Apple Store Down Ahead of 'Surprise and Shine' iPhone 18 Pro Event

I’m gonna throw out a wildcard here and say that the iPhone 18 Pro drops the number and it is just iPhone Pro…especially because of the lack of number for Air and whatever the fold will be.

Happens every year. This does not need to be reported. It’s their tried and true to get you excited to spend too much.

They should call the new foldable phone the Apple Newton Pro.

What surprise?

SO this year, we moved the camera lenses around again. Oh, and now you can make your photos worse with AI. Also, there's a new color.

I'm not so much complaining that they don't have "life altering" product announcements every year so much as I am thinking that these events largely lost their oomph because they've deluged us with mystery box theatre for every minuscule update, all in service to perpetuating a little stock price excitement... It's just become background noise at this point. I don't need to know every time they slightly change the look of the Home Screen or add a new vibration to indicate something.

I've worked in tech 30 years and the cultish stuff becomes really grating after the first 2 or 3. And I am really disheartened by the obsessive push toward all things AI. It tells me they have run out of imagination and are all praying to Curtis Yarvin's god. And that isn't good for society. It isn't good for your soul.

Steve used to say that the Mac was like a bicycle for the mind. Aside from the clunky metaphor, I like bicycles... they're things you get on because you want to, and you learn and ride at your own pace.

Now, devices are like a treadmill you're forced to walk on, at a pace determined for you, and it feels like a chore... in the soulless virtual padded cells the Apple execs do their rah rah presentations from. (This scene ('https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WP1FpKVUR6Y') from Grosse Point Blank also comes to mind...)

I still play old Apple ][ games and get more enjoyment and replay value out of them than anything these greedy cultish weirdos have produced in the decades since.

More than anything I want companies to make good quality products, serve customers, not fight them or make their products crappier over time, and just leave them alone. Like we're tired of this hype cycle. Tired of garbage products, tired of anti-consumer behavior. Just sell me a phone, keep it updated from a security perspective and thats it. I don't need you to introduce new features every year. I don't need a dog and pony show, I just need a device. Whatever happened to technology improving peoples lives, now all it does is ruin lives and make people anxious.

I’m gonna throw out a wildcard here and say that the iPhone 18 Pro drops the number and it is just iPhone Pro…especially because of the lack of number for Air and whatever the fold will be.

My vote goes for iPhone 27 - same schema as iOS and macOS

Waiting to see the new devices and prices of other iPhones (including the base 17) when the store is back online.