> In a lecture several years ago at the University of Southern California, the architect Rem Koolhaas suggested that the city of Dubai had reached a logical dead end. By locking itself into the premise that every new building had to be a unique formal or structural experiment, he argued, Dubai had become not a paradise for ambitious architects and their engineers but something more like a series of ever-louder action films.

I wonder how much did Steve Jobs lock up Apple's fate the same way. The breathless hype for all Apple's products ultimately doomed Apple's future offerings to the same fate. If it didn't excite audiences as much as the iPhone or the iPad, it wouldn't survive on the Apple ecosystem.

If Apple has been circumspect of late, I attribute part of it to this