»Let’s take a field trip«, WWDC, and reading too much into things
Thoughts on Apple Car, Part 103
Looking at Apple event invites has been fun for a long time, and it gets only better if you see it through the lens of an unannounced product.
Tomorrow is Apple’s first event in Chicago and it’s probably about education and the iPad. Its title though, »Let’s take a field trip«, would make for an Apple Car event as well. It can’t be long, right?
Even better clues can be found in this year’s WWDC design. Most people see UI elements and suspect a new form of unified operating system or user interface. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
The WWDC design is actually a city landscape with moving parts all over it.
It is clearly the preface to a car-focused 30-year anniversary of WWDC in 2019, which I dreamed about in this post from last year:
Moving a little back in time, we can find clues in Apple’s event history that connect a few dots.
The first time Steve Jobs was showing a car on stage was in 2005.
It was during the introduction of the original iPod nano and Motorola ROKR, when Steve was both revealing an unbelievably insightful product (the nano) that would set the stage for future product development (flash storage), and an unbelievably crippled product (the ROKR) that would soon be put off stage by a revolutionary future product (the iPhone).
What he did in between though, was introducing iPod for your car (part of the Made for iPod program), starting at minute 33 in the following video:
What car is he showing?
Turns out it is the race car of Eddie Rickenbacker, the most successful US air force fighter in the world wars.
He drove this car during the legendary Elgin Road Race in Scotland in 1914.
Rickenbacker also started his own automotive company, Rickenbacker Motor Company in 1920, selling technologically advanced cars incorporating innovations from automobile racing. He marketed it with a guy called Steve (!) and foresaw the future technology in braking systems.
From Wikipedia:
Rickenbacker had arranged with Steve Hannagan, the Super Publicist for the Indianapolis 500, to publicize the car. The Rickenbacker came equipped with the first four-wheel brake system. Probably due to bad publicity from the other car manufacturers, who feared they would be unable to sell their inventory of cars with two-wheel braking, the company had trouble selling its cars and eventually went bankrupt in 1927. Rickenbacker went into massive debt, but was determined to pay back all of the $250,000 he owed, despite personally going bankrupt (and therefore no longer being legally obligated to do so). Eventually, all vehicles manufactured in the U.S. incorporated four-wheel braking.
The photograph of the race car shown in Steve Jobs presentation became famous being the cover of Philipp Blom’s The Vertigo Years, a »unique anatomy of a pivotal era which chronicles this conflicted epoch year by year«.
But why did Steve Jobs choose this picture? Did he feel like being in a between-the-years episode, was he aware that the iPod in cars, and also the later CarPlay, would only be bridge technologies in the race to Apple Car?
We’ll never know.
The funny thing is, tomorrow’s event will probably be covered by the Chicago Tribune, which also recently published a piece remembering the epic Elgin Road Race in Scotland:
Sigh.
