra wide output (the sort of thing passengers on the London Underground are just going to love...). Those who glue it all together, store it in the cloud and making the networks that deliver all this data and content more efficiently are the burghers of today’s Silicon Valley. Don’t get me wrong, the behemoths are still there - you can’t miss the household brand names who all, to a company, have an R&D presence in the Bay Area (no cheap affair, either, given that the Valley is one of the most expensive places on the planet in which to employ people). But the novelty that exploded in the 90s has worn off. The Dream Factory has given way to a corporate beige.

In the 26 years since I first set foot in Santa Clara County it has cycled through different phases. Dot com excitement and digital tech gave way to health start-ups, who in turn gave way to the green revolution. The dot coms still exist, of course, nestling in and amongst all the other consumer electronics, health tech, IT and telecoms businesses in the Valley. And there is still some sense of innovation. But not a lot of 'new'. Uber and Tesla might be toddlers by comparison to Google or PayPal, and Facebook famously has evolved so far that it is part of two-sevenths of the world's population. Rather than being the startup it once was, with Mark Zuckerburg and a team of coders hunched over their laptops, Facebook is now part of the establishment, as much Valley founding fathers as Intel and HP. Just three years ago Facebook moved into its 430,000-square-foot, Frank Gehry-designed headquarters in Menlo Park. Now it is planning an even bigger "mixed-use village" on the same site that will include a supermarket, 1,500 apartments, a 125,000 square feet retail space and 1.75 million square feet of office space. Google can claim a similar expansion with its vast corporate town in Mountain View (when I lived in the Valley between 2001 and 2003 I’d not even heard of Google - Yahoo! was, to all intents and purposes, "The Internet".

Picture: Google

What hasn’t changed over the last couple of decades is the wealth. Some Valley veterans claim that it's less ostentatious now than it was in the boom years, while others maintain that it is actually more obvious. It's hard to tell, really. Cars, a touchstone of disposable wealth, appear to a little more German in the Bay Area than other places in America, probably to the annoyance of the current keeper of the White House (who is descended from German imports, anyway). And property...well let’s just say that property in the region is even more ludicrously expensive than when I rented a two-bedroom 'condo' for $2400 a month, part of which was subsidised by my employer.

The can-do culture, however, is still there. The sight of basketball hoops nailed to notice boards and dudes in surf shorts skateboarding along corridors may be a tad worn these days, but the culture prevails, even in those giants who've long-since seen the days of being pioneers on the frontier of technology. Campuses across the South Bay are casual environments, where employees are worked hard but are also allowed some fun in laid-back offices. California's weather provides some of that relief, with many corporate HQs providing outdoor spaces for lunchtime barbecues and team picnics. Many companies, too, have followed Google's cultural lead by offering employees free food and snacks throughout the day, an investment that keeps them engaged - and enclosed - at the same time.

When I first arrived in the Valley I was given a lot of sage advice from more established ex-pats. First, I would soon grow bored of the permanent sunshine (I didn't). The second, was never to wear a suit, lest I be viewed with suspicion and, subsequently, likely to close down a business in times of trouble. I completely forgot this maxim this week when I entered the offices of my new employer wearing the jacket-and-chinos combo uniform in London. Instantly I was marked out by people's gazes as an outsider, given that even senior executives here wear T-shirts and jeans. It's an environment I'm very at home amongst - I've never been much of a suit wearer.

Picture: Google

Workplace attire not withstanding, these last few days have brought me to a conclusion. Well, perhaps more of a realisation. Something I hadn't fully appreciated when I lived in Silicon Valley in the early 2000s. It's what makes the Valley tick. In the 15 years since I returned to Europe, I've been immersed in a European corporate culture, working for Dutch, French-American and then Finnish companies. Such companies are often national incumbents, more like civil service organisations than enterprises, nurturing careers from cradle-to-grave. Employees are well rewarded with pensions and holiday allowances, statutory sick leave and other social provisions. And thus they work their way steadily towards retirement, when they cash in their pensions or go off to play a lot of golf. Valley companies, however, run on different view. Even those that have been in business many years still feel like they're on some imaginary frontier, where it is impossible to sit still - dangerous, even - less they leave themselves vulnerable. Life is fast, work is hard, but the work-hard, play-hard spirit is tangible. Even in one of the most expensive regions on the planet to buy or even rent property, people seem engaged and self-purposed. It's an age-old cliche, I know, but here the attitude is 'can do', not 'let's give it some thought'. And I like it.

Resisting modernity - why I still want to plug in to my iPhone

So we already know what to expect: a couple of hours from now, Tim Cook will walk out on stage at San Francisco's Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, dressed in de rigeur 'Valley Formal' jeans and a blue or black untucked shirt. He will update us on the billions of of iPhones Apple has sold to date, of the billions of devices running iOS, and then hand over to one of his lieutenants - probably the exquisitely-bouffant software chief Craig Federighi, or marketing boss Phil Schiller, or iTunes maestro Eddie Cue to run through the "awesome" features of the next iPhone and the next iteration of iOS.

There will be a little light banter at the expense of the competition, some nerdy in-jokes, perhaps a celebrity endorsement (but please God, no - not another free U2 album...) and possibly an awkward moment of dad dancing. That, though, the star of the event will be a new iPhone will shock no one. After all, the Apple fanboys and rumour sites have spoken of nothing else for weeks, months even, such is the totemic fascination the world has with this, of all the devices in Apple's canon, past and present.

I'll be happy to be proven wrong, of course, and if Cook & Co present a show featuring dancing Muppet chickens and unveil plans for an Apple spaceship or a move into leisurewear for the elderly, I will welcome the refreshing change of direction. But given the pattern of just about every single "Apple special event" in the post-Steve Jobs era, we shouldn't really expect anything different tonight. And that, in essence, is Apple's problem: the lack of anything different. If we ignore the company's authority issues over tax and device encryption, Apple's main appeal - and its main challenge - is its products, those phones, tablet, computers and other trinkets that people like me apparently pay a premium for quite happily.

Whether they admit or not (and they wouldn't be expected to), Apple has successfully mastered the art of drug dealing. Once we're hooked in its ecosystem, it's hard to quit. That has much to do with the opiate pleasure that using their devices brings. Even with some of the irriations that every technology has built into it, Apple's have always been tolerable. Until now, the only serious issue I have genuinely had cause to gripe about is iTunes, which has become bloated and complicated and a far cry from the simple, drag-and-drop means of managing a music library on an iMac and an iPod.

Even when Apple replaced the 30-pin iPhone/iPad/iPod connector with it's slimmer 'Lightning' interface, we moaned a bit, but dutifuly got on with replacing our cables. In hindsight, it wasn't all that big a deal. So the question remains is that if, as has been predicted for almost a year, the new iPhone to be announced today will not have a headphone jack socket, will owners of the estimated 800 million Apple iOS devices with them be as accepting?

The difference between the 30-pin connector and the Lightning cable was mostly one of ergonomics. Removing the headphone jack and insisting that new iPhone owners listen to audio through rumoured Lightning ear buds or via Bluetooth headphones is a different deal. For the former, it will mean buying an adaptor as the minimum of inconvenience or, at worse, new headphones with Lightning connections. Ker-ching for the manufacturers of headphones. For the Bluetooth approach, however, it presents a whole new challenge for neo-Luddites like myself.

Ever since wireless headphones first appeared 20 years ago, I've had a deep problem with them for listening to music. The early RF headphones were OK for watching television late at night without disturbing the neighbours (using much the same technology as baby monitors), but you would occasionally get disturbed by a taxi reporting in a passenger pickup. Bluetooth headphone have more recently become a popular choice for sporty types or individuals who want to look like a Cyberman from Doctor Who, with a big pair of cans strapped to their ears featuring a bright blue blinking LED. I, though, still have my doubts as to whether Bluetooth can deliver decent audio performance. Compressed, digital audio is already something of a poor cousin of analogue music, but at least with a pair of physical cable-connected headphones to an iPhone or music player, you have a relatively decent supply of tunes, much the same as watching films on a home AV system connected by the best-possible quality cabling. But does Bluetooth really offer the same experience?

And then there's battery life: one of the biggest bugbears of Bluetooth accessories like mice, trackpads and speakers is that they need recharging, and always just before you actually want to use them. Traditional white iPhone ear buds clearly don't have this problem. There is also, too, the image factor: Bluetooth headsets have never been a particularly good look for mobile phone use - if you spend any time at American airports you'll see travelling salesmen pacing the concourse loudly trying to conclude a deal, their hands windmilling for an audience that can't see them, and ridicule from the audience that can.

Apple will no doubt claim that removing the headphone jack will allow them to create an iPhone with a thinner profile, and with the relative cost of Bluetooth chips lower than that of headphone components, there'll probably be a bottom line benefit as well. Ideal for a company which saw its second quarter revenue drop year-on-year from $49.61 billion to a measly $42.4 billion.

Is Apple heading for a mid-life crisis?

I'm an MS-DOS man myself," so I was informed, 26 years ago, by Brian the IT man who'd come to fix an Apple printer in my office which, thanks to my impulsive then-boss, had universally ignored company IT policy and had Macintosh computers installed or every member of the Sky TV press office. We were regarded as freaks for having these small, squat greyish boxes with their tiny screens.

Around the same time the publishing industry was in the throes of revolution. Proper revolution. Desktop publishing was taking over, which meant that anyone working in the media was getting to play with Apple technology, either for composing copy or laying out pages.

The media world, insular beast that it is, fell in love with the Mac. But it was a lonely world to occupy. Microsoft was the king, the PC was still overwhelmingly a business tool and home computer ownership was still rare. Even when Apple ventured, properly, into the consumer technology space, first with its iMac and then the iPod, there was still a latent feeling that it was a niche brand selling expensive devices to a clique of design-conscious (some might even say design-obsessed) geeks and posers.

That, however, as we all know, was about to change. The company that began on April 1, 1976, with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne selling computer kits to hobbyists - each hand-built by Wozniak - is now the most valuable company in the world, estimated to be worth more than $700 billion with a cash pile of $218 billion. Perhaps more importantly, it's Apple's ubiquity which is the most breathtaking. At last week's Apple 'townmeeting' in Cupertino, CEO Tim Cook revealed that there are now more than one billion active Apple devices in use around the world.

Of course, this has much to do with the incredible growth spurt Apple experienced after the company - under Steve Jobs - launched that first iMac in 1997. It's unique popularising of what had been a dull, beige worktool - coupled with a sprinkling of Jobs fairy dust to talk up the-then nascent "digital lifestyle", was a stroke of genius (and, of course, designer Jony Ive deserves a lot of credit for making the iMac something you wanted to show off, rather than hide beneath a dust cover when not in use).

What followed - the iPod, iTunes, the iPod, iPhone and iPad - until Jobs' death in 2011 was, in relative terms, akin to the rapid spread of human civilisation. The iPhone and iPad, in particular, were genuine game changers (a phrase I hate, but can't ignore in this context). I probably use my iPad now more than any other technology device I own, such is its versatility and convenience. This, though, is the essence of Apple, and probably why my home is full of its hardware. Take, for example, the little Apple TV. Even though it is, to all intents and purposes, a screenless iPhone, it, too, is versatile and immensely convenient: Netflix, iTunes, YouTube and my music collection and much, much more all there in that little black hockey puck hidden beneath the TV. Or my current iMac - a machine I don't really regard as a PC but as a thin but nourishing slice of design and technology excellence.

However, not everything in my walled Apple garden is rosy. iTunes has now become a bloated mess, with Apple Music - a clunky attempt to take on streaming services like Spotify - lacking any relevance to us earlier Apple adopters who liked the triumvirate of the iMac, iTunes and an iPod to easily managed music collections. And in promoting the iPad Pro as a 'PC killer', there's every chance that it might start to cannibalise sales of its own line of MacBooks. As delightfully thin as a MacBook Air is, the 9.7-inch iPad Pro is pretty close to replacing that, too.

And then there's the Apple Watch. Really, are they being bought in quantity? Are we that in need of convenience that we can't be bothered to pick up our phone to read our e-mail or retrieve a boarding pass? With this, Apple have over-stretched themselves. Under Jobs, the company found a way of selling snow to the eskimo: computers, digital music players and mobile phones existed long before Apple applied their touch to them, but each time they managed to come up with a compelling - and often impulsive - reason for you having to own one. Not with the watch.

Apple does have some history in launching things people don't want, or don't want just yet (the Apple Newton and their 'cube' Mac computer for a start), so there's every chance that the Apple Watch may develop into a bigger business. And that is what it needs, desperately. The new iPhone SE and indeed the iPad Pro 9.7 may keep revenue ticking over as replacement sales, but there is a genuine sense that the Apple magic has plateaued.

Businesswise, there is still plenty of potential for Apple in developing markets like China and other parts of Asia, where disposable incomes are increasingly in range of Apple pricing (it still amazes me how Apple could become some dominant given that their products still command a mighty brand premium). But what is clearly lacking from Apple is a vision of its future.

We can safely assume that there will be an iPhone 7, perhaps in September or next year, followed by an iPhone 8, 9, 10 and so on. iPhones will get even thinner (probably dispensing with the headphone jack, thus forcing us all into buying new headphones...) to the extent that they will cease to feel like phones at all. Similarly, the iPad will continue to get thinner and lighter, more powerful and better suited to productivity, thus fulfilling Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller's prediction that the PC is under threat from the tablet. But in neither product lines is there any sense of true evolution, apart from design and performance improvements.

In the Mac department, Apple trundles along. MacBooks will continue to be popular with students and design types and iMacs will continue to be the choice of those who need a desktop and prefer it to be stylish (such as the White House, if House Of Cards is to be believed...). However, the Mac range accounts for less than 9% of Apple's annual revenue. Ironic, given that it represents the company's origin.

So, as it turns 40, Apple faces a mid-life crisis of sorts. Like many in their 40s, life can be good: a comfortable income and a healthy career. But as with many when they hit 40, questions start to emerge. Is this all life has to offer? Could there be more?

In converging computing and consumer electronics, Apple may have hit the motherlode - and the stratospheric financials underline this. But they are also discovering - as both traditional computing and consumer electronics manufacturers have found - that when everyone owns the 'must have' keeping the cash registers working is the biggest challenge. The consumer electronics industry, in some part, has been usurped by Apple. Bar the screen, my Apple TV box alone provides all the content that three or four separate devices used to provide. This has been the existential challenge for the CE industry now for nearly two decades, reflected in the fact that the likes of Panasonic, Hitachi, JVC, Sharp and even Sony have contracted or even disappeared completely as Samsung, with its deep (and riskily-so) pockets have taken over. Philips, my old company, has sold off much of its CE product ranges, and while innovation continues to be vibrant in, for example, its TV business, it can't be fun competing any more.

Apple long ago stopped acting as a computer company in the consumer world. In some respects, it has invented a category all of its own, somewhere in the midst of making products that serve lifestyle, entertainment and productivity needs. But that still doesn't guarantee a future. Plenty of big technology brands have fallen by the wayside as markets have matured and standalone devices that could have been milked for money have become obsolete.

We are now coming to the end of the first digital era, one that was defined by portable content, miniaturisation, and the Web. Around the corner lies the 'Internet of Things' and 'Machine-to-Machine', in which sensors and devices fragment and talk to each other autonomously. Some have predicted that the smartphone in its current guise could be obsolete by the beginning of the next decade. That's only four years away. For Apple, who's iPhone represents almost 70% of its income, that's a future that will have people within the company's shiny new spaceship HQ in Cupertino thinking very long and hard about where they want to go over the next 40 years.