For years, Apple gear has been regarded as expensive, sometimes in the luxury class. Thus owners of such products were regarded as well-off, elites, or people who just didn’t understand the value of a dollar; well, make that whatever currency you use in your country.

I know that when I first brought a Mac into my home, in 1989, I did price shop, not that there were many dealers who managed the full product line. In the end, I chose the shop from which my employer bought their Apple gear after having been assured I’d pay the same price they did.

Now it was a different world, and you couldn’t buy cheap PCs for a few hundred dollars at the neighborhood supermarket. It was a serious purchase even though Apple’s pricing lay at the high-end of the market. While Macs were offered fully assembled, you could — and still could — assemble a PC from the parts. Sometimes you’d save a good deal of money, at the expense of having to assemble everything, configure device drivers and so on and so forth.

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Hearing someone say “the year 2020” seems a bit like a far-off sci-fi future, but the future is here, and in many ways, it’s pretty incredible. With a combination of rapidly-developing tech in general and the COVID-19 pandemic, 2020 has been an incredible year for technology to change and adapt to the way it’s needed right now. Here are some of the most interesting ways tech in 2020 has adapted to the public’s needs.

More Accessibility for All

In 2020, more people than ever are working from home, with many businesses shutting down or whittling their in-store staff down to skeleton crews. In turn, that’s meant that tech has started to become more accessible in general. That includes everything from bookstores offering certain books for free to governments recognizing that internet access is more essential than ever, and pushing to deliver it to more and more rural areas. People are gaining access to tech at an unprecedented rate, and it’s served to help more people access much-needed services.

Information From Many Different Sources

Along with more access to tech, 2020 has seen a huge boost in access to information. It’s easier than ever to publish an article online or even just create your own blog to get information out to people. Within minutes, thousands of people can see the latest update on an interesting piece of information, even if that information is happening across the world from where they are. People are able to be educated with just a few clicks, and that’s more apparent than ever.

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Despite all the critical misgivings, the original iPhone SE was a hit with the audience to which it was marketed. While Apple had moved on to handsets with 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch displays before the spring of 2016, there were millions of customers who thought they were too large. A four-inch display was quite enough, particularly for those with small purses or pockets.

We can argue the value of larger displays, maybe, but the public mostly made its decision. After Apple executives, including marketing VP Philip Schiller, denigrated the large Samsungs and other handsets as being too inconvenient for one-handed use, it was clear that the public just didn’t care. Soon as the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus arrived in 2014, sales soared. A pent-up demand that Apple wasn’t admitting to was filled.

All right we know that when Schiller was saying no to any iPhone larger than the iPhone 5s, Apple was already designing handsets with larger displays. Typical of Apple, it was all marketspeak. First attack the competitor’s product, then release the “superior” alternative.

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As much as some people complain that Apple is spending too much time resting on its laurels — particularly with the iPhone and certainly the Mac — change has been a constant for the company over the years. In article in AppleInsider about how the Apple II saved Apple, Steve Jobs is quoted as saying that “all computer architectures have about a ten-year life,” but that was largely about boosting the sale of NeXT gear.

Now the ten-year lifecycle comment has in sone respects been true for Apple. So while the Apple II was quite a successful computer in the 1970s, the Mac ultimately supplanted it although it took a while.

Ten years after the Mac debuted in 1984, Apple made a huge change in the processor architecture with the arrival of the PowerPC. Looking back, it wasn’t such an impressive upgrade at first. It took quite a while for apps to be upgraded to the new architecture, so they ran in emulation, and thus much slower than regular Macs of that era.

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