Today, in a streamed presentation, Apple announced the latest version of the iPhone, along with upgrades to the AirPods and the Apple Watch. As has been the case since the start of the pandemic, the presentation took the form of a pre-recorded showcase, with lots of camera pans and hyper-rehearsed delivery by Apple employees. For more than 100 interminable minutes, Apple demonstrated both mundane activities (email, photo management) and professional ones (filmmaking, audio recording), all of which will be facilitated by modest updates to what amount to essentially the same devices the company has been making and selling for a decade. “What a remarkable day of announcements,” CEO Tim Cook said in closing remarks, but I have a hard time believing he meant it. This was, let’s face it, just a day of announcements.

I will acknowledge that there are indeed various changes and improvements to the product line. What they are, exactly, is exhausting to explain; the annual announcements have become so jargon-laden that my brain shuts down to protect itself. Apple executives and senior vice presidents certainly rattled off a bunch of features: a thin insulation splitter, a 16-core neural engine, the most advanced H2 chip. As usual, the numbers given to these updates go up: this is the 16th generation of the iPhone, the 10th for the Apple Watch. We’re at A18 in Apple silicon, one better than the A17 chip that preceded it; the iPhone 16 Pro is made of Grade 5 titanium, which should be at least a few times better than the poor eggshell-like Grade 2 titanium cases of competitors. The metal Apple uses in its devices is still aerospace-grade (a fact made less spectacular by the fact that the aerospace industry has become increasingly adept at making planes fly well). The iPhone Pro also now features a 48-megapixel Fusion camera, which itself houses a second-generation quad-pixel sensor, allowing you to take better photos across a wider focal range.

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It’s no longer news to note the lack of meaningful novelty in new smartphones. Annual updates, even from the world’s smartest company, have only become more modest. Indeed, success on the scale of the iPhone now requires a certain degree of ordinariness: mass appeal can’t sustain rapid change or wild new ideas. Progress tames and domesticates. Or so it feels.

I’m long overdue for an update to my iPhone 12 Pro, a sentiment that makes little sense even though I feel it acutely. I bought mine in 2020, a fairly recent year that still feels a long way off. What exactly do I need to update? My phone works fine, as far as sending and mostly deleting emails, watching overproduced YouTube tutorials, ordering records awesome tibs or boxes of Bobo’s Pumpkin Spice Oat Bites on DoorDash, and I even make the occasional phone call, which sounds worse than ever once I get my AirPods properly connected.

Ah, but the iPhone 16 Pro wouldn’t be one but four “Studio-quality” microphones with improved signal-to-noise ratio. Plus, I can’t use Apple Intelligence, the company’s take on generative AI, with my aging processor. Eleven years ago, when I covered the launch of the iPhone 5S—the first model to feature fingerprint security!—I compared the iPhone’s annual updates to a seasonal fashion catalog: Even then, the updates had less to do with innovation than with calendar necessity. Apple Intelligence might be something else, though. It’s more than just fashion: the technology lets the phone summarize your emails, prioritize your notifications, and help you create your own emoji while you’re in the middle of a text exchange. It seems cool, well-designed, and effectively integrated into the OS.

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But it’s also a kind of fashion. To update is to participate in the discourse of updating, to experiment with features rather than usability. Do I want email digests and custom, improvised emojis? Of course I do, but I’m also disappointed by Apple’s lack of ambition. Is that all there is? Of course I do. What did you expect? The company that sells beautiful phones has a new one, and you need it, or you want it in a way that feels like needor you may receive it as part of your endless lease plan.

This year, the designs of these glass rectangles and ear lozenges, long defined by their smooth, futuristic surfaces, seem to yearn for the pomp and circumstance of ancient technologies. Take the latest Apple Watch, which can be viewed from oblique angles, with an always-on display that houses a ticking second hand even when your hand is down. These have, of course, been hallmarks of wristwatches for hundreds of years. Or consider the latest AirPods: these devices were already meant to sit in your ears more or less all the time, but now they can be used as earplugs also—or even as hearing aids. The iPhone has finally acknowledged that it wants to be a camera, with a new, dedicated button for taking photos—a fancy, Apple-designed version of the shutter button on a classic rangefinder or SLR camera. According to the presentation, an iPhone software update coming later this year will enable the button to detect half-presses for exposure or focus locking, as such buttons did for decades before cameras were locked into phones.

Future smartphones will continue to consume forgotten innovations of the past and then regurgitate them back at us as if they were new. And we will continue to devour them, partly because they will be new, and partly because we will have no alternative.