Why every Apple news byte seems to matter so much

There's an addiction in the modern news reporting universe online to updates on details so very small that less than 10 years ago they'd never have left their respective sources lips. With Apple, we've got an addiction to details on the devices we're holding right this minute. Chances are, in fact, that you're working with a device right now that we've written about in the past 24 hours, and it doesn't just have to be an Apple device.

When I write a story about a BlackBerry device, I don't necessarily feel as though it'll be read by BlackBerry fans alone. Our news cycle currently includes mainly stories about BlackBerry 10, an operating system that'll be released inside the next few months, likely at the start of 2013. Because this operating system's success will in a giant way affect the company that makes BlackBerry available to the world, each detail matters. As the iPhone 5's absolute barrage of tiny details turned into full stories has shown you over the past several months, it doesn't matter that the end product is greater than the sum of its parts.

With BlackBerry 10, we're not expecting an operating system that's going to change the whole mobile universe. It is interesting, on the other hand, to masses of people working with their smartphones on Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, that BlackBerry 10 will bring a whole new keyboard to the mix. If you've got a keyboard that's a hit on one system, the other systems see the success and step up their own game.

If we see Apple adding a new way to look at the map on your smartphone, the competition has no choice but to jump into the ocean. Google Street View recently added underwater panoramas to their archive. If Google was the only group in the world making an effort to map our planet, the public would expect that the speed at which they're doing it was the fastest anyone could go. They'd also expect that noone else could do it better since Google would be the only one making the attempt.

So what does it mean when Apple's Lightning connector is broken into? It means that Apple's continually successful projection of a "magical" delivery of technology is inspiring the rest of the industry to "fight back", so to speak. There's no chance that manufacturers across the board don't see an update about a hacked Apple cord and think, at least to some degree, "I wish our hardware mattered that much."

Because of Apple – and the rest of the companies that find their way into our news feed every day – we're seeing the personal technology market grow at a rate that's absolutely astounding. Think about what we were working with just 2 years ago and consider how a story about clock image licensing is changing the speed at which we see great innovation every day.