While everyone is concentrating on teardowns of iOS4 and Retina Displays I’m going to pick up on something which Steve said during the keynote which may have slipped past the radar:
“We’re not just a tech company. Apple is more than that. It’s tech and humanity.”
Whilst it may sound like a trite statement and a bit of marketing spin if you examine the history of Apple it’s always been a cultural icon, and culture is part of the fabric of human society. An Apple product is a lot more than just expensive aesthetics. Walk into an Apple Store and it invokes desire. Watch the (now defunct) “Get a Mac” ads and it invokes a smile (albeit at Microsoft’s expense). Walk down the street and there’ll be a large percentage wired into an iPod.
But why ?
Because as much as people loathe the company and their hype, the designers continually push the envelope. Everyone knows that the 1st Gen iPhone wasn’t perfect but then it didn’t need to be, it showed that there was a better way of doing things rather than continually watch Sony and Nokia push out the same technology in a different shell. Despite however many laptop and desktop manufacturers out there, the designs were all pretty much the same, boxes hewn from solid plastic and with an operating system that worked some of the time. Apple tried to inject a little creativity into something which is hardly exciting, lets face it, the computer is a functional product.
Roll onto 2010 and WWDC springs on us the iPhone 4. But while some may argue it’s a product launch and nothing more I’ll counter this. Over at Engadget who were live blogging the event there was a snapshot of a video showing FaceTime. And this is where Steve and Apple tap into our humanity. While many products show suits at power meetings using video conferencing, at WWDC Jobs showed us families using FaceTime to communicate with each other. While other show off groups of young people all playing around and acting cool with video conferencing but with little substance or relatable context, Apple showed off two people conversing with sign language over the phone. Has anyone else bothered to show us what the real advantages of using video calling could be other than “it’s a neat trick” ?
Picture from Engadget
Frankly I’m glad that someone is championing technology the way Apple and Steve does. This isn’t about Adobe vs. Apple or Microsoft vs. Apple. And if there is a singular image, or message, taken from that it’s that technology is here to enrich our human experience not rob us of it.
Disclaimer: I’m no obsessive fanboi but I do use Apple products 😉
