Aindreas Gallagher
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as my gob gently hits my palm – er, of course. i’m an idiot. still tho still.
just take it broadly as meant charlie – what do you actually think of the make up?
edit – ok I guess kevin lynch is in there – but it’s a thing the current board chose to excise what they did off the core statement. It’s impossible to think they weren’t involved in the removal. that would be some crazy fly on the wall.
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insanely cogent post – also hey! I’ve google mapped your area sir. my rejoinder is: a solid gold apple watch.
from a garage in the valley, to an object best sold by gucci. no one makes a dent in the universe with solid gold watches, and people with predilections for solid gold watches are less likely to consider the issue.
Andy inhakto pointed out the input is fundamentally skewed as well. Even watching apple personnel he said – they were twisting the digital crown, tapping on the screen, scrolling with their finger – and thats on a thing on your wrist.not alone did apple not arrive at a clean decision, because they utterly failed to – instead they threw spaghetti at the wearables wall, but they also decided to turn it into wealth flaunting.
you’re right the apple stores look kind of amazing, for my money they look better than most ostensibly high end stores – but surely the point is that is born out of their credo. it’s not meant to signal the presence of overt wealth goods, it’s meant to signal the presence of apple design ethos, which is intended to religiously disseminate excellent design for broad social usage as transformative technology.
the apple watch is kind of depressing in multiple directions – its fundamentally intellectually miscued, it represents nothing like the sets of stunning execution and insight the iphone did, and it is patently an attempt to reposition apple to luxury as directed towards a bifurcated society where there are obscene economic distortions.
Apple have actually created an object, in the gold watch, that formally tells broad society that there are parts of apple that are not intended for them. not because it is a macpro stacked, but because they specifically designed it for obscene wealth. It goes to Warhol’s quote on coca cola.
it’s like apple acknowledging they are arrived in venice:https://kottke.org/12/10/is-the-us-becoming-an-extractive-state
Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.
apple as a US company seem to be internalising and signalling the presence of near feudal social economic distortions. that board increasingly amounts to courtiers for the elite and the wealthy: they have an ever growing number of board level executives trained and groomed in catering to obscene wealth.
and your new apple board everyone.
It’s also noticeable that the apple watch section dwarfs the other primary categories in verbiage, photography and sub-sections.
also as a last point – there was an insight on a podcast lately that cook, so desperate to mould apple in this direction, has created multiple chiefs – multiple parachuted in CEOs and near CEOs as little chiefs in effect – the resulting apple watch smacks of indecision more than anything. It might as well be a microsoft product. I have absolutely no clear idea what the apple watch wants to be, or what its reason for being is.
cook hasn’t got the clarity of thought – or the sociopathic tendencies of Jobs – required to pull that together.
if, as your photos illustrate, apple becomes a half century transient mall outlet on the highend in the fashion of gucci or the others, then you might suspect jobs will rise out of his grave and actually throttle cook for his hubris.
Because jobs put pianos and bmw bikes on the foyer to remind his people what technology could and should be, not that they were intended as staff to cater to fatcats with stupid gold baubles.Jobs determined to alter the world on his terms – as any good genius level near sociopathic maniac would.
Cook now seems crazy to stuff his board with burberry / yves saint laurent people who want to make gold watches and fashion accessories.that is quite some come down.
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[Tim Wilson] “Look, all they have to do is be as good as Beats at selling $400 pieces of plastic, and they have a billion dollar business on their hands in a year, 18 months TOPS “
yes that’s almost certainly bang on. the problem is that, circumstances aside (to a ludcicrous degree), those are the decisions of john scully.
apple just tried to cram an iphone, your caller list, your photo album, all your apps, your messages and your emails onto a watch on your wrist. they also tried to make it a heartbeat communicator, a sketchpad, a payment device, and a health and fitness tracker.
that is a samsung device.
with s-health, s-hearbeat, and s-sketch. Apple have no clue what they made – they just know they really want to charge insane margins on it.
apple didn’t actually make anything here – they just made luxury coke – they made roughly the same market device and asked for a lot more money. and then they made a solid gold version.
on some level we can all feel the mirror cracked here.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I am conflicted. I get it, and then I really don’t get it.”
yep yep me too. part of me really does suspect that watch may represent the baroque apple period as after echo from the iphone cataclysm tho – it’s too on the nose – that 2007 iphone is starting to look increasingly like a neutron bomb in historical tech terms.
bar the ipad – which they knew prior they would do – post that supernova, as the world’s wealthiest company, you’d wonder if even apple know exactly where in the hell they are. as in they may be waiting for impressionism or something.
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tell me some part of you doesn’t think this is weird – never mind his central speculation that the decision to make a solid gold apple wrist accesory comes from the newly installed “insanely pricey luxury object” part of the leadership team. that’s a pretty weird new wing of apple. that cook installed.
and surely the weirdest thing is that, inside that solid gold ingot is commodity electronics that will be unusable inside 48 months.
Ok they’ll have some insane trade in system for the sheiks who bought one, (and as the verge pointed out in hysterics on the podcast, apple will need a smelting operation to recover the gold in the old iwatch) so they can run apple watch OS4 without the screen in the middle of the gold stuttering – but how mad is all that?
the point cringely makes on rolex is flat out wrong too, as has been pointed out: there is a central fallacy in the apple watch edition object. A rolex actually bloody is timeless – its hand machined innards are built to last a century – complications at the top end are fabergé like.
would you take an apple watch to the moon?
that thing has an lcd, a questionable battery life, and a soon to be commodity chinese circuit board that can just about stand a shower. It’s not a timepiece, there is no surreal internal craftsmanship – there’s just an lcd screen and that dodgy screen of overcrowded apps.
Apple are, in a sense, pandering to horology – edit – no point hammering them like mad. haven’t actually even seen the thing.
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Love the daring fireball. top of my feedly rss list it is. he writes good stuff.
[Jeremy Garchow] “I know an avid watch collector. The amount of money, time, and effort that is spent on watch-ing, as well as the observation and curation of the history and craftsmanship that is put in to the time pieces, is a job unto itself.”
small confession – I went through a period of watch madness last year – ebay, seventies indian watches, eighties russian watches – there is some great stuff out there. I bought this eco drive – with a custom black leather white stitch strap (because the one it comes with is disgusting):
https://www.shadestation.co.uk/media/thumbs/800×800/media/product_images/BM6400-00Efw800fh800.jpg
also if you go here (you may have already been) : https://forums.watchuseek.com/f71/
you can find some ahhhhmazing stuff for not too much cash.
your mate will know the acronym: WIS. watch idiot savant. I’m not one by any stretch of the imagination, but I did have a few months of madness getting odd watches in the post. Its mad to read those guys on the forum. Watches can be deeply satisfying in a nerd design blokey way.
gruber linked as well to a brilliant article where a guy who runs a blog on watches was basically blown away by the quality of apple’s work – big surprise right?
basically they’ve made some of the best engineered straps he’s ever seen in his life, link straps better than stuff on watches that cost stratospheric amounts of money.So I buy all that as far as it goes – apple have decided to get into watches in a big way. but still but still but still. Five thousand dollar solid gold watches in an apple store. For what it will be seen to say about them – is it worth it? They’ll end up making more on iphone cables annually you’d suspect. there are only so many gold watch buyers out there. why do it? why make that statement about themselves?
[Jeremy Garchow] “I’ll be honest, and you call me any name you want, fanboy/whatever/etc, I do have a lot of respect for Apple products, and I do believe that the Apple leadership truly wants to create a better user experience.”
I believe that in spades too. Sure I’m apple up to my neck. the chances of me buying an android phone or a windows laptop are nil at the point. I have a basic belief in what apple stands for – because they execute it – and its that that is making a lot of this stick in my craw. I just can’t square what they’re doing here.
Also – I don’t get it either. Same as you I can’t find any enthusiasm for this thing – i keep trying to picture it – I think about the phone in my pocket and this thing on my wrist and it feels like overkill – at least the way they’ve constructed it. The one thing I thought was fascinating is that gruber was convinced they weren’t going to do a watch – that they would really just do a bracelet sensor with some visual display, a ring even, which I found kind of fascinating. A ring could say presumably do all the health skin contact reading and maybe the haptic, some interesting visual colour notification. Gruber was convinced they weren’t just going to do a big LCD with faux timepiece and tons of notifications and well… look what they did.
And they made a five thousand dollar one in gold.
misgivings, super unavoidable misgivings.
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I’ll tell you what’s weird jeremy – have you read gruber’s thinking on the price tiers? the mid range watch with sapphire glass and stainless steel isn’t going to be a hundred bucks more – he thinks it will come in around two to three times the price of the sport edition?
so that’s 350 – 1000 – 5000 dollar watches in the applestore –
what’s even crazier is the likely price of some of the straps – listen to this stuff off the site:
Crafted from the same 316L stainless steel alloy as the case, the Link Bracelet has more than 100 components. The machining process is so precise, it takes nearly nine hours to cut the links for a single band. In part that’s because they aren’t simply a uniform size, but subtly increase in width as they approach the case. Once assembled, the links are brushed by hand to ensure that the texture follows the contours of the design. The custom butterfly closure folds neatly within the bracelet. And several links feature a simple release button, so you can add and remove links without any special tools. Available in stainless steel and space black stainless steel.
someone from the guardian said they’ve never seen this much verbiage on the apple site – they have a point. there’s half a novella in the apple watch section.
but more crazy is what that strap is likely to cost – gruber reckons it’ll be more than the sport watch itself. you don’t tell someone you spent nine hours rubbing something unless you’re going to charge them a ton for it.
Which gets to the basic problem here – apple stores are essentially egalitarian – the products aren’t cheap, but they are broadly affordable – the macbook air is kind of an amazing computer for the price right?
But now when you walk in its going to be getting increasingly weird – there will be stands and presentation areas, in apple stores, specifically designed for and catering solely to very wealthy people who wish to flaunt that wealth. that just feels an incredibly odd thing for apple to be doing.
I don’t like, at all, the feel of where this is going – I said before that its starting to feel like apple has decided to self-recognise its brand as an overtly luxury offering. Hence them hiring from luxury fashion, luxury marc newsom objects, luxury everything – I’m not even thinking about their position on pro apps anymore, the entire show is starting to feel off key at a basic level – to me at any rate. Five thousand dollar gold watches in an apple store is just wrong. there’s no way around it.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “I, personally, think this has everything to do with Mr Ive.”
that crass distortion of apple has absolutely nothing to do with Jonathan Ive. He’s a socially averse Dieter Rahms and he’s having a bad enough time already. They just forced him to sound like himself on purpose narrating the story of a stupid gold watch. where the gold is twice as strong as gold.
Jonathan Ive will not be in the company inside 16 months. he will not stay to sustain the new gucci gold watch apple web page.
I would bet literally anyone all of the available money on this.the second jobs died all cooks inclinations lead him to luxury products with a luxury board and they started smelting solid gold watches, he also created the most naff moment in rock history and singularly destroyed U2 as a musical force. to the point where apple is now laying out instructions to remove unwanted U2 albums for customers.
apple, as were, explicitly died the second they made a gold watch to share rich people’s heartbeats and their sushi invitations.
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surely they still shouldn’t have done it bill. I’m not even saying they wouldn’t have if steve was still there, but it’s noticeable they’re now making 16karat gold watches where the operating system craps out in 36 months. Chunks of the board now come from places like burberry. Apple after jobs seems to see in the mirror a luxury object brand. That is a lobotomy perception of Apple’s core. Someone needs to break that mirror.
FCPX ran the tour de france, its being adopted by the BBC for news editing, and the panel you were on had the editor for a hundred million dollar feature – and apple still just pulled professional application generation from their core statement.
The apple watch section of the website looks like gucci b*llshit.
also, for kicks, how likely are broad society to send their heartbeat to other members where the mode of transport is a median price 500 dollar watch (leaving out the gold watch) – what part of steve jobs or wosniak would be gladdened by that crass mercantile horror?
is that watch the macintosh for all of us? And how likely is pro apps newly off the mission statement likely to prosper in a company selling solid gold consumer wrist electronics?
lets do that again:
a company selling solid gold consumer wrist electronics?
can someone explain how apple aren’t gone to gucci hell inside two years flat under cook. they must feel so smart.
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me neither really, X is making proper clear strides – you’d just wonder at the the board level thought process and discussions leading to the removal of professional applications from apple’s core statement. It’s not like any PR appartchik gets to rewrite that statement.
on some level there has to be kremlinology around the removal. A lot of senior people have to be happy in order for that to go: basically why remove those few words?
Funny story: when a major american UK based broadcaster were looking to move on, they reached out to avid, adobe and apple. Adobe won it, avid put a lot of work in, and apple directed them to their website. true story.
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