With no tea leaves handy, I have looked out of the window at the decomposing leaves in the garden, and here’s what they had to say about today’s Apple event. All rumours guaranteed one hundred per cent accurate.

• In a drive towards honestly in marketing, the new smaller iPhone will be called the iPhone Upsell.
• Tim Cook will perform a rap about privacy, which will carry on until: The FBI stops bugging us / Otherwise we will continue to cuss. Them. / It’s not about one iPhone, it’s about precedent / And you should know that, Mr. President.
• Apple will hurl an iPad Pro at the temple of any journalist who’s written about the iPad’s sales decline, knocking them out cold and thereby stemming worldwide criticism.
• The ‘loop’ in ‘Let us loop you in’ will refer to a new tether that keeps an iPhone attached to your wrist. Permanently. The loop can never be removed.
• A new Apple Watch strap will periodically give you a small electric shock, thereby jerking your arm and making the watch’s face turn on, saving you having to perform a magic arm twist yourself.

Oh, all right, then. There will be a new and smaller iPhone that will be called MAGICAL, and a new and smaller iPad Pro that will be called MAGICAL, and Jony Ive will probably still be locked in a white room. MAGICAL. HAPPY NOW?

I recently wrote that Game Center is still broken after six months. For many people, the system fails entirely, launching to a white screen, and freezing Settings when you try to access the Game Center section. This results in many games not running at all, impacting users who play games, and developers who make them (suddenly finding their games are effectively inaccessible unless they build in a ridiculous ‘is Game Center broken on this device?’ workaround); it’s also a pain in the backside for people like me, who write about iOS gaming.

I’ve filed bug reports about the Game Center issue in the past, but when Apple’s new Twitter support team sprang to life, I figured I’d give it a shot. It became clear that (entirely reasonably), I’d be asked to try a bunch of generic fixes, and so on about the third communication I fired over a lengthy message outlining all the things I’d tried already. (There are various ‘tech voodoo’ solutions rattling around the web, none of which appear permanent. The latest, which bizarrely shows some promise, is to restore your device and avoid any game released before November 2013.) In the end, I was bumped to phone support.

I had a very nice conversation with someone at Apple, who said he’d prioritise the case and get insight from engineers regarding what could be done to fix things. I wasn’t optimistic, and it turns out with good reason, because I now have a response:

the issue is being investigated and should hopefully be resolved soon

So there we go. The Game Center bug, which Apple has known about since the iOS 9 betas, is being investigated and should “hopefully” be resolved “soon”. I realise that’s all anyone can really say, but I think anyone reliant on Game Center would be justified in wearing their cynical hat while reading that statement. We can only hope ‘soon’ in this case means ‘by the time of the next minor update’ and not ‘possibly at some point in the iOS 10 cycle’ or ‘before the heat death of the universe’.

I wrote recently about a cheery email I received about Nook. The service is closing in the UK, and the company has reached a deal of sorts with a nothing operator in the space (run by a supermarket!), which will allow you to retain some of your purchases. I received another email today, which had a rather more urgent ‘last chance’ feel to it. Again, it outlined the process customers must take:

To help meet your digital reading needs going forward, NOOK has partnered with award‑winning Sainsbury’s Entertainment on Demand to ensure that you have continued access to as many of your purchased NOOK Books as possible at no additional cost to you.

If I have purchased something, my assumption would be ongoing and permanent ownership. What would be more honest is the following:

To help meet your digital reading needs going forward, NOOK has partnered with award‑winning Sainsbury’s Entertainment on Demand to ensure that you have continued access to as many of the NOOK Books you thought you had purchased — but had in fact only sort-of rented (SURPRISE!) — as possible at no additional cost to you.

This kind of thing is why I almost never buy DRM-encased content. Music already solved this problem, after plenty of turmoil, and it’s now actually quite difficult to find downloadable music (outside of streaming, where ownership isn’t presumed) with DRM. Books, magazines and comics rather oddly often cling to DRM, though, to lock you into services or specific stores; on that basis, I have reverted to paper or will only purchase content in formats that lack DRM (such as freely usable PDF or CBR).

When it comes to movies and telly, I fear things won’t change for a very long time, due to studios being blinkered and paranoid. Right now, I could download almost any show or movie entirely for free, and would be able to watch wherever and whenever I like. By contrast, I can pay over the odds for a digital file that only works on specific hardware and/or using specific software, and that might vanish from a cloud library without notice. Subsequently, I almost never buy digital TV shows or movies now, preferring streaming; and on those very few occasions I do succumb, it’s either a rare DRM-free download (for example, from a Kickstarter), or for something that’s inherently disposable that I only really want to watch once.

Frankly, the approach taken by many executives — whether they’re behind Hollywood blockbusters or systems for selling and reading books — needs to die. They are consumer-hostile, and Nook’s misfortune showcases what happens when things go badly wrong. If a publisher folds, you don’t expect someone to silently remove their paper books from your shelves and then say you can have some of them back, for free, because a deal has been struck with a supermarket. The same should be true for digital.

The Guardian has run one of a seemingly endless string of Steve Wozniak articles, which you can find hurled across the internet, like so much toilet roll flung into a tree. This time, he’s moaning about Apple Watch, and specifically its shift into the jewellery market, where the unit you buy is as much about status as functionality.

You’d have to be naive to consider Apple wasn’t already somewhat in this space anyway. While I’ve long argued Apple kit is worth the outlay due to its broadly superior usability compared to rival products, there’s always been a hint of elitism about Apple. And purely within single Apple product lines, there’s clearly space for the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ — after all, there probably aren’t too many people buying the very cheapest iPhone or iPod because they really want that model. With Apple Watch bands, this is even more overt. On this concern, I somewhat agree with Woz, although Apple Watch remains only a small part of Apple’s business rather than something that drives the company.

The problem I have with the report is it highlighting two concerns that come up a lot in interviews with Woz, and then get widely reported as some kind of fact:

Well this isn’t the company that Apple was originally

Good. A stagnant company is one that fails. But also: what is the original Apple? Woz and Jobs in a garage, hacking away at the Apple Computer 1? The company that found a modicum of mainstream success in the Apple II? The company that created the Macintosh, but then found itself almost obliterated by the IBM juggernaut? The company that nonetheless instigated a desktop publishing revolution?

That only takes us through a small part of Apple’s history, but it showcases how the company has changed many times. And during the more recent Jobs/Cook run, we’ve seen shifts towards consumer computing, rethinking media industries, revamping mobile devices, and more. If we still had the company Apple was originally, would we have the iPhone?

or the company that really changed the world a lot

At which point did this stop? The Apple II? The Mac? The iPhone? The iPad? Where’s the cut-off point in Woz’s mind about Apple’s ability to be influential and change the way things are done?

I respect Woz and his various achievements, but it’s odd that so many column inches are reserved for the opinions of someone who has had almost nothing to do with Apple in three decades.

When iOS 9 hit beta last summer, I heard concerns from developers about Game Center. Never Apple’s most-loved app, it had seemingly fallen into a state of disrepair. In many cases, people were reporting it outright failed to work.

Six months later, little has changed. If anything, Game Center has gotten worse, with major problems increasingly widespread. These include the Game Center app launching as a white screen, and Game Center freezing the Settings app when you try to access its options.

You might wave this away as a trifling problem. If so, I imagine you don’t play games. Game Center isn’t just about logging highscores — it’s also crucial for the functionality of many turn-based multiplayer titles. Without Game Center, they cannot and do not work. Additionally, some games freeze on start-up, because developers had quite reasonably expected Game Center would at least be functional. This makes for angry users, who can’t directly contact developers through the App Store and therefore leave bad reviews. Developers are now updating their apps to effectively check whether Game Center is broken, flinging up a dialog box accordingly, and at least allowing players access.

This state of affairs is ridiculous. I have three working iOS devices, and only one now has a functioning Game Center. As someone who writes about iOS games for a living, this issue affects me professionally and impacts on coverage for developers, since I cannot write about games the broken Game Center is blocking access to. But more importantly, it makes me question Apple’s interest in fixing bugs, and especially dealing with anything relating to games.

If a critical bug blocked access to any other default app and caused countless other apps on the system to fail, would we still be waiting for a fix six months later? I’ve no idea whether there’s anyone senior at Apple responsible for and advocating on behalf of gaming. If not, Apple should do some recruiting, because right now it feels like the exec team doesn’t give a hoot about games and gamers, beyond the odd high-end title showing off the power of an iPhone or iPad at an Apple event.

Further reading: TouchArcade thread Game Center Stopped Working, which has over 50 pages at the time of writing.