When you look at the price of mainstream TV sets nowadays, they are remarkably cheap compared to the way things used to be. You see, when I was real young, the family TV was a major purchase.

So I’ve owned far too many TV sets over the years to remember them all. Shortly after I left home to seek my fortune at age 21, my mom bought me a Zenith 21-inch black-and-white set. Although color sets were becoming available in those days, they weren’t worth the extra price, since much TV fare hadn’t switched to color. At least not yet.

Apropos of nothing, that famous super hero show of the 1950s, ‘The Adventures of Superman,” filmed the final group of episodes in color. Evidently someone was clever enough to realize this might mean something someday.

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Except for some reports of the form of future Apple products — the iPhone 12 and the first Macs with Apple Silicon — that hasn’t been a whole lot of important news to cover about our favorite fruit company. Whether you have time on your hands — or are working at home — no doubt you are running the family TV for more hours than usual.

Now there’s so much content available for streaming from the various services, you should be able to find some material that’s worth watching.

As most of you know, Barbara and I are very pop culture oriented, and we found enough good shows on the family TV from traditional broadcast networks to keep us occupied most evenings, at least until seasons ended prematurely because of production shutdowns. So we were left looking for alternatives.

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Some of you have wondered whether the fact that I’m not writing as many columns means that I’m slowing down, or planning to retire. But it’s not about wanting to work less. It’s more about the fact that Apple is not the company it was when I started the original version of this site in 1999, and I’ve begun to repeat myself a little too often.

Then, Apple was just a couple of years coming out of a near-death experience. It wasn’t out of line to think that there wouldn’t be an Apple Computer for many more years, so those of us who embraced the platform by buying its products had to work harder to prove — maybe to ourselves — that it was the correct idea. And as Apple’s fortunes improved, to refute the fake news and ill-informed commentaries written about them.

Segue to 2020.

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One of the main reasons given for Apple’s decision to limit most discussion about future products is not to harm sales of existing hardware. This is certainly true for incremental product updates. So if you knew what was coming in the 2020 iPhone, you might postpone buying the current (2019) model. Well, at least when the next version is coming soon.

More or less.

But when it comes to an iPhone, Apple has been quite predictable in releasing annual updates, and for the most part, the new model isn’t so improved compared to the current model that you should rush to upgrade. At this point, most iPhone owners probably know that new models are forthcoming — and when — and they will decide if they need to wait for something special, or just buy what they want now.

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