
Apple’s cringeworthy approach to women reveals a company out of touch - alexwoodcreates
http://www.thememo.com/2015/09/10/apples-cringeworthy-approach-to-women-reveals-a-company-out-of-touch/
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lsiunsuex
I don't think the author had a single good thing to say about the Apple event.

I on the other hand, thought the event went over really well - most (all?) the
demos went off without a hitch and a lot of things got refreshed.

Anyone that thinks a $100 stylus is a consumer product is out of their minds.
It's a pro product with pro's in mind. Dad won't be buying a $100 stylus to
click around the screen.

And it just seems like the author was trying to find any reason why more women
weren't on stage.

I'm all for women in tech, but I'm more for the right person for the job.
Maybe more women weren't on stage because more women weren't capable of
producing the kind of "performance" Apple and it's customers expect from this
event. Just because a women might work in a department as a programmer or a
designer or whatever, doesn't mean their capable of spending 10-20 minutes on
stage explaining a product.

And the author neglected to mention that it was a women who presented the
features of the new Apple TV - which IMO and a lot of others also, was the
best product to be released yesterday. Her presentation was almost perfect
(couldn't tell if she was crossing her fingers because she wanted her team to
win, or she wanted the feature to work hahah) - she was very well composed,
spoke clearly and barely stumbled - absolutely on par with most of the men on
stage.

Title is complete clickbait.

------
coldtea
> _While much of the press gushed ecstatically over every minor update, at The
> Memo we questioned the company’s future._

How original. Only the 10.000th press article to do so since 1999. Clearly
Apple is doomed.

> _Watch customers are selling up in their thousands. Take a look on eBay and
> count the number for sale. This is not normal behaviour for a new product
> from the world’s most valuable company._

Yeah, "numbers of sale on eBay" sounds a very scientific metric. Probably he's
too young or uniformed to remember that iPod and iPhone have been (and are)
HUGE sellers in eBay (new models included):

Also nevermind that:

[http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/07/20/at-97-apple-
watch-...](http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/07/20/at-97-apple-watch-
customer-satisfaction-outpaces-original-iphone-ipad---report)

Then they complain how Adobe showed retouching a woman's picture on stage with
their app and the new Stylus, saying, "You know, maybe that would be seen as
the embodiment of all that’s wrong with Silicon Valley?".

Do the people on The Memo know that retouching model photographs happens in
tons of magazines millions of women love like Vogue, Cosmopolitan, etc? Or
that it also happens for male models in magazines like GQ, Men's Health etc?

> _The patronising positioning of women continued. The next woman on stage was
> from online retailer GILT, America’s answer to Net a Porter, showing off a
> new app for the TV. As many noted on the night, her elevator pitch was
> carefully slotted between men talking about manly pursuits like sports and
> computer games, because it appears that in Apple’s world, women are best
> left talking about shopping._

That's a new kind of BS spin, where you're damned even when you do show a
woman on stage, because she's "no true scotsch-woman". She should have been a
game designer or a sports. But not bad sports, like Beach Volley, because then
it would be sexism again.

They forgot to tell us what women do in Amazon's and Netflix's world, btw.

> _Except as we reported days before, Apple had been pipped to the post by a
> Chinese challenger, as most of these ‘exciting’ new innovations are already
> found in Huawei’s Mate S, a device that costs a mere fraction of the new
> iPhone._

Ughhh, the age old "competitor product has more features and is cheaper"
(never mind execution, coherence, build quality, ecosystem, etc).

------
paulrpotts
If you are a man and don't see anything odd or disturbing about an audience of
men watching a man edit a woman's face so that she is smiling at all the men
in attendance, you are pretty much by definition part of the problem here.

~~~
paulrpotts
Oh, good, thoughtless downvotes! You know, I always like to think that
technically competent men like me are also thoughtful people, capable of
introspection and self-criticism, but I'm usually shown otherwise. Still, hope
springs eternal...

