Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max: Obsessing Over Photography (Premium)

We all know the story of how Steve Jobs pulled Apple back from the brink of bankruptcy and then orchestrated the biggest comeback in personal technology history by creating the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. The introduction of the iPad in early 2010 was interesting for a lot of reasons, but forgotten in all the mythology is the months-long wait between the iPad's announcement in January and its release months later in April.

During that lull, I argued that Apple had erred by letting customers wait too long between the iPad's announcement and its release. And that in doing so, it was giving them time to reconsider this expensive purchase and develop buyer's regret. Many of them, I thought, would come to understand that the iPad was unnecessary and perhaps redundant.

That's not what happened, of course And while it was impossible for a device like the iPad to duplicate the level of success Apple enjoyed with the iPhone, the iPad did of course go on to formally establish a new market for tablets, and it did so by shifting our expectations of what such a device was and could do. My blindness to this possibility was related to my being unique among reviewers. As a veteran of Microsoft's Tablet PC efforts---I probably had more experience with this platform and used more of these PCs over the previous decade than anyone outside of Microsoft, literally---and I thought I had the iPad's number. After all, I had seen it all, and it wasn't like Apple was doing anything profound with a product I viewed as an oversized iPod touch. Except, of course, that by being focused and doing less, Apple was indeed doing something profound.

But that was the iPad and the end of an era. These days, when Apple announces new products, it releases them immediately or within a few weeks at most. And it's unlikely that many customers ever rethink these purchases now: As we've often discussed, Apple's audience consists of the most loyal customers imaginable, and they seem uniquely inclined to spend as much money as possible on whatever products and services the company introduces. This is what Apple's competitors envy the most.

Of course, I am not the typical Apple customer. And not just as a reviewer, but as an individual, a user. I respect the company in ways that aren't often obvious by my sarcastic teardowns of its hype-tastic product announcements, which are now expensive, Hollywood-like productions with Marvel movie-like special effects, further blurring the line between marketing and reality. But I am also by nature indecisive. I brood over product purchases for longer than most, and I immediately reconsider them as soon as I hit the "Buy" button. This is an uncertainty I do not associate with Apple's most loyal customers.

I am also rarely completely satisfied with anything, and while some of this is surely just my nature, that's fed by the real problem, which is the failings in the products I use. This isn't an Apple-only problem, of course---my mixed feel...