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Just over a week ago, the Mark Ellis Reviews YouTube channel surpassed 100,000 subscribers.
I know. No, stop it. No, I can’t quaff another glass of champagne – seriously. Oh, really – you’re embarrassing me now. Stop it. Etc.
That’s the last time I’ll mention it. Promise.
Unfortunately, the week that followed this momentous achievement was possibly the worst seven days of growth my channel has experienced to date. It was a stark reminder of the harsh reality of YouTube: you’re only as good as your last video (and I’d published two stinkers, performance-wise, after hitting that 100K).
Things have picked up since, but that’s only because I’ve gone back to basics and published videos about two products that always seem to perform well – the iPad and AirPods Max.
There’s just one huge issue here and I can’t get it off my mind.
The Apple wilderness: a reviewer’s perspective
This time of the year is always rather desolate for tech news. After the initial flurry of early releases, the big brands hunker down, readying themselves for the big summer releases.
Apple played an unexpected role in those Q1 releases this year, with new Macs and a completely new set of M-series chips surprising us all in January. However, that excitement masked the fact that we should have seen that stuff several months before (as spotted by those who trawled through the URLs and HTML code for the January announcements).
Equally, it has resulted in no spring event (unless Tim and co. erm, spring one on us unexpectedly). That means no meaningful Apple news between January and June when WWDC kicks off.
That’s a long time in tech. There are numerous potential reasons for this delay. Continued supply chain squeezes, chip shortages, internal wrangling at Apple – the list goes on. That’s all conjecture, though – none of us knows what’s really going on.
What we do know is that this might be the worst ‘tech slump’ in recent memory. And as much as I know this will make me sound like an Apple Fanboy Pro Max, Apple undoubtedly drives so much of the tech narrative and trending topics. When they go silent, so too does the industry within which I reside.
It’s bloody tough.
Where does the problem lie?
I mentioned in my recent analysis of the latest iPhone 15 rumours (which relate to the volume and mute buttons – no, really) that we reviewers are largely to blame for the impact the tech slump has on our industry.
We expect too much. We get unreasonably angry when Apple fails to add USB-C charging to all of its devices. If there’s no “one more thing” at an Apple event, we leap to the suggestion that this wouldn’t have happened under Steve’s watch.
We’re f*cking annoying at times, I know.
But there’s far more to it than that. Tech has reached a point where you have to try very hard to buy a bad product. Be it a smartphone, tablet, or computer, no matter what you spend – on pretty much any brand – the result will be a very satisfactory purchase.
Powerful computing has been democratised; features that were once only available to those with deep pockets can now be purchased without roasting one’s credit card. It takes a lot to get people excited or impressed by tech these days.
And then, along comes AI.
AI and evolving expectations
Our Siri-only experiment at home has been an utter disaster. I won’t bore you with the reasons today, because I’ve already said my piece, but, suffice to say, Apple is so far behind in the digital assistant game.
This has always been an issue, but in 2023, the deficiencies of Siri have been thrown under the brightest of spotlights.
The rise of AI and services like ChatGPT is terrifying and inspiring in equal measure. If you’ve used any of that stuff either out of curiosity or to help you become more productive, you’ll be acutely aware of the jaw-dropping nature of this tech.
I’m conscious that ChatGPT isn’t a digital assistant in the same way as Siri is. You can’t ask it what the weather will be like tomorrow, you can’t use it to time your eggs, and it has no access to your music library if you fancy listening to Paul Weller’s greatest hits.
But it is much, much smarter than Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, and whatever Samsung’s assistant is called, combined.
However, we’re only witnessing the initial, public-ready versions of AI. That means this is the worst it’ll be, and that means we’re in for some absolutely astronomical advances in the coming years because the worst versions of AI are already utterly brilliant.
I think this has caught brands like Apple on the hop. While machine learning and AI have long formed part of its development process, Apple has suddenly found itself on the back foot, thanks to the march of AI in the public domain.
The latter has immediately and irreversible raised our expectations of what tech can do, and no iPhone update, Apple silicon-powered Mac Pro, or new form factor for the MacBook Air will knock AI from the headlines.
“One more thing…” candidates
Artificial intelligence aside (I don’t think we’re going to see anything significant, Siri-wise, for quite some time unfortunately), we should consider the potential candidates for Apple’s next big thing.
Apple’s place within the automotive industry has long been debated. We know they’re working on something significant, but the result of Project Titan is still yet to emerge from Cupertino. The sheer number of lay-offs, changes in top brass personnel, and rumoured course corrections suggest that we’re not going to see an Apple car for quite some time.
There’s the less headline-friendly stuff, too. The most notable is any advance Apple is likely to make in hi-res audio – more specifically, adding it to the AirPods line via a new proprietary codec. I think we’ll see this at some stage later this year, and it will at least raise the level of interest in that side of audio; as noted earlier, Apple is a master at this kind of PR.
But I think our best bet for something revolutionary and, more importantly, headline-worthy is VR. The rumours about Apple’s mixed-reality headset have been too loud to ignore, and it looks likely that we’ll see something at WWDC.
It’s just a shame we’ve had to wait this long, isn’t it?
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