The iPhone X and Apple's Mundane Vision of the Future

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The iPhone X and Apple's Mundane Vision of the Future
> Date: September 14, 2017 at 6:26:50 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend Gerald Steinback.  DLH]
>
> The iPhone X and Apple’s Mundane Vision of the Future
> By Anthony Lydgate
> Sep 13 2017
> <https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-iphone-x-and-apples-mundane-vision-of-the-future>
>
> “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” Steve Jobs said a decade ago. 
> “Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” Standing onstage at the 2007 MacWorld Expo, in San Francisco, arrayed 
> in his usual vestments—bluejeans, black turtleneck, gray New Balances—Jobs was proclaiming a modern gospel. Provided 
> you had five hundred bucks lying around, you could proclaim it, too. By 2008, the company formerly known as Apple 
> Computer, now just as Apple, had attracted millions of new adherents. At the Worldwide Developers Conference that 
> June, Jobs introduced the iPhone 3G. The 3GS followed, in 2009, and soon the good news was coming more than once a 
> year—iPad, iPad 2, iPhone 4, iPhone 4s. Jobs didn’t live to see the iPhone 5, or the 6, or the 7, but they were 
> announced in the Jobsian style, with the same careful choreography, the same boomer-techie soundtrack, and the same 
> increasingly inevitable sense that whatever Apple was selling would soon be walking among us, whether we wanted it to 
> or not.
>
> I watched the latest product launch, held on Tuesday, on my obsolescing iPhone, since my desktop computer wasn’t up 
> to Apple’s live-stream specs. The event took place at the Steve Jobs Theatre, on the company’s freshly planted, 
> manured, and mulched campus in Cupertino, California. (In May, Tim Cook, the current C.E.O., told Wired that the 
> building “felt like” Jobs: “It’s on a hill, at one of the highest points on this land.”) The theatre proper is 
> located underground, beneath a cylindrical glass lobby area capped with a metallic carbon-fibre roof; to me, it 
> looked like Jony Ive’s interpretation of a macaroon. When the event began, at one o’clock on the dot, accompanied by 
> Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” it was clear that the Jobs-era 
> trappings had barely changed.
>
> As Cook, who wore bluejeans, blue sneakers, and a blue zip-up over a blue button-down, explained, the company’s new 
> location was itself a testament to its co-founder. “Steve’s vision and passion live on here, at Apple Park,” he 
> said—in the “sea of asphalt” converted to “rolling parkland”; in the olive and apricot groves planted inside the 
> gargantuan main building’s thirty-acre courtyard; and, of course, in the theatre, with its fourteen-thousand-dollar 
> leather seats. (“It’s the most state-of-the-art, purpose-built theatre ever,” Cook said.) The C.E.O. then invited 
> Angela—Angela Ahrendts; Apple executives go by their first names, like teachers at a Montessori school—to the stage. 
> “Our people are our soul, and they’re Apple’s greatest differentiator,” Ahrendts, the senior vice-president for 
> retail, said. Because of this, the company’s outposts around the world were being renamed. “We don’t call them stores 
> anymore,” she said. “We call them town squares. Because they’re gathering places for five hundred million people to 
> visit us every year.” The company would continue to offer classes, workshops, and other social events, where 
> “creative pros” could further spread Apple’s word. (Ahrendts: “The creative pro is to liberal arts as the Genius has 
> always been to technology.”)
>
> As if to confirm the company’s new reach, Cook started his presentation of the day’s first product, the Series 3 
> Apple Watch, with a video in which a dozen or so Watch users read aloud letters that they had purportedly sent him. 
> “This is the first time I’ve worn a watch since my bar mitzvah,” one man said. “Now I get up at 5 A.M.,” another 
> said, a little too brightly. “I dutifully oblige when the Apple Watch reminds me to stand up every hour,” a third man 
> said. Then it was back to Cook. “I’d like to invite Jeff up,” he said. “Jeff?” Apple’s chief operating officer, Jeff 
> Williams, walked onstage in a dark-blue button-down and dark bluejeans. He went through the new Watch’s features—an 
> enhanced heart-rate app, a barometric altimeter, a wristband inspired by the “classic Hermès driving glove,” and, 
> most important, cellular connectivity. “That’s just darn close to magic,” Williams said. “Who would have thought?” 
> Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice-president of Internet software and services, showed up next to introduce the Apple TV 
> 4K, and then it was on the main event.
>
> Cook began by reminding his audience of how far the company had come since 2007. “We’ve created innovation after 
> innovation after innovation,” he said. A spectator could be forgiven for hearing a note of fatigue in the C.E.O.’s 
> voice. Apple has always seen itself as world-changing; with a few minor modifications, one year’s sales pitch works 
> just as well the next. Seemingly every product has been “incredibly thin” and “optimized for real-world use,” primed 
> to show us “just how much better it can be.” This time was no different. The original iPhone, Cook said, taught us 
> that we could “touch the software.” FaceTime and iMessage “allowed us all to connect in more meaningful ways.” Siri 
> “used artificial intelligence to make our voices more powerful.” And so, Cook said, “it is only fitting that we are 
> here, in this place, on this day, to reveal a product that will set the path for technology for the next decade.” Was 
> it time for another gospel already?
>
> [snip]
>
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