In new iPhone 5 ad, Apple tries to get the feeling back
In a renewed tug at heartstrings and purse strings, Apple's new ad says that more pictures are taken with the iPhone than with any other camera. How does the company know?
You know those people who wave their iPhones about everywhere they go, in a desperate need to record every moment of their lives?
You're one of them, aren't you?
At least there's a very good chance you might be, if Apple's new iPhone ad is to be believed.
For, in an attempt to re-pluck your emotive twang-elements, the company claims that every day more people take pictures with an iPhone than with any other camera.
I am not sure how the company knows that, say, my engineer friend George doesn't take 65,000 pictures on his Nokia Lumia 920 every living hour. But it claims it does.
Which is, in itself, worrying.
Lately, Apple has begun to realize what it feels like to be Lindsay Lohan.
For reasons best known to those for whom satisfaction is a peculiar form of hell, Cupertino has been assaulted by every possible brickbat.
It's had rocks thrown at its effigy with constant force -- everything from the idea that its CEO is a coffee-drinking, unimaginative Titanic captain to the notion that Apple's designers will never produce another interesting product before Lohan wins an Oscar.
This new ad is an attempt to restate confident emotional territory and rise above any and all brickbats.
Here we see the world through Apple's eyes.
Skateboarders who have to take pictures, joggers who have to take pictures and shoppers who have to take pictures.
It's as if we've become a society of camera-freaks, ready to snap the minute we awake. Which, in a way, is true.
We are so wound-up about missing something that we have to photograph it to remind ourselves (and, especially, others) that we've actually seen it.
I am creating a clinical term for this phenomenon: Photo-neurosis.
We shoot fun, friends and, of course, food. We point our cameras to the sky and to the ground. And we can only see a concert through the prism of an iPhone camera.
Who's going to believe us if we just say we were there?
This ad will undoubtedly make many people feel good all over. It reassures photo-neurotics that they are not alone.
It's more difficult to reassure the feelingless, feckless, fickle, fumbling, fraudulent neurotics on Wall Street, however.
Sadly, no ad can ever do that.