A new edict from an old cult
Back in the day, jokes about Apple Inc. being a religion were pretty frequent. You don’t hear them much anymore. Those of us who were absorbed into the Apple cult, as I was, reluctantly, over decades, know the reason: there’s not much joke left in the joke. I suspect my cognitive processes on seeing the preview of the new iPhone 7 were typical of Apple user-hostages, and you could even see them playing out in the online tech press.
“They’re removing the headphone jack from the phone? Oh, hell no. No one is gonna buy this thing. I wouldn’t buy it myself. I’ ll wait till they bring it back f or t he i Phone 8. Those wireless earbuds look stupid and they’ll probably get lost right away.” Minutes pass. “Hmm. Come to think of it, the headphone jack is pretty old technology. Like a century old. And then some. We all know headphones are going to be wireless as a matter of accepted fact in 10 years anyway — the kids will laugh at old photographs of people wearing wired ones. So aren’t the people who instinctively object to this a bit like those audiophile ultra-suckers who obsess over cabling?
In a world of digital signals, there’s no problem with the lightning adapter they’re throwing in for people who have older headphones or buds.” More minutes elapse. “And, I mean, how long does a pair of earbuds last anyway? Cripes, they always wear out or get mislaid in, what, somewhere between six and 30 months. This guy who’s complaining about his $800 headphones — pal, you already set that money on fire. Everybody knows you do your research, pay $ 60 or whatever for a top brand or something the consumer magazines like, and hope your phones are good for two years.
“The adapter is not going to affect the quality of your overpriced cans. Nobody has to buy the new earbuds if they think they’ll get lost. And how sure are we of that? I bet the user testing has been pretty extensive … I haven’t lost a pair of glasses since I was 12.”
Before you know it, perhaps without consciously knowing it, you have re-talked yourself i nto t he narrative of Apple cultural leadership and style innovation. It has its cruel, obtuse side, sure — anybody who plays music or podcasts on iTunes knows it. But that’s part of what you buy when you buy Apple: imperfect fast- forward judgment on when an interface or an application is technologically obsolete. The church may err, but it deserves the benefit of the doubt. You trust it to tell you when it is time to let go.
The style of reasoning is recognizably religious. Indeed, if you were once religious, and you lost your faith, that type of thinking might be why you lost it. One catches oneself using excuses as a substitute for reasoning — letting one’s brain eternally play the defence lawyer instead of the judge.
With that said, there is nothing that guarantees that this sort of process, this de- fensive religious paradigm, will always reach mistaken conclusions. Whether the iPhone 7 will be a success is not a normative question: the market is to decide, and we will all agree later on the answer. When I type “the narrative of Apple cultural leadership and style innovation,” I know I am referring to something that Apple devotes a great deal of energy into cultivating, with perhaps a smidgen of fibbing. I also know that the narrative is true.
I’m not an Apple militant, although I am known to make smug passive- aggressive remarks when someone I know is having a characteristically non-Apple computer problem with mismatched software ( or hardware, or both). I’m a soft United Church type when it comes to the Apple cult. I am glad, and not secretly or shyly, that the disorderly, challenging, free non- Apple alternative universe exists. I even admire those who live in it — those who are more defiant than I turned out to be. I know that if my church catches a sequence of awful popes, I can always go home.
Apple and un- Apple is an ecosystem — a Hegelian dialectic, even. Un- Apple keeps Apple honest; Apple keeps un-Apple innovating. I don’t know if the world will swallow an iPhone without a headphone jack. I do know it’s dangerous to write off this iPhone model as no biggie. A lot of people are shrugging off the dual camera as a gimmick: you should think of it as “binocular vision in an intelligent device” if it will help you see the possible evolutionary consequences.
I AM GLAD ... THAT THE NON-APPLE UNIVERSE EXISTS.