Jon: Welcome to episode 107 of The Digital Life, a show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I'm your host Jon Follett and with me is founder and co-host Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Greetings Jon.

Jon: Today Dirk we are celebrating or observing another worldwide developer conference for the biggest tech company in the world and biggest company in the world, which is, of course, Apple. We've been taking a look at their announcements for coming products over the past couple of hours. We're going to react to that from a design perspective.

Dirk, what's your initial take on the Apple announcements of today?

Dirk: First, just to sort of correct your framing, I'm certainly not celebrating it. I wasn't even anticipating it. I didn't give a crap and as predicted it's another big yawner of a day. Apple's jumped the shark. The idea of these events being memorable and interesting and giant buzz-worthy things are garbage. Apple has settled into the same kind of status that Microsoft has had for decades, of a company that has had it's best acts in the past and is living off of those past glories and is trying to wrap shit with a bow and tell us it doesn't stink. I don't know why anyone cares about these announcements anymore. I certainly don't.

Jon: I think I have an interest in Apple's announcements, at least for the time being, just because the majority of my computing life is spent on the Apple hardware and software, for better or for worse. Let's go through some of their announcements for today. You give a great overview of your general take on things but I'd love to talk to you about some of the specifics.

All right. Apple has got their new software roll outs for both the OS-X El Capitan, which apparently is the next version of the OS-X software, as well as their mobile platform, iOS 9. Now certainly this tends to really approximate, as you said, the Microsoft announcements of the past year or so. There really isn't a lot of excitement to be taken away from new software roll outs. We're expecting ongoing improvements from our software and that's more or less what both the desktop and mobile platforms are offering. Slight improvements, nothing that we haven't seen before. I guess, to your point, is it worth having an event around new software roll outs? Probably not.

Dirk: The event itself isn't the problem. Apple is an organization with a lot of employees, with relationships to outside developers, and they need to have meetings and announcements to communicate things and convey things. The meeting isn't the problem. The problem is that the world continues to act like this matters. The world continues to act like this is a really big deal and something that we should all be paying attention to and god we so shouldn't.

Jon: Yeah. I think it's a little bit more inside baseball than worldwide announcement as it's been in the past. I think something telling from this event that typifies this switch from ground breaking innovation to business as usual is that the use of that one more thing line that Tim Cook has adopted from Steve Jobs presentations of the past. When Steve Jobs did it, there was really something mind-blowing at the other end of that sentence or of that intro. Their one more thing today was for the Apple music streaming service, which as delightful as that may be, is really just something similar to Spotify and was anticipated because Apple acquired Beats a few months ago. That one more thing is no longer an innovative one more thing, it's just, "Well one more thing."

Dirk: That's right. Consistent with Apple's vision-less execution, in recent years, they've taken something that had real cache, that one more thing was exciting. It wasn't necessarily every time, hint-hint. It was like, "We've got something special that we want to do and it's really going to take your breath away." They've totally piddled that away. Going back to the operating system thing,