Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives.
When I was growing up, there was an ad for cat food that claimed "9 out of 10 cats prefer it."
The iPhone is, apparently even better than that cat food -- 99 percent of iPhone users love their iPhones.
How do I know this? I don't. But Apple seems to want me to think it. In one of two new ads released Thursday, Apple shows an array of happiness that has rarely been seen -- even in Apple ads.
Multiple iPhone screens show multiple people having multiple, well, expressions of joy. There's not a miserable human among them.
The voice declares that 99 percent of people who own an iPhone love their iPhone. Which makes me think only one thing: What about that 1 percent?
Do they loathe their iPhones, but have them paid for by their employers?
Are they merely misanthropes who cannot be happy with anything? Do they all live in some swanky part of Connecticut where they have their own "Miserable iPhone Owners Cult"? Are they all Samsung employees whose job it is to test the iPhone to find its flaws? Are they just holding it wrong?
We're never told. Neither are we told in the ad where the alleged evidence lies that 99 percent of iPhone owners really do love their iPhones.
However, an Apple spokesman told me that the figure emerged in an iPhone 6/iPhone 6 Plus ChangeWave survey for March/April 2015. ChangeWave claims to be "an independent survey research firm that identifies and quantifies 'change' in telecom industry trends, consumer spending behavior and corporate purchasing."
I have requested a link to this survey, and will add it, should I get one.
In another ad released Thursday, Apple lauds the fact that it makes both hardware and software. This way, goes the claim, you're guaranteed everything will work together.
This is chillingly persuasive. There's a certain reassurance that, if the same people made both parts of the phone, the parts might actually be in sync. At least most of the time.
Of course, this is a thinly veiled nose-thumbing at the likes of Samsung, which must rely on Google's Android, rather than its own software.
Both ads are summed up by the glib vacuousness that "If it's not an iPhone, it's not an iPhone."
Still, there's one thing that both reek of -- and that's confidence. It's certainly a time when many people are saying: "If I don't buy an iPhone, what else is there?"
Update, 11:31 a.m. PT: Adds comment from Apple.