Apple's iPhone 6 and Watch reveal: Behave different
Apple didn't so much introduce new products as try to persuade people to change their behavior. Are people that malleable?
Here's what I learned at today's only event in town: Apple invented size, time and money.
I half expected Ben Bernanke and Stephen Hawking to appear on stage and confirm it.
At the heart of the larger iPhones and the Apple Watch , though, was one central thought: Forget everything you might have heard before. Now we want you behave different.
Yes, you loved your iPhones because they were small and fitted nicely into your purses and trousers. Now you'll have to have bigger pockets (go on, buy some ugly Dockers) and dump the tiddly Birkin.
Forget whipping out your black or platinum to show that you're an individual of style, importance and solvency. Now just wave a golden gadget at a terminal.
Forget, too, staring at your phone all through dinner, as your lover and the server toss daggers at your eyes. Instead, revert to the gesture you used to employ to show you're bored: stare at your watch.
There was something almost comical buried within the beautiful slickness of Apple's presentation. Tim Cook said he wanted to "redefine what people expect from a watch."
Most people don't expect anything from a watch. They don't wear a watch. What Apple was redefining was its ability to attract you to new behaviors through its excellent design and your wondrous tendency toward boredom and amnesia.
You've always wanted to "communicate from your wrist," haven't you? You just didn't know that you wanted to. Or you couldn't communicate it very well.
Many people were probably too busy already composing their personalized Apple Watch faces to allow their ears to hear: You still need your iPhone to get your Apple Watch to work. It's not some independent device. It's another $400 that Apple wants you to spend on being one of the coolerati.
If you allowed a hint of Grinchiness to enter your brain, you might have pondered that with Apple Pay , the same company that's recently had problems keeping your naked selfies safe wants you to now photograph your credit cards and send them the picture.
What an interesting turn of thought it is to hear that wallets are easy to lose and be compromised. Left hanging in the air was the notion that phones are compromise-free and no one has ever mislaid, say, an iPhone prototype.
Watching the Apple live feed online, I was moved, too, when Phil Schiller talked about Image Stabilization. The feed froze. For perhaps the 10th time. Technology does have glitches. Many.
Yet the core of Apple's brand faithful will likely lap this up. They need not only to see something different but to be something different. Technology has stagnated recently. There hasn't been a new behavior to embrace. Now you can twist away on your old watch wind-up wheel and feel like you're in a new age of enlightenment.
Who could not be entranced when Jony Ive spoke of "horological experts"? Mine has often told me I shouldn't date a Scorpio after 9pm.
Ive's, however, merely briefed him on the whole history of watches and why we now suddenly, desperately need them.
And did you hear that part about the Milanese Loop? You've probably only ever enjoyed a Bolognese Loop. And it surely wasn't infinite.
I was so in the Loop that I missed the part about the Watch's battery life. Was there a part about battery life?
So, now that Apple has asked you nicely to behave different, will you? Will you accept that the new way of looking is the new way of behaving?
The world, you know, might not have changed quite as much as Apple would like to make out. Yes, the company is now giving away albums to all its iTunes customers.
But the band at the end was still U2, right?
