Apple made more product announcements yesterday.  Some hardware people got excited, some software people got excited, some OS people got excited.

The thing that continues to impress me about Apple is that they seem to be drawing us out of one atmosphere into another, in the same way that our ancestors were drawn out of the water and into the air (onto the land).

From time to time I hear it said that Apple is creating a “new ecology”.  It seems to me that a better analogy would be to say that they are replacing our gills with lungs, so that we can live in a new ‘world’, and experience all our ecological relationships differently than we have ever done before.

The (future) value of Apple doesn’t lie with the iPhone 6 Plus, or the Apple Watch, or the barometer, or any other piece of the puzzle.  It lies with Handoff, and the APIs that allow various apps to intermingle, and leveraging iTunes to create Apple Pay, and the list goes on.  Apple users may be tied to one ‘suite’ of devices, and software, and OS, and none of the elements may be the strongest in their field, when evaluated individually, but their collaborative capacity has lapped the field.  Eventually, of course, another innovator will recognize the depth and breadth of what Apple is doing, and take up the challenge.  Who knows when that will happen, or what will be the outcome.  The fact is, the internet of things will be experienced through a membrane of hardware, software, and OS.  The innovator that is first to make that membrane seamless will have accomplished a huge, audacious task.  Apple is looking good.