Throttling the firehose

Melin and I talked yesterday - not for the first time - about the feeling that Apple is becoming less exciting (and also simply less focused on users like us). Exciting or not, there definitely are too few news to go around the substantial number of Apple observers in the world.

All of which added up to a really good question right as I finished my run today: why do I follow so many news outlets - podcasts especially - with a focus on Apple? Every single rumor, idea, article and announcement will be completely wrung out, picked apart and left to dry, studied from every angle no matter if it is yet another rumor about future phones or the opinion of an Apple developer about the state of the stores. Why do I spend so much time listening to the same things being discussed over and over? Surely I could find deeper things to fill my time with? There is, after all, so much good to read out there. Novels, deeper analysis, white papers, so much!

A friend made the very true argument that following news like this is like following a soap opera. Great point, it serves a different purpose than deep mental stimulation. But I should clean out some of my stock, because there is a lot of soap in my life here. A few podcasts I follow are more or less focused on Apple news, and many of the rest intertwine it with other things. I could probably strike the focused podcasts (and some of my RSS feeds) and rely on the mixed-focus pods for all my Apple news. Anything important is sure to filter through them eventually.

Am I not entertained?

Sure, I am. But there is more entertainment out there than Apple rumors. (He wrote, throwing a cunning sideways glance at his podcast playlist.)