So the invite went out last week, swirly Apple logo, purple and blue gradient, the word "Wonderlust" in that serif font they like to use when they think they're being clever. September 12th, Cupertino, the usual song and dance. I'm not going, obviously, nobody I know goes, but every year around this time I get an email from three different people asking "so what do you think they'll announce" like I have some inside line to Tim Cook's calendar. I don't. I read the same leaks everyone else reads.
But this year I actually have a personal stake in it, which is rare for me because I mostly find phone launches boring at this point. The thing everyone's expecting, and by everyone I mean every leaker with a semi-decent track record, is that the iPhone 15 is finally, finally switching to USB-C. Not because Apple woke up one morning and decided cable clutter was bad for the planet, but because the EU passed a law forcing it. Common charger rule. Every phone sold in the EU has to use the same port by the end of 2024, and Apple isn't going to make two different iPhones for two different markets, so USB-C it is, worldwide, whether they wanted to or not.
And look, good. I'm glad. But I want to talk about my cable drawer for a second because I think it says something true about how tech actually works in a normal person's house, as opposed to how it works in a press release.
I opened it this morning out of curiosity. Second drawer down in the kitchen, next to the takeout menus nobody uses anymore because everything's an app now. I counted eleven Lightning cables. Eleven. Some are the little white Apple ones that fray at the connector after about fourteen months like clockwork. A couple are the braided nylon third-party ones I bought because I got tired of the fraying. There's one that's specifically for the car, coiled up with a twist tie, that I have used maybe four times in three years. And underneath all of that, tangled up like it's trying to hide, is a whole separate pile of Micro-USB cables from whatever era that was, old Kindle, an ancient Bluetooth speaker, ancient Fitbit, that I keep meaning to throw out and never do because what if.
That's the part nobody puts in the keynote. The actual lived experience of "the industry standardizes on a connector" is not a clean transition, it's a decade of drawers like mine, three formats deep, none of them fully retired. I'll buy new USB-C cables for the new phone, sure. I won't throw out the Lightning ones, because my kid's old iPad still uses one and so does my mom's phone, and she is not upgrading anytime soon, I promise you that. So now I'll just have two drawers' worth of cables instead of one, for the next several years, until Lightning finally dies off the way Micro-USB is (mostly) dying off now. Progress, but slow, and messy, and it happens in kitchen drawers, not on stage.
Small tangent while I'm here, I keep seeing people talk about Threads like it's already over, and I think that's mostly right? I opened it a few weeks back out of habit and it was just... quiet. Like walking into a party an hour after everyone left but the lights are still on. I don't think Meta's worried, they've got the patience and the ad budget to just let it simmer for a year, but it's funny how fast the "Twitter killer" narrative evaporated once the novelty wore off. Nobody wants to admit their group chat was the whole appeal of a thing, not the app itself.
Anyway. Back to Tuesday. If the rumors hold and it really is USB-C across the board, I might actually pay attention to a keynote for once instead of reading the summary two hours later while pretending I watched it live. Small victories. I'll believe it when Craig Federighi says the words out loud, because I've been burned by leak season before, remember when everyone was dead certain the iPhone 14 was getting an always-on display and a satellite thing and half of Twitter (or whatever we're calling it this week) argued about it for a month before anyone actually knew anything. We'll see Tuesday. My drawer isn't going anywhere either way.