
Apple's Launch Event Was Creepy as Hell - notsony
http://www.thealphapages.com/content/apples-launch-event-was-creepy-as-hell
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notsony
Entertaining commentary:

You cannot squeeze out some kind of imprimatur of good citizenship by holding
a product launch in a “civic” center.

...

We all knew that Jobs’ refusal to dress ‘appropriately’ was the flipside of a
loner genius with a unique vision who wasn’t going to conform. He was half-
crazy but headed to unexplored territory. The first guy who does that is
authentic; the second guy is not. CEO Tim Cook is the second guy.

Cook’s persona is creepy, almost mortician-esque. He has an unconvincing
forced jubilance, wedded to a lurking, hunchbacked rigidity. His body seems
superfluous, a nuisance. The white hair and nerdy glasses round out a kind of
depthless, mealy look that betrays a measure of cruelty. His arms hang
useless, as if he has to exert every ounce of willpower to raise them when the
script calls for mock exultation.

...

As an illustration of how the Apple Watch changed people’s lives, he tells us
how the watch helped a man keep to an exercise schedule. Does he think we’re
so dumb we believe this was never possible until the invention of this watch?
Also he showed how a doctor could tilt the watch forward and check his daily
schedule of rounds; ironically, this task was something that my own father
could handle with a small notebook and a pencil in the 1960s, as a doctor at
San Francisco General Hospital no less.

The Apple Launch soon became a drone-fest, with Cook introducing another man
who was dressed virtually identically to Cook, who introduced another guy
dressed the same, and then a woman dressed similarly, then again another guy,
like Russian matryorska dolls popping out of each other. They were all in the
same uniform, or rather anti-uniform, in some kind of California-forced-
conformity/anti-conformity. The last time I saw so many people looking like
that, it was the mass suicide at Heaven’s Gate.

...

Mercifully, it ended with Cook giving a shout out to the Apple workers in the
audience, who responded like cult members fed sugar and gumballs all week. And
then, in a fawning introduction, he introduced the band One Republic, who gave
a kind of generic performance that would offend nobody, in a hall that hosted
revolutionary bands like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead.

Lest I be called a killjoy, let it be noted that I am typing this on a MacBook
Air. I have an iPhone 6, and an iPad Mini. I am an Apple person, as it were.
But just because I buy the products doesn’t mean that I buy the mythology
surrounding them.

...

The Apple Launch is a closed circle of fawning sycophants, thrilled with
gimmicks, adapted to computers, programmed, a throng of identical authentic
individuals chained to their machines and congratulating themselves on being
‘connected,’ led by a human that resembles a robot.

Two hours of watching the Apple Launch actually made the Manson Family seem
homey.

