There’s a word that shows up in tech headlines so often, it hits you before you even finish the headline: finally. You know the kind of headline I mean…
“Microsoft finally releases native Copilot app for Windows 11”
“Google finally supports something it probably should’ve had years ago”
It’s become a staple of product news. Something rolls out, and someone somewhere will declare that it’s finally happened—like we’ve all been waiting around in collective agony for this one thing to arrive.
Sometimes, we have. The iPad calculator example is fair; every computing platform since the ’80s—Windows, PDAs, early cell phones—has shipped with a calculator. The iPad didn’t. It wasn’t just quirky; it was so baffling that it became a meme. So when Apple did add it in 2024, the word wasn’t clickbait. It was a collective sigh of relief, more than a decade in the making.
But most of the time, it’s not something anyone outside of a narrow power-user niche has really been clamouring for. It’s just a new feature, a minor fix, a long-touted promise that maybe wasn’t that pressing to begin with.
At first, I thought this was just a personal annoyance. But I dug into it. I analyzed a decade of tech headlines (well, ChatGPT did)—and the trend is real.
The word “finally” has been steadily increasing over the years, and not just by a little. Since 2015, the frequency of “finally” in headlines has more than tripled. And when you break it down by type of outlet, the gap becomes even more interesting.
Professional outlets—places like The Verge, PC Magazine, Wired, and Ars Technica—do use “finally,” but more sparingly. In these headlines, it usually points to something that really was delayed for years, or a shift that marks the end of a long arc. But in enthusiast and semi-professional media—sites like Betanews, Neowin, or independent tech blogs—the word is everywhere. It’s slapped onto so many patches and features, it’s turned routine product work into breathless milestones.
This isn’t just a quirk of tone or amateur writing. It’s a signal.
“Finally” is a word that implies a story. It hints that there’s been a wait, a demand, a buildup. It injects emotion into otherwise routine updates. Even when it’s not earned, it gives the impression that something overdue has at last been delivered. It creates urgency where there may be none—and that’s exactly what makes it so tempting in the attention economy. It’s a word that boosts clicks.
And here’s the part that matters more: this framing doesn’t just shape how stories are told. It shapes how products are built. When “finally” becomes the headline you’re chasing, it feeds into a larger mindset. Teams start focusing on shipping what’s expected, not necessarily what’s valuable. Roadmaps get cluttered with “we should’ve had this already” features. Engineers and product folks feel pressure to tick boxes rather than ask hard questions. “Finally” doesn’t celebrate good work, it celebrates catching up.
You end up with launches that feel reactive, not deliberate. Releases framed more by what’s missing than what’s possible. And when that happens too often, you lose the thread of strategy. Product work becomes an endless sprint to meet expectations—real or imagined—rather than a thoughtful process of solving the right problems at the right time.
Of course, some things are genuinely long overdue. Some fixes are worth celebrating, even if they took a while. But we’ve reached a point where “finally” is used so casually, so reflexively, that it dilutes any sense of meaningful payoff. Everything is framed as a climax which means nothing actually feels climactic.
The result? Teams get burned out. Features pile up, are launched without care, unsupported, and quickly forgotten. Users get trained to expect a constant stream of improvements, each more dramatic than the last. Thoughtful development gets edged out by headline-chasing urgency.
So maybe it’s time we treat the word “finally” with more care. Not everything is late. Not everything is climactic. Sometimes, a feature isn’t finally here, it’s just… here. The time was right, the team had space, and they released with intention.
That may not make headlines, but it makes better products.