The 21st Century Model T Ford

Picture: Apple

The date when, arguably, face-to-face conversation ended was 9 January, 2007. It was the date when the television set, as the “electronic hearth” of collective family engagement, ground to a halt. It was when the morning commute (remember that?) became a head-hunched, spinal strain-inducing exercise in what we British islanders, in particular, do better than anyone else - social avoidance. Because that was the day Steve Jobs introduced, with customary understatement, “a revolutionary and magical product" that he claimed was "literally five years ahead" of any rival: the iPhone. 

Apple’s press release on the day said that it combined three products: the aforementioned phone plus “a widescreen iPod with touch controls, and a breakthrough Internet communications device with desktop-class email, Web browsing, searching and maps.” There was also an “entirely new user interface based on a large multi-touch display and pioneering new software, letting users control [it] with just their fingers,” adding that it ushered in “an era of software power and sophistication never before seen in a mobile device, which completely redefines what users can do on their mobile phones.”

This was peak dream-weaving Jobs. As Apple had done with the iMac in the previous decade and indeed the iPod in 2001, they’d taken an existing concept and made it desirable and cool. The iPhone was certainly not the first smartphone (anyone working in the corporate world would have already endured years of BlackBerry envy as they were provided to more anointed colleagues), nor was it the first touchscreen-enabled gadget. But, Jobs’ spin notwithstanding, for once, the tech marketing cliché “revolutionary” was broadly applicable. 

In addition to cellular connectivity and the music player, what really drove the revolution was the iPhone’s ability to carry a vast array of native software applications, a statement in itself, given how “app” has established itself in the common lexicon. In fact, those colourful app icons we tap on our smartphones are as significant as the expensive hardware they're downloaded onto. In old(ish) money, Uber or Deliveroo would be regarded as online destinations, but we all use them as physical services that just happen to be accessed through an app on our phones. 

Today, nearly 90% of British adults own a smartphone, with ownership in older demographics notably increasing during 2020, most likely because of lockdown necessitating connectivity. Despite their upfront cost - a full-specced iPhone 12, bought outright, will set you back just under £1000 - they have become indispensable, but they can, too, be easily be taken for granted. They are, despite their form factor, highly sophisticated computing devices equipped, invariably, with camera technology to rival that from the big names in photography. One common trope, however, is that the smartphone in your pocket is more powerful than the technology that landed Apollo 11 on the moon, which is a fallacious comparison, given that NASA was working with beyond-state of the art capabilities in 1969. But it’s not a bad way of looking at the sheer power today’s smartphones represent, and the - still - unprecedented functions they perform.

This forms the core of Always On: Hope And Fear In The Social Smartphone Era, a new book by Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology editor, and someone who was there where it all began. In fact, when it began. Recalling that Jobs press event early in 2007, Rory went on to compare, on the BBC, the new Apple phone to the Model T Ford in terms of its potential impact. Viewers complained that he’d given a commercial launch too much prominence on the BBC’s ad-free airwaves, and even Rory himself was initially worried that he’d gone “over the top”. But on later reflection, he felt totally vindicated, writing on the tenth anniversary of the launch that it had truly been a “moment in history”, heralding “the key transformative technology of the last decade, putting powerful computers in the hands of more than two billion people and disrupting all sorts of industries.” Rory expounds on this shift in the book, discussing how Apple's effective invention of the smartphone founded entire industries and economic ecosystems. I was working at Philips at the time of the iPhone launch, and as its evolution began, it became apparent that it wouldn’t just eclipse the predominant handsets from Nokia, Motorola and others, but posed an existential threat to PC manufacturers and consumer electronics brands as well. Over time, the smartphone would become your TV set, your home cinema, you music system and its content library, and - crucially in its development, Rory points out - your camera (a moot point with me, given the forest of phones you have to peer through at gigs…). 

But, Always On also argues, the smartphone didn’t just become a replacement for a multitude of devices. It also turned “software” into “app”, the word even your granny is now familiar with. How many times a day do you interact with an app, or hear the word? Even freedom to travel might soon be facilitated by the NHS app, acting as a Covid passport. So, when you combine the hardware, the software, the functionality, the connectivity, the rise of social media and the innovation of app developers (even the term “swipe right” has entered popular convention thanks to Tinder), you can begin to appreciate the enormity of what that rectangular box in your pocket represents.

Always On delves deeply into the smartphone's social impact, not just focusing on the consolidation of consumer electronics into a single device, but on the global impact of digital engagement facilitated by it, as our “hyperconnected” society lives and breathes on social media, elects governments, supports economies, finds people jobs (and loses them through misuse…) and more. Rory even draws on the role the smartphone plays in healthcare, given how the NHS app was placed front-and-centre in the fight against COVID-19. My own company, Vodafone, helped develop an app called DreamLab, which enables Imperial College London to effectively crowd source the immense computing power of dormant smartphones at night to dramatically shorten the number of thousands of hours required by human research into developing therapies for cancer and the coronavirus. 

Rory Cellan-Jones

Rory, however, has an even more personal health connection with the smartphone: a couple of years ago, while doing a live demonstration of 5G technology on BBC Breakfast News, viewers noted a tremor in his right hand. Unbeknownst to all but a few friends and colleagues, he’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease some months before. Shortly afterwards he revealed on Twitter what he’d been going through: “It was a vivid example of the positive side of what this book describes as the social smartphone era,” he writes. He says we’re now immersed in an era in which technology has become personal, in which these devices enable us to connect with “friends, strangers, celebrities and even Presidents and Prime Ministers via new networks which appeared to democratise communication.” There is, though, a negative side to this - an acute example being the recent football boycott of social media, the result of the repugnant racist, sexist and homophobic abuse that some players of both genders have had to endure - but Rory hopes that his book faithfully examines the positives of what smartphone technology has done for individuals and society in general, as much as its dark side.

To return, though, to my introduction to this post, there is still a residue of old farts who look upon the revolution that Jobs’ heralded as the start of a societal breakdown that will never be repaired. The response to such arguments is always ‘do you want to go back to how it was?’ (i.e. outdoor toilets, steam trains, ‘the wireless’, etc). “We have a slightly problematic nostalgia that romanticises the past,” Professor Daniel Miller, leader of a 16-month international anthropology study into smartphone use told The Times recently. “TV was way more passive,” he added. “Smartphones are far more interactive and far more social. So why is that a loss?”. Miller and his colleagues argue that the Internet has, rather than creating digital zombies, brought society together. The problem, they say, is that digital connectivity has also brought down divisions within individual households. We’ve all done it: we’ve all sat there as families, idly thumbing through our phones while half watching something on TV.

Rory Cellan-Jones’ original thesis that Steve Jobs produced a Model T Ford for the 21st century with the iPhone shouldn’t be in any doubt. But, says Miller, it comes at a social price. “At any point, whether over a meal, a meeting or other shared activity, a person we’re with can just disappear, having ‘gone home’ to their smartphone,” he said in The Times interview. It’s almost, he believes, as if the smartphone has become too ubiquitous. “We have become human snails carrying our home in our pockets,” Miller and his colleagues write in their study, going so far as saying that we spend more time ‘in’ our phones than in our own homes. Moreover, they contest, the smartphone now plays such a fundamental role in how we engage with our families, friends, colleagues, celebrities, politicians and anyone else we can just ping on WhatsApp, the technology has virtually become as basic a form of human communication as talking. That, though, is nothing new. Almost every form of technology communication is accused of supplanting something else.

Which is what makes Rory’s book so engrossing. As the BBC’s primary technology correspondent since January 2007, and indeed the week when Jobs strode the Moscone Center stage, replete in trademark polo neck, stonewashed Levi’s and New Balance trainers, he has reported on every gadget, trend, startup, collapse, innovation and outbreak of industry hyperbole since. And when you put it all into perspective, you’d struggle to disagree with the central belief that Always On entertainingly proffers, that most of those “breakthroughs” my peers in technology PR peddle don’t even come close to the smartphone. 

The telephone is generally regarded as one of humankind's greatest creations, after the printing press, the electric light and industrial manufacturing. I’d argue that, given that it is more than just a mobile phone, the smartphone might one day find itself up there in the same pantheon of achievement.

Always On: Hope And Fear In The Social Smartphone Era by Rory Cellan-Jones is published tomorrow,  13 May, by Bloomsbury

Hiss on the tape

As someone who has somewhat vigorously reinvested in the vinyl revival, I'm probably not one to pontificate over niche fads that bring back cherished items from our past, like Spangles, Marathon bars and the Three-Day Week. But the one that continues to baffle me is the habit of apparently switched-on music acts releasing their albums on cassette.

Last year, on the 40th anniversary of the Sony Walkman, I raised the question of who was actually buying these tapes (Going walkabout: 40 years of the Walkman), with Billie Eilish selling 4,000 copies of her debut album When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? in the format, and the The 1975's A Brief Enquiry Into Online Relationships becoming 2018’s cassette best-seller, both suggesting, bizarrely, that tapes had a teenage demographic. Quite what such youths were playing these tapes on remains a mystery, but then according to the BPI, the body representing the UK’s record labels, a fifth of people who buy vinyl records don’t have anything to play them on. 

Regardless of such practicalities, new figures from the Official Charts Company have revealed that 65,000 cassette albums were bought in the UK in the first six months of this year - twice as many as in the same period last year - and that by the end of 2020, more than 100,000 copies will have been sold. This remains a fraction of the total number of albums sold via all formats, but still. Growth in cassettes is faster than any other category.

So, why? "Younger consumers are buying into their collectible appeal — as they have done with vinyl," the BPI's Gennaro Castaldo explained to The Times yesterday. "They are also drawn to the retro Eighties appeal, which artists such as Dua Lipa, the 1975 and the Weeknd have recently spoken about as an influence on their music."  Artists marketing limited edition cassette releases is a cute measure, given that the age group most likely to buy them are also buying quirky retro things like skateboards and Converse All Stars. Perhaps we have Guardians Of The Galaxy to blame, after Chris Pratt's character played a mixtape throughout the film, a feature cleverly reflected in the movie's marketing (which included releasing the soundtrack on tape). It may have started a trend.

Old heads like me, however, have a different view. For a start, they were cheaper than vinyl albums. Secondly, a cassette was never more than a carrier, and not a particularly good one at that, especially when it got trapped in the player's mechanism. A feature of hedges and grass verges since the cassette died out is that they are no longer strewn with reels of magnetic tape ejected from car windows in frustration (you could also note that you don't see discarded porn magazines any more, thanks to the Internet, but I digress). Indeed, all the cassette had going for it was its size, and even then, going on holiday meant taking with you a bulky plastic carrying case stuffed with your tape collection (both those you’d bought from Our Price and…ahem…those containing albums you’d recorded off your brother's collection or Radio 1).

The cassette was purely about cheap convenience. Even with the addition of "Dobly" noise reduction on both the tapes and the players, they were never about hifi enjoyment. The vinyl revival, on the other hand, has been mostly about the fetishism of "real" audio quality, and that view will get defended - with some justification - by audiophiles until the cows come home. Even if such benefits are marginal, there is something about the entire vinyl experience - from eyes to ears - that the cassette can and will never replicate. And, yes, the aesthetic appeal is a part of it. From Unknown Pleasures to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, there is no shortage of 12x12-inch cardboard art with infinite Instagram appeal. I even recently bought a dedicated rack bearing the words “Now Playing” purely for the pose benefit. Cassettes, though, hold no such value and the 10cm-by-7cm box offers nothing to display even the most notable imagery, leaving me still bewildered by what kitsch attraction they hold.

And, yet, the surge in demand - fuelled largely by the limited edition releases - has even led to US and European factories reopening manufacturing lines for high-grade ferric oxide, a key ingredient in magnetic tape, a similar story to the reopening of vinyl pressing plants. If this is, then, being driven by a generation of teenagers more aware of the environment than any that has come before, it seems counter-intuitive that they should be buying a combination of plastic and chemicals purely to put on display (again, assuming that none of them own any kind of cassette player).

However, while the story about cassettes coming back provides a platform for venerable geezers like me (who, incidentally, spent 17 years of his career shilling shiny new digital formats for Philips) to harrumph about youngsters and their bizarre trends, the cassette and even my beloved vinyl are spots in the ocean compared with streamed music. Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Loved, 2019’s biggest selling hit, has been streamed 228 million times. The cassette has a long way to go, and like most fads, will be superseded by something else quite quickly.

Tech me back to all that magic

Picture: CES®

Along with vain attempts at going meat-free and alcohol-dry, one of the hardy perennials of the first full week of the new year is the gargantuan technology fest that is CES (note: not the "Consumer Electronics Show" or "International CES", as the organisers don't like either...). Every January, news feeds and column inches are filled with gadgets and gizmos getting showcased for the first time in Las Vegas that the tech industry hopes might catch on and, you know, even sell. In my day in the business, it was about launching the latest TVs, hi-fi systems and new media formats like DVD, Super Audio CD and Blu-ray Disc. As much as everyone involved would kvetch vigorously about having to give up part of the Christmas holiday to write press releases and CEO keynote speeches, then put up with Las Vegas in general and 4am visits to the Kinko's drive-through copy shop (which I once did in a limo, handing over an entire press kit through the sun roof), there is still something magical about the show, even if now viewed from afar.

Firstly, for those who've never been, Las Vegas is far from the glamour harbour it is portrayed as being. True, once it started to clean up its grubby reputation in the 1980s, and the first mega-“resort” hotels installed minibars and large screen TVs in their rooms (allegedly, against the wishes of the Mob, who wanted punters down on the gambling floors, getting rid of their life savings at the blackjack tables and slot machines), Vegas became something of an anodised version of its former self. Fun for all the family and, initially, of great appeal to the conventioneers who poured into the city in the ‘high desert’ all year round. For those visiting in January for CES, it was usual to recognise rookies as those arriving without overcoats, freezing in the endless early morning taxi queues. Just because it’s set in the vast western desert does not make Las Vegas warm in winter. But once inside the Las Vegas Convention Center, warmth of a million watts of electricity takes over, as the vast venue dazzles the visitor with its endless aisles of new toys.

My involvement, as part of Philips’ PR team, was a combination of accompanying senior executives and facilitating the journalists who rush about the place, breathlessly attending press conferences and keynote speeches, desperate not to miss the next big thing or some CEO’s visionary statement about the future. When the chance allowed, however, it was fun to go off-stand and peruse the dazzling array of what the industry, then, had to offer. This was, however, a long, long time ago. When we launched the first hi-fi system to connect to the Internet, we were given much the same rebuke as the Wright Brothers being told that planes will never take off, so to speak. Now look at it: everything is connected.

Picture: CES®

Reassuringly, this year’s CES hasn’t gone short of traditional introductions like TVs, with the big beasts like Panasonic, Samsung and Sony pushing the boundaries of both screen sizes and picture quality. This was pretty much the story in my day, 20 years ago, but then, when we thought we’d brought about the end of days by launching a 42-inch plasma TV, now we’re seeing 75-inch QLED sets offering 8K picture quality. Which I’m told is very good indeed. We've also seen a $60,000 TV from LG that rolls up and down like a blind. Indeed, thin displays are all the rage this year, with a glut of laptops at CES with foldable displays, the new groovy thing in screen-based devices.

I’m actually quite excited to see such developments. ‘Traditional’ consumer electronics, we keep being told, are supposed to be dying, as kids prefer to stay glued to TikTok on their mobile phones, Millennials opt for YouTube and even older punters prefer Spotify to actually owning their home entertainment. This sounds Luddite, I know, but I accept that as someone who still buys LPs and CDs, and is clinging desperately to the notion of owning hi-fi separates when my iPad, loosely, offers the same thing, entertainment consumption has shifted. I’m currently in the process of moving out of my flat and into my girlfriend’s house, which means making some choices - some hard, some easy - as to what I declutter. Apart from some dodgy record company promo copies, the vinyl LPs stay; the CDs can be reduced somewhat (I don’t really need two copies of the Heat soundtrack...); and the DVDs - some ‘first generation’ transfers - can go straight to the charity shop. Only a small handful of box sets and Blu-ray collections (Bond, The Sopranos, The Godfather, natch) need remain as everything else is mostly available to stream without taking up cupboard space. There will still be a market for the gear to play all this media on, but even the consumer electronics industry has wisely embraced online distribution, progressively and seamlessly incorporating streaming services into their audio and video boxes over the last decade or so (reminding me what pioneers Philips were with that first ‘Streamium’ hi-fi system in 2002...).

In fact, while home entertainment has long been the primary reason for consumer electronics shows to exist, other tech industries have moved in. Just like the IFA, the venerable Internationale Funkausstellung in Berlin (translated - “International Radio Exhibition”), which converted into a hybrid event of the domestic appliances and CE industry several years ago, CES has, too, brought together traditional home entertainment devices with the likes of 'connected' toothbrushes and - yawn - fridges (that are still not in widespread use, despite being relentlessly featured at such shows for what seems like years). In Las Vegas this week, there are other new tech trends to challenge the show’s traditional interests. Motor manufacturers have seen CES as an opportunity to showcase their in-car tech for a while now, but whereas this used to be largely about entertainment and navigation technology, the car itself, thanks to Tesla, is now more gadget than vehicle. Thus, this year we’ve seen Mercedes-Benz introduce a futuristic ‘pod car’, inspired by the world of James Cameron's Avatar, while Sony - along with traditional launches like its new PlayStation and new TVs - delivered one of the first big surprises of CES by unveiling a car, the Vision-S. Now, this doesn’t mean the Japanese giant is about to take on the increasingly consolidated car industry, but the Vision-S is an electric concept car designed to showcase what Sony is still capable of in diverse applications, from in-car information and entertainment through to battery technologies, imaging and sensors.

Health technology has been a growing part of CES for some time, too, with large tech companies shoe-horning Internet-enabled personal care this-and-thats into the Convention Center, but even cosmetics brands are getting in on the act. This year L’Oréal, Oral-B, Gillette and Neutrogena have been demonstrating gadgets. I’m not sure if, yet, the world needs lipstick that connects via Bluetooth to a mobile phone, or artificial intelligence that looks for imperfections in facial skin (my mirror does that job quite adequately), but they’re on display if that’s your thing. The spin is that this is innovation, and fair play to the wonks in these companies’ labs for ‘pushing the envelope’, as such wonks like to say. Of course, it’s almost a cliché to point out that many of these concepts will never see the commercial light of day, much like Homer Simpson-style car designs at motor events and pilotless passenger helicopters at air shows, but it’s this heady mix of the rational and irrational that maintains the 175,000 people who descend on Las Vegas every year, along with 4,500 exhibitors from 160 countries for the self-styled “global stage for innovation”. And, secretly, I’m a tiny bit jealous I’m not amongst them. Even if it would mean losing measurable years of my life in taxi queues.

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.