Is Apple Out Apple-ing Itself?
I’m realizing that I’m getting a bit tired of Apple PR and all the fuss they create around their products. I feel like the company has become too self-aware and it’s bragging too much about its process, creating pompous narratives around things that wouldn’t have much to say otherwise. The products should talk by themselves (isn’t good design supposed to be honest?), and what Apple says about them should be an ‘addendum’; instead, with the new Apple Watch, I feel like Apple is trying to take something underwhelming and frivolous, and make it meaningful and desirable at all costs. There are watches and smartwatches made with the same materials and care, when not with much more care, than Apple’s one, but Apple wants us to believe that what they’re doing is unprecedented and revolutionary, when it’s arguably not.
The marketing around the first iPad made much more sense to me; even if it was very Appleish in its grandiosity, it felt more authentic and truthful. With the Apple Watch, instead, they’re trying to out-Apple themselves. And with the tech thingys market reaching saturation, I feel like the worst is yet to come in terms of inventing needs, creating narratives and forging desires.
They say they’re making technology more personal, and I feel like the more personal technology becomes, the more we have to worry about what we really want and what we really need.
Yes, the Apple Watch is a very good tech toy and it does pretty amazing things like helping medical research, but I’m convinced that the latter is not the reason of its existence, while Apple is trying to convince us that it is. Nope, the reason it exists is that a big company needs to sell us one more thing (nothing wrong about that!) and hopefully something good is coming out of it, and that’s it.
Maybe we should start thinking a little more about technology and its role in our lives. No, I’m not talking about writing longer reviews, I’m talking about calling into question our relationship with this stuff. Apple is just a company after all, not the saviour and treasurer of personal interaction and human well-being. What they produce is often incredible and I can’t imaging writing these words on anything else than my iPhone or Mac, but that won’t stop me from being aware and critic, and wondering if using these things is really making my life better and omg I really want to buy an Apple Watch!
Written and published on my iPhone without much editing, thanks to the new Medium app, which I really, really like and it’s probably the reason this chain of thought is messy and full of typos.
