It’s that time of year again, when the corporate masters of the digital universe at Apple figure they can convince more of us to upgrade our handheld devices to the latest, shiniest new toys. Of course they know they can – with what is most likely the biggest marketing budget on the planet, they plan how our technological future unfolds with great precision.

But this year’s new iPhone is just a bit different from recent annual spectacles. This new one that is now available is the 10^th anniversary edition of the iPhone. So important is this benchmark that they skipped the ‘7S’ designation, announced an iPhone 8, then skipped 9 altogether and changed to a roman numeral for the iPhone X.

Most of the mass media is fixated – and rightly so – on the price, since it has now migrated to 4-digit territory. (In Canada, the higher memory model – which we will need to run no-too-distant future versions of the operating system smoothly, will run us 1529 units of the local currency). But that the advance sales have led Apple to predict record revenues for this model tells us more than that expertly targeted and crafted marketing can lead people to spend beyond their means. It shows that Apple is just not concerned about the lower tiers of the market.

There are plenty of much lower price competitors out there, just not in the Apple ecosystem of devices. They run open-source android software, and just don’t display the kind of status that Apple wants its customers to feel they have. The fact that iPhones have such a high price shows that Apple is fully aware that it has such a hold on its customer base that it just doesn’t have to worry how expensive its products get. Real competition at this level is purely an illusion.

But the price is not the really significant element here. The design of the iPhone X is worth considering because there are deeper lessons to be learned about our technological culture. It features an ‘edge-to-edge’ display so that entire front surface of the handset is screen. There is no aluminum outline to frame a picture or video – no wasted space for those who want the largest screen that fits in their hand. All you see is image.

This means that there is also no ‘home’ button to activate the device. Instead, a pair of cameras will create a 3D rendering of the face that looks at it, and the phone will activate only for its owner. As well, the latest iPhones all sport wireless charging.

Jony Ives, the key designer for Apple (and thus the one most responsible for an incredible proportion of our interaction with technology on a day-to-day – or even minute-to-minute –  basis) claims in the promotional video that accompanied the launch back in September that “for more than a decade” they have been working toward such a device.  The idea is that the hardware should be unobtrusive, or even invisible – it should “disappear into the experience” of use of the phone. The interaction with the content of the communication should not even require us to be aware of the hardware, as if we have a portal in space through which to look. Ives claims that the iPhone X is the fulfillment of that ‘dream’.

But the dream is actually much older than the first iPhone from ten years ago, or even the first iPod or Mac computer. For ages we humans have been dreaming of transcending the material world, living outside the limitations of the physical world. It is the same dream as flight, escaping from the limits of territory on the ground, or of space travel, overcoming earth’s gravitational field. (Not coincidentally, the launch event was held to inaugurate the ‘Steve Jobs Theatre’ in Apple’s brand new ring-shaped HQ building known as the ‘spaceship’ in Cupertino.)

The same dream pops up in our science fiction, with the ideas of telepathy, or of uploading consciousness into a mainframe computer and leaving the body behind. But is older too – the first people to think about the implications of telegraphy, or radio broadcasting, imagined that these would bring about world piece as they eliminated the distance between nations, allowing perfect communication and understanding.

All these new devices were seen as having nearly magical powers, and in some senses they did. Who doesn’t relate to the emotional power of the idea of flying? or the power of radio transmission? These things have always been sublime, especially in when they are new.

The iPhone already went a long way towards this feeling of living in an immaterial world. In fact any smartphone, with its ability to access the entire content of the internet anywhere we go in our urbanized world, without paying attention to borders or distances, with their ability to show us almost any film ever recorded or play us any music ever recorded, to beam the content to screens and speakers through wireless connections, or print documents on printers, to be scanned by laser beams at checkout counters or concert hall entrances, to be controlled by voice commands – all this contributes to a sense that we were living in a world of magic wands and magic phrases.

And these features of the new iPhone build this form of magic even further into the handheld devices that we have come to rely on as constant companions.

Now we only need to look at it and it recognizes us and starts working for us. We talk to it, using Siri’s voice activated commands. The old idea of a metal slab in our hands disappears. Also disappearing into thin air is the last cable that we needed to use for our devices – this one charges by simple contact with a special accessory that sits on a table top. Along with the wireless earbuds or headphones and wireless microphones and all the other wireless accessories, we now have a device that is free standing and absorbs electricity without wires. All its electronic connections have become invisible, It never needs to be ‘plugged in’ to anything, like an actual physical device would.

Of course the more the machines disappear into the experience of their use, the less we understand how they work, how they uses our information, how they connect us to other people, and the less we are aware of how we are connected to the powers that reside in the corporate algorithms that mediate the flow information that we receive This alone makes the dream of freedom an illusion – how can we be free in a world we don’t really understand?

But the dream of the magical future is alive. Freedom from the limits of the material world feels one step closer with these new machines.

Of course freedom from the powers that actually govern our daily lives, from those with the power to tell working people what to do at work all day and how to do it, so that we can earn the money needed to pay for any of this magic, remains a much more distant dream. And of course (it should go without saying but we need to keep saying it anyway) that both kinds of freedom remain much more distant for the tens of thousands employed by Apple’s dependent contractors actually manufacturing the material devices in the sweatshops of the newly industrialized world.

With its latest devices, Apple has made us feel closer to one dream of freedom, but I can’t help but feel that doing so makes us all the less likely to hang on to the dream of a more meaningful and realistic freedom – the freedom to determine how our own potentials as human beings will be realized, the freedom to direct our own creative energies towards ends of our own choosing. That kind of freedom requires something other than new magical machines; it requires different relationships with others, and different organization of social power. The more we find ourselves dazzled by the latest gadgets, the further we seem from that goal.