There are days when I look at my news feed, and it seems like a social fabric of fun - a video of the first steps of my friends' baby! My nephew's prom date! On other days, it feels like a NASCAR vehicle, plastered with news stories, promoted posts, lame Live videos, and random content.

The lens through which I view the media world is pretty simple: If you are in the business of sucking up attention, then you are in the media business.

Because Apple's corporate DNA is that of a hardware company, its activities are meant to support hardware sales.

Business, much like life, is not a movie, and not everyone gets to have a storybook ending.

The early entrants into the world of A.R., as with its cousin virtual reality, were disappointing: the phones were too weak, the networks were too slow, and the applications were too nerdy. But now the technological pieces are in place, and a whole generation - much of which is on Snapchat - has come to consider the camera almost a third arm.

Apple has always been, and always will be, a hardware-first company. It produces beautiful devices with elegant designs and humane operating-system software.

Our entire society is rooted around the idea of more, and longer has become the measure of success.

Augmented reality is the 'boy who cried wolf' of the post-Internet world - it's long been promised but has rarely been delivered in a satisfying way.

By now, we all know that our every move online can be tracked and traced, and that, ideally, services learn from and adapt to customers based on an artful deployment of that data.

Most competition in Silicon Valley now heads toward there being one monopolistic winner.