Chestnut Hill is an Apple town. One of the ways we know this – aside from taking a visual census of the Macbooks you can find on tables in front of coffee drinkers at the Chestnut Hill Coffee Company and Starbucks – is from the Google Analytics counts we get for visitors to chestnuthilllocal.com, where Apple users are far more plentiful than they are in the general public.

For example, the most popular browser used to view chestnuthilllocal.com is Safari, with 30.85 percent. It edged out Chrome by a slim .73 percentage points.

Other measurements put our readers even more squarely in Apple’s camp. A whopping 74 percent of our traffic from mobile devices comes from iOS. And of all the people who read us on a desktop computer, 30 percent do so with a Mac, even though Mac’s account for less than 10 percent of all the desktops used in the U.S.

I was thinking about these facts during last Wednesday’s annual Apple event for announcing its latest iPhone. Last week’s multi-hour event featured product announcements of a new set of iPhones – the 6s and the 6s plus – a new, larger iPad aimed at “professionals” and a new Apple TV.

I’m not sure how much people in Chestnut Hill follow these Apple announcements, but I’m guessing they’re more popular here than they are in a lot of other communities in the country. I can’t count how many people write to the Local to suggest an Apple store whenever a major commercial property opens up.

The national media was certainly abuzz with the Apple event. The week that followed was filled thousands of stories and analysis pieces on the new Apple products. Writers and commentators again debated whether or not Apple was still “innovative” or not (a word that is used so much now that I think it’s actually lost its meaning).

What is it with Apple and technology in general that generates so much attention? What are we all looking for? What is so important about a slightly more convenient way to stream video to our TVs or speedier ways to upload photos to Instagram? Every year Apple promises to “change everything?” But does it?

It’s complicated. And I’m not here to lament technology. I love tech. And I’m an agnostic. I own an Android phone, an iPad, a Windows 10 laptop and a Linux desktop. I like them all and don’t really have a favorite. Each way of doing things has its quirks, its downsides and advantages.

But I wonder, as the iPhone approaches its 10th anniversary (in 2017), are we going to continue to wait for some new, breathtaking innovation, heralded by a new device that most of us assume will come from Apple.

The truth is, though, I think, that the big change already happened. Smart phones already changed the way we do a lot of things – from listening to music to taking photos and sharing it all on Facebook. Yet we will keep watching tech announcements and reading about them afterward.

What are we waiting for?

-- Pete Mazzaccaro