![]() ![]() To its credit, Apple has taken steps to address a good deal of this criticism. My former colleague Katie Notopoulos skewered the company in 2016 for appealing to the prototypical “40-something dad who just wants to FaceTime his adorable children while he’s on a business trip, and also find a local pourover coffee shop while he’s in town.” She dubbed this marketing amalgam, “Apple Man,” noting that the needs of this test audience often came at the expense of making the product more affordable or adding features aimed at the millions of loyal customers who don’t worship at the altar of inbox zero. Likewise, there’s some cognitive whiplash to this month’s reports (and Apple’s problematic initial response) that a major iPhone vulnerability targeted the Uighurs, the persecuted Muslim ethnic minority group, and watching Apple executives onstage days later gleefully trying to make to make slow-motion selfies - “slofies,” according to Apple branding - a thing.Īs a luxury brand, Apple’s been accused of being out of touch in keynotes before. Like parents throwing a super chill birthday party for the kids when the marriage has gone haywire.” Given the pressures of looming tariffs and trade wars, the event seemed, as the journalist Lauren Goode tweeted, “eerily calm. The Pleasantville cheery, sanitized tone of the keynote clashes with Apple’s position as a global tech behemoth. Plus, they’re exceedingly shiny and the cameras can turn any point-and-click amateur taking photos of their goofy dog (me!) into Annie Leibovitz. So it makes sense that we pay attention when the company dreams up a new iteration. iPhones changed how we communicate with one another and seek information they’ve addicted us, tethering us to our jobs and helping us feel both attached to and alienated from one another. Their new phones are big deals by virtue of the fact that they’ve sold more than 2.2 billion iOS devices since their debut in 2007. Apple is a global company that changed computing by putting little ones in all our pockets. The evolution of the Apple keynote is understandable. ![]() And why Apple needs to put an end to its 90-plus minute advertising spectacles. It was also a tidy example of just how peculiar and out of touch the company’s product unveilings have become. The tightly choreographed scene was a demo of an iPad reboot of the classic “Frogger” game, which Apple was teasing as an example of its new arcade gaming platform. “Is that a giant baby wearing sunglasses?! He’s making quite a mess!” (It was a giant baby he was being quite messy). “Whoa, what is that?" Executive Two whooped. Roughly six minutes into Apple’s annual keynote presentation on Tuesday, I watched with grim fascination as a video game executive guided a digital frog across a bathroom floor in order to carefully avoid scraps of rogue toilet paper, while a second executive provided breathless color commentary. ![]()
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