My waking hours are not consumed wondering what sort of goodies Apple will reveal on June 4th, the date for the WWDC keynote. Last year’s announcements were more voluminous than than many expected, so it may well be there will be lots to predict, lots to talk about this year too. So it’s natural that the tech media is getting set to talk about it.

Last year, we had the predictable demonstrations of iOS 11 and macOS 10.13. While the superstitious among you might have felt a letdown that Apple didn’t succumb to the unlucky 13 stigma, such as it is, High Sierra still wasn’t such a compelling release.

It has worked all right for me, but I’m somewhat disappointed that the “future update” promised by Apple to add support for the Apple File System (APFS) to Macs with Fusion Drives has yet to arrive. Indeed, after the initial claim that it would come, there has been little or no discussion about it. The option to convert the Fusion Drive on my iMac to APFS is still grayed out.

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Shorn of the silly excuses about hampering innovation by ISPs, ditching Net Neutrality is more about reducing regulations. But regulations quite often are responses to abuses, so the issue may never have come up if people didn’t find their Netflix signals constantly stuck in the “buffering” zone.

The reason that was happening was because some ISPs, such as Verizon, were throttling the stream because it was using up what they regarded as too much bandwidth. After one failed attempt that didn’t pass court review, the FCC, under President Obama, found a scheme to establish Net Neutrality that worked, by reclassifying ISPs under Title II.

So against industry opposition about more regulation, ISPs were no longer allowed to slow down online traffic. All legal traffic had to flow freely, so users of Netflix and other services didn’t have to worry, especially when streaming 4K content, such as the latest episode of “Jessica Jones.”

With a new administration, with its extreme anti-regulation approach, a Republican-controlled FCC voted, by a 3-2 margin, to reverse Net Neutrality protections. What this means is that those protections are poised to disappear.

That said, it doesn’t mean ISPs will resume traffic management of streaming video and other services. So AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson wrote earlier this year that, despite the pending end of Net Neutrality, AT&T won’t engage in any traffic management tricks. Then again, AT&T claims it never did so before, and besides, it wants the government to feel warm and fuzzy about them so they stand a chance to get the OK to acquire Time Warner.

In any case, this is an issue that isn’t going away without a fight. Although the FCC decided to ignore millions of comments opposing the repeal of Net Neutrality, the U.S. Congress has the power to approve a 60-day review and possible reversal of the FCC’s decision.

Now in theory a Republican Congress ought to mean that nothing will change, and we’ll have relegate the quality of those Netflix streams to the whims of your ISP. But there may some hope that things might change.

So on Wednesday, the U.S. Senate voted to repeal the order to terminate Net Neutrality with extreme prejudice. The vote was slim, 52-47. It passed due to the decision  of three Republican Senators to go along with Democrats and Independents. The verdict benefited from a slim majority.

The prospects for approval are less certain in the House, which has a fairly large Republican majority. The Democrats would have to persuade more than two dozen of their counterparts on the other side of the aisle to vote with them, and the prospects aren’t so good. Even if gains approval, the President would have to sign the bill, and that’s by no means certain since he opposed Net Neutrality. If he vetoes the bill, the chances for a veto override are slim to none.

But even if Net Neutrality goes away, the final verdict of how it impacts ISPs is up to them. Will they restore traffic controls to the detriment of customers because a service is using too much bandwidth? Will it happen because people choose to ditch cable TV in favor of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and other services? What about DirecTV Now, which is adding cloud-based DVR and other features, or Sling TV and other streaming services roughly mimic traditional cable TV?

Maybe nothing will happen right away, or at all, because you can imagine how customers, knowing the impact of Net Neutrality, will protest big time.

Or will the cable TV companies, who run most of the larger ISPs, opt to take Netflix out of the equation, so it won’t impact online traffic?

Consider that some ISPs, such as Comcast and Cox, already bundle Netflix with some of their set-top boxes. By doing that, the Netflix stream goes through the traditional cable TV pipe as essentially just another channel, and the cable companies receive a piece of the subscription fee. Since Netflix is the number one “abuser” of Internet traffic, it’s taken out of the equation.

If that move spreads, Netflix will have insulated itself from potential online traffic controls by giving away a piece of the pie, or maybe just reallocating some of what it normally spends for streaming to that cable provider. The cable company gets another source of income, and, in turn, hopes that fewer customers will cut the cord.

That’s the sort of innovation that does benefit customers, at least if you’re not watching 4K content on Netflix. Right now, the cable companies have yet to offer 4K, but they will. It’s inevitable. Besides, if your TV has a well-designed UHD upscaling system, the difference between real 4K and converted HD isn’t all that different. Well, except for the lack of HDR support with the latter.

The arrival of 4K on cable boxes also depends on the availability of 4K channels, and that will come too. And imagine if other streaming services sign up for a place on your cable (or satellite) set-top boxes. Would that, and smart TV sets, eventually make Apple TV, Roku and similar streamers essentially obsolete?

I gave up on my Apple TV because my VIZIO TV has Netflix and a choice of thousands of other streaming channels courtesy of its SmartCast app and Google Chromecast. Consider sets with built-in Roku or Google or even Amazon.

To understand what the Apple Store meant to me, let me tell you a personal story. In the 1960s, I had a hobby, building radio and general audio gear. Some of it I bought for myself, others I assembled for friends — at no charge. Well, I was a teenager, living at home. I wasn’t rich, but I had a tape recorder and a radio and a mic, so I was mostly happy.

In those days, I made periodic trips to one of the early consumer electronics stores, Lafayette Radio. After going bankrupt in 1980, its assets ended up in the hands of the company that eventually became Circuit City.

After moving to the Phoenix area in 1993, I shopped occasionally at a local Circuit City, but mostly for CDs. If I wanted a new Mac, I went online and saved money. It’s not that Circuit City didn’t carry Macs. They had some, and I remember visiting the retailer a few years later and seeing a few dusty models placed haphazardly on a single display table off to the rear somewhere. Most had been left off. The few that were running mostly displayed a Hypercard slide show that didn’t really entice anyone to buy anything.

Besides, the salespeople were busy encouraging you to check out the real center of the action, the PC tables.

I recall a report some time later, about Steve Jobs admonishing Apple dealers to give Macs a fair shake. Make that demanding in very raw language. It was, after all, vintage Steve Jobs.

Apple finally decided to go its own way, by establishing its own retail chain. Jobs recruited former Target retail executive Rom Johnson to help him design the new stores.

When the first two Apple stores had their grand openings in 2001, in Glendale, CA and Tyson’s Corner, VA, the tech pundits were skeptical. Other electronics manufacturers, including Sony and Gateway, launched chains of branded stores, but they really didn’t go anywhere.

In large part, it’s because they were just ordinary retailers, only focused on a single brand. So why go to one when you could get the very same merchandise at the same price — or less — at a store with a far greater selection?

Apple’s approach was to customize your shopping experience with a specialty boutique with what appeared to be a remarkably noncommercial approach to retail sales. For one thing, you weren’t confronted with greedy salespeople trolling for a sale. Indeed, nobody pushed you to buy anything, or even to leave if you just wanted to just hang out.

If you had a problem with your Apple gadget, there was the Genius Bar where you could get advice, or authorized repairs by a factory trained specialist.

As a contributor to the Arizona Republic, and later Gannett and its national newspaper, USA Today, I attended two of the openings in the Phoenix area. At the Chandler, AZ Fashion Center, I met  Johnson, then Apple’s retail chief. I also got an Apple Store T-shirt.

I remember the opening ceremony, where the newly-minded employees welcomed customers with loud rounds of applause.

In 2002, I received a VIP invite to attend the grand opening of an Apple Store in New York’s SoHo district. I was part of an exclusive group that included Apple executives, even Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller, fellow tech reporters and a smattering of show business types.

While there, I had a chance to speak with Jobs for a few moments before he pulled his usual stunt to end a conversation, which was to walk away in mid-sentence. But I also spent several minutes speaking with the comic actor Tim Allen, who stared in one of my favorite movies, “Galaxy Quest.”

Recalling that the film ended in a way that a sequel might have been filmed, Allen said that one key factor that hurt the effort was a motorcycle accident that actor Daryl Mitchell, who portrayed the starship’s navigator, suffered the previous year. The mishap left him paralyzed from the waist down. Despite the handicap, by the way, Mitchell has remained active in show business. These days, he’s a featured player in a hit CBS series, “NCIS: New Orleans.”

But there’s still hope for a “Galaxy Quest” revival on Amazon, despite the 2016 death of Alan Rickman, another star of the cult classic.

Now my feelings about the arrival of the Apple Store in the Phoenix area were mixed. Before they arrived, I made a decent income as a Mac consultant. But Apple could provide much of what I offered, at least to people who didn’t mind carrying their gear to the store, at no charge. It didn’t take long for most of my clients to choose the obvious alternative, even when I lowered my hourly rates.

At first I focused on older gear, mostly Macs that were too old for Apple to provide direct support. As my customers grew older, however, that business mostly faded.

Despite my bittersweet feelings about the matter, I do get to an Apple Store from time to time to check out the new gear. Overall, the shopping experience remains mostly good, but the Genius Bar is often overwhelmed, so you have to reserve a session before you pay a visit.

As to Ron Johnson, he finally left Apple and went on to JCPenney to overhaul the shopping experience over there. But it proved to be a poor fit, and Johnson departed after the struggling retailer’s situation only worsened from his attempts to move them upscale. These days he’s connected with Enjoy, a startup that hopes to overhaul the shopping experience.

Having used Apple gear for over 30 years, I realize there’s no such thing as perfection. Different models had different glitches that sometimes required extending the warranty to cover repairs.

That didn’t happen with such models as the Macintosh IIcx, the first personal computer that I brought into my home, after using Macs at the office for a few years. But floppy drive failures were frequent, because it appeared that the cooling system drew in the dust rather than push it away. I remember the office admin, Adam, took on the task of repairing Macs, with my help, and he constantly complained about the poor design.

My IIcx never developed any problems, or maybe our home wasn’t a dust magnet. Regardless, the first Mac I owned that exhibited a product defect was my PowerBook 5300ce, the first model with a PowerPC CPU. It was expensive, late to market due to an early battery defect, and a source of constant annoyance.

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