Duncan Bell is into Apple
This month has been both a triumph and a disaster for The World’s Biggest Brand
The inevitable and instant result was that my phone crashed, burned, bricked, died
Are you one of those people who, upon reading any article about Apple that doesn’t slag them off mightily, rushes to social media to ask, “How much did Apple pay you for this?!”
Well, you’ll be pleased to know that I can tell you exactly how much. In my case: nothing. Isn’t it unfair?
Every time I pen a feature called something like, “New iPhone looks like it’ll be the best phone you can get, until the next good one comes out,” I send off my invoice to Apple (£5,000 and a gold Apple Watch, payable within 28 days).
Every single time, without fail, they ignore it. AND they don’t return my calls when I ring to complain.
Then, when I turn up at their offices holding a big placard saying, “Apple, pay me what you owe me for writing sycophantic things about you,” while shouting abuse through a megaphone at anyone coming out of their building, they call the police!
This is why people hate Apple. It’s their sheer money-grabbing unfairness, and their high-handed, control-freak attitude to being shouted at through a megaphone, on the street, by me.
Get to the point, please
Using Apple’s products – being a ‘fan’ of them, if you will – can feel like being in love with someone who’s very beautiful, but also an axe murderer. And I feel like last month was a mixed one for The Word’s Biggest BrandTM .
We’ll be able to judge how well the iPhone 7 handsets have really done in a year’s time, but it was no surprise to me that the 7 Plus and certain types of 7 sold out on pre-order – an unusual occurrence in recent times. The new iPhones absolutely target Apple’s hardcore fanbase with their design.
That’s why the company emphasised the black ones at its launch event. Nothing is more classically stylish and appealing to people who are into design than black things. Steve Jobs, with his black polo necks and black smartphones, got that.
In recent years, Apple’s not even had a black handset. The nearest thing was ‘Space Grey,’ which is a feeble, watered down version of black. The emphasis has been on colours such as rose gold, in a stab at following fashion and trying to dominate Middle and Far Eastern markets.
People in the East like everything to be made of gold, because it brings good luck, or something. If you go to supermarkets in, say, Doha, you’ll find that everything from trousers to Twiglets are gold coloured. Bathroom fittings too. Yes, over there, even the showers are golden. You couldn’t make it up.
But gold is gaudy. It’s not stylish. Black is stylish. And you know what’s even more stylish than black? Jet Black.
That’s the new type of black Apple invented especially for the iPhone 7. It’s a black so noir- ish, it’s like a black diamond, at the bottom of a well, at night, during a lunar eclipse.
So anyway, I lap all this kind of crap up, so I was absolutely knocked out by the iPhone 7. I also loved how Apple not only greatly improved the camera, but also how they’d addressed the complaint that some people had, that the camera lens protrudes from the back of the iPhone, instead of being flush. Rather than removing the protuberance, Apple actually made it more noticeable… But also more attractive. It made it into a feature!
Problem was, the inky blackness and the beautiful, sports-car curve of the camera-lens bump got me so hot under the collar, I really did momentarily become a genuine Apple ‘fan boy’. A Fapple, if you will.
As a result, I broke the hardlearned habit of recent years and decided to install iOS 10 – which is also packed with neat little features and design flourishes – on my ancient and oh-so-unworthy iPhone 6s, as soon as it became available. Woah boy.
The inevitable and instant result was that my phone crashed, burned, bricked, died. And I simply cannot exist any more without a phone – I’m like a Dalek without its casing, plus I immediately get lost without Google Maps – so I very nearly had a nervous breakdown trying to restore it.
At least this meant that equilibrium was restored. I looked at my lifeless phone, and my pile of unpaid invoices to Apple, and realised that I actually hated the brand and all of its deeds. Although, give it another month and I’ll probably have swung the other way again. Such is the rollercoaster of tech.