From Great Britain to Little England

Interesting insights from Michael O’Sullivan and David Skilling into what lies ahead for the UK:

Britain chose to leave the EU because it had an outsized opinion of itself. But it will soon have to follow a small-country model, like that of Switzerland or Norway. Forty years after leaving New Zealand in the lurch to join the European Economic Community, the UK might soon have less access to the European market than New Zealand does. Its journey from Great Britain to Little England may well be complete.

The general thrust of the article is that if the UK is to recover from Brexit, then it will have to become a very different country. It’s not like Switzerland or Norway or Singapore. And to date no G20 economy has had to make such a dramatic pivot.

So the iPad is “done”. Really?

This morning’s Observer column:

My eye was caught by a headline in the Register, an invaluable online source of tech news and opinion. “Clearance sale shows Apple’s iPad is over. It’s done,” it read. This was a quotation from a piece by Volker Weber on the latest product announcements from Apple. “iPad is the biggest news,” he wrote, “and it says: the iPad is done. Apple is just refining the components, but there isn’t much they can do these days to make yet another super-duper Earth-shattering innovation here.”

Since I was reading this on my iPad Pro, which is probably the most useful electronic device I have ever owned, it came as a bit of a shock. But in fact Volker was really just articulating a truth about digital hardware, which is that the evolution of all such products (and a good deal else besides) follows a sigmoid curve.

It sounds complicated, but it isn’t really…

Read on