THE THING NOBODY ASKED APPLE FOR IS THE THING THEY'RE MAKING US WAIT FOR

First of all I want it on the record that 9to5Mac's website loads like it's being typed out by a man with one finger and a head cold. Three pop-ups before you get a sentence. A cookie banner the size of a driveway. I had to click through more consent screens than my uncle Walt had to sign to get discharged from the Merchant Marine, and Walt — this is true — Walt got discharged twice, once on paper and once, according to him, "in spirit," which never made sense to anybody including his own wife, who by the way ran a notions shop two doors down from the Rexall and would not, under any circumstances, sell you a spool of thread if she suspected you'd bought your last one somewhere else out of loyalty to a rival notions shop that, as far as I could ever tell, did not exist. That's the kind of grudge economy 1982 ran on. Nobody trusts nobody, but at least the page loaded.

So. Apple. Two features. Delayed. Not canceled — delayed, which is worse, because canceled is at least an ending and delayed is a hostage situation with a release date instead of a ransom note. They're telling us — calmly, like it's nothing, like it's a weather report — that two capabilities we didn't have yesterday and won't have tomorrow are now scheduled to arrive at some undisclosed "future" point, which is a phrase that should be illegal to put in a press release. "Future" is not a date. "Future" is where you put things you're ashamed of. I want a calendar. I want a page number. In 1982 if the hardware store told you the rototillers were coming in "in the future" you walked two blocks to Kowalczyk's and bought a rototiller that existed, in the present, made of iron, that would outlive you and possibly your children, and you never thought about it again except to oil it, which you did every March whether it needed it or not, which it did not, but you did it anyway because that was the deal you'd made with the machine, silently, the way men used to make deals with machines before everything started talking back to you and asking for your fingerprint.

And another thing — nobody in that article explains what the features actually DO, they just say "capabilities," which is a word people use when they don't want to commit to a noun, and I have had it with nouns that won't commit—

—which reminds me, and I do mean reminds me of nothing, there is no bridge here, I want to be clear I am not building a bridge, but it puts me in mind of the summer the McAlister boy — not the older one, the older one joined the Air Force and we didn't see him again till a wedding, somebody's wedding, not his — the younger McAlister boy got it into his head that he was going to build a working telegraph between his house and the Dunmores' place across the ravine, using wire he'd stripped off a defunct chicken-yard fence, and a car battery he was absolutely not supposed to have, and for about eleven days that whole summer there was a rig of scavenged copper running through two backyards and over Mrs. Petrosky's clothesline, which she allowed, inexplicably, because she liked the boy's mother, or maybe she just liked chaos, some women of that generation did and would never admit it, and the telegraph never worked, not once, not for a single dot or dash, the whole thing just hummed faintly and occasionally shocked the dog, a beagle named — this is going to bother me all week — Rusty or Dusty, one of the two, and the point is — there is no point, I told you there's no point, I'm not going to manufacture one now just because you're sitting there waiting for it. That's the modern disease. Everybody wants the payoff. Nobody wants to just sit in the ravine and watch a beagle get mildly electrocuted by innovation. That WAS the payoff. You had to be there. I was there. I'm still there, some nights.

Where was I. Apple. Right. And here's where I want to be careful, because I feel the pull, I feel myself drifting toward the easy chair where a certain kind of columnist sits down and says "well back in my day the free market would never have tolerated this delay" and starts talking about regulation and innovation and the invisible hand, and I want to say clearly and for the record: I am not that man. The invisible hand has never once helped me carry anything. I don't trust a hand I can't see holding my groceries OR my software roadmap. Free market, government market, doesn't matter to me, both of them let the Concorde stop flying and neither one has explained itself. My distrust is not partisan. My distrust is total. It starts in 1982 and it has never found a reason to stop.

And ANOTHER thing — the article doesn't say WHO decided to delay the features, it's always "the company," faceless, like weather, like it just happened to Apple the way rain happens to a picnic, but somebody in a room, somebody with a badge and a lanyard and probably a standing desk, looked at a calendar and a checklist and said "not yet," and I want that man's name. Not to do anything to him. I just want it on file. Somewhere. A registry.

Which — fine, all right, since we're on the subject of registries, I will tell you about the time my cousin Deb and I tried to catalog every hubcap on our street, this would've been, had to be '82 because I remember the Braves were on the radio in the garage the whole time, though Deb swears it was the Phillies and Deb was not even living on our street that summer so I don't know where she gets the nerve, but we went car to car with a steno pad, numbering hubcaps, writing down the make, and we had it in our heads that this was going to be useful someday, to someone, for some reason neither of us could name even at the time, and we got up to forty-one hubcaps before Deb's mother called her in for supper and the steno pad — I want you to understand this project simply stopped, mid-sentence, hubcap forty-two half-described, "Buick, dent on the — " and that's it, that's where it ends, I still think about hubcap forty-two, what was the dent on, I'll never know, Deb won't discuss it, we don't discuss the hubcaps, there's a version of my family where the hubcaps are simply not a topic, and honestly? Maybe that's the correct response to an unfinished project. Maybe Apple should take a page from Deb. Just stop talking about it. Don't tell us it's "coming later." Just go quiet, the way the hubcap ledger went quiet, and let us assume, mercifully, that it never happened at all.

But no. They ANNOUNCED it. That's the crime here, if you want to talk about crimes, and I do, I always do. It's not that the features aren't ready — fine, things aren't ready, I've never in my life had a rototiller ready on the day I wanted it either, you order the part, the part takes time, that's physics or commerce or both, I don't pretend to understand the difference anymore. It's that they told us. They put it in a headline. They made it a STORY. Nobody made the hubcap ledger a story. Nobody made the McAlister telegraph a story, though frankly it should have been, that dog earned a write-up. The modern trick is to announce the absence of a thing with the same fanfare as the thing itself, so that "not having it yet" becomes a kind of content, a kind of product, and I refuse — I REFUSE — to be marketed an empty box with a bow on it and told to admire the bow.

I had a whole separate complaint here about phone weight, the actual physical heft of a phone, the good heft, the heft that told you the thing in your hand was a piece of machinery and not a playing card, and I have lost the thread of how that connects to any of this, and I'm not going to force it, I said I wasn't going to force these and I meant it —

—and I still haven't said one useful word about the other two stories in that packet, the movie fella and the shell whatnot, and maybe that's for the best, maybe some weeks you pick one grievance and you let it breathe, the way you let a hubcap ledger breathe, the way you let a dog that's had a mild shock breathe before you try to walk him again —

— and another thing, and I mean this now, I mean it as the last thing, don't anybody call me about the hubcabs, I'm not doing a follow-up, that door's closed, Deb and I have an understanding —

Anyway. Future update. Sure. We'll see about that.

— Edgar, waiting on the rototiller