The stories coming out of the iPhone Duo launch paint a grim tableau: someone lifts a very expensive folding phone out of an elegant box, opens it as though it were a booby-trapped relic, and then the boulder comes rolling (or, less cinematically, the screen has already cracked). Reading enough of them returned me to a question I have been turning over since the day Apple blocked my Haxies: has Apple fundamentally changed, or is it simply doing what it has always done, only now with a hinge?

Having spent more of my adult life inside Apple's ecosystem than I would care to total up, I have come to believe the answer is both. On the hardware side, Apple is repeating a pattern that stretches back decades, and anyone who has been paying attention should find it more familiar than shocking. What has changed is the layer of human care that used to sit beneath those products and catch us when they failed, and the slow disappearance of that layer tells us a good deal about where the rest of the technology industry is heading, now that every company on earth has discovered AI.