Why Apple and Amazon can't stop launching stuff

"Every podcast is lit up all the time talking about it." That's how one Vergecast listener described the current product release landscape, and Verge editor-in-chief David Pierce agrees. The old playbook—saving everything for one or two splashy events a year, à la Steve Jobs pulling the MacBook Air from a manila envelope—is dying. In its place: a constant drumbeat of smaller announcements, week after week, from both Apple and Amazon.

The death of the big reveal

Pierce argues that the era of the single, world-stopping product event is over for structural reasons. Steve Jobs was uniquely good at commanding a news cycle, but the way people consume information has changed. More importantly, the AI race has compressed product development timelines so dramatically that companies can't afford to sit on announcements until September. "The idea that we're going to save all of our new software for September is just going to make you look slow," Pierce says. Apple has already started breaking its own cadence—announcing things at WWDC that don't ship until January, or dropping features piecemeal rather than in one big .0 release.