I haven’t said much about Apple in recent months. Mostly it’s because they haven’t put out anything completely new, and political issues about monopolistic restrictions on third parties are still works in progress. The watchword is modest or less when it comes to new Apple gear and operating systems. It’s almost as if Apple has setup up a Keynote presentation with bullet points, where minor updates to products are listed. Each year, they go through the last and add the ones that developers can perfect, or at least make workable, within the appropriate timeframe.

So the iPhone 15 Pro may be the bee’s knees for some people, particularly if you haven’t upgraded in a few years. If you have an iPhone 14 Pro, you’ll probably prefer to sustain a yawn and get on with your business.

But let’s look at the main topic of this column, about things super or marvelous:

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Being a loyal Mac user in 1998 wasn’t such a great place to be for many of us. Although co-founder Steve Jobs was doing a lot to keep the company afloat with a slimmer product lineup, profits were slim or none. In the days before the iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, many still didn’t take the company seriously. Worse, many Mac users had made the switch to Windows.

But in the spring of that year, I got a long look and a fair amount of experience with the product that some suggest saved Apple. In those years, I was a member of their Customer Quality Feedback (CQF) program, which meant that I’d get pre-release software and occasionally a pre-release Mac to put through its paces.

Hardware, of course, had to be returned at the end of the beta cycle, although there was one instance where I came close to keeping a certain preproduction Mac.

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The fundamentals aren’t new. Financial results in the tech industry so far in 2023 are mixed, and lots of people, many hired during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, have received their pink slips. Despite the complaints that Elon Musk’s decision to fire half the staff of Twitter was outrageous, perhaps irrational, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and others have taken the hint and also announced large layoffs. Not as large as Twitter, but it’s clear they were overstaffed. I mean it’s not that these services are running less efficiently with smaller staffs.

The layoffs maxed out with Amazon at 18,000. In passing, this total is larger than some of the places I’ve lived in over the years, especially during the early days of my broadcast radio career back in the late 1960s. Two of the towns, Piedmont, Alabama and Windom, Minnesota, had populations below 5,000.

Imagine the population of an entire town disappearing overnight; well, aside from sci-fi films and TV shows of course. Imagine the equivalent of three or four of those towns.

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It all started when I was 13 or thereabouts; it was the late 1950s. My mother worked as a clerk typist, and I decided I needed to learn to type so I could write about my favorite subject at the time, flying saucers. So she agreed to rent one, and gave me quick guidance as to where to place my fingers. I tried to figure out the rest, but eventually bought a do-it-yourself typing manual to improve my speed.

Within a few years, I owned a brand new Smith-Corona electric typewriter, but it was constantly irritating my obsessive sensibilities, with bad misalignment of the key bars, thus resulting in a slightly uneven appearance. I soon learned that you could bend them slightly to improve alignment, which presaged a later career I had as a typesetter at several prepress agencies in New York City.

Some years later, I discovered machines that used little golf balls with the letters engraved on it, and I acquired a red IBM Selectric. This had to be around 1972 or thereabouts. No more bendable type bars, and near-perfect letter alignment.

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