A friend of mine who was an editor at Vanity Fair once told me that the problem of the magazine is that it had ceased to be relevant. “It’s read by the gay hairdresser in Tulsa who thinks it’s cool — and that’s about it,” he averred.
So I chuckled a bit when I saw Tim Cook — an openly gay executive — on the cover trying his best to look cool.
Now there’s always a danger when you write these sorts of columns that you’ll be clowned by real events but I’m pretty sure that I won’t be humiliated here. So let me say it clearly:
The Vision Pro represents Apple at its worst. There may well be a market for it but there shouldn’t be.
I’ve always seen Steve Jobs as a lot more Japanese than the conventional analysis might suggest. I’ve watched the Steve Jobs and Japan NHK documentary probably half a dozen times to try to get a real sense of it. Watching it again today I’ve more or less concluded that Jobs was a product of the Japanese-American tech transfer. If Jobs is Japamerica Cook is Chimerica. Japan is style; China is scale.
Once Jobs had perfected his craft working alongside Japanese executives and pilfering from American firms like Xerox’s PARC he turned it over to Tim Cook, whose father was a mobbed up shipyard worker and whose mother worked as a drug dealer pharmacist in Alabama. Before that, Cook’s father served as a parts supplier for the U.S. Army. He spent the last 20 years as assistant general foreman, until the shipyard closed.
“I am proud of all three of my boys,” the elder Cook said to his hometown paper. “They are all smart and they are all good with computers. I’ve lived my entire life striving to be an honest man and I raised them to be honest men. That’s really all I could ask for.”
Put this in Johnson’s law: whenever someone has to tell you that they’re an honest person they aren’t.
You’re supposed to spend a lot more time focused on Cook’s homosexuality than his family’s mob ties and for all I know that’s why he was picked as Jobs’s replacement. Cook has doubled, tripled, quadrupled down on the China-America relationship with Apple with Japan’s Sony very much passed by.
Only the mob or the state care that much about logistics. You can think of Apple as a product of what’s been called Chimerica. Like any marriage the America-China relationship has its ups—and downs. The man from Fairhope proudly wears his slave-labor produced Nikes — he sits on the board — in the Vanity Fair piece.
For all the talk of raising the birth rate there’s a contingent within China and America that’s perfectly content to sell you the digital opium that’ll take your life from you. You can call this group the Activision pushers and we’ve been on them before and done our part to see to it that Activision doesn’t get acquired by Microsoft. The Vision Pro is the tell that Cook is a part of this group and not the imaginative sort who push civilization forward.
We’ve both on this already as you can see from the writings below. .
The reason Apple ($2.91T) and Microsoft ($3.08T) are valued so much is that they helped us be industrious, not escape from the world. To the extent that America’s flagship companies are now focused on anti-human, anti-social technology like job destroying artificial intelligence or escapist virtual reality we can comfortably say they’ve lost their way. The State ought to step in. And indeed it seems that the State did just that with Google. Google, for what it’s worth, crushed it in earnings recently.
For all the attacks on the iPhone the truth is that the iPhone liberated us from the cubicle to spend time with those we love. To be precise it is the tricorder not the Holodeck. It is the remote control which programs you while you program it. The iPhone was next to us but never on our bodies, like the Apple Watch which was merely a signaling thing.
I bet if you concentrate hard enough you can remember exactly where you were when you first held an iPhone.
The first Mac product I could ever afford I bought — and then Steve Jobs promptly passed away from cancer. I bought the laptop in the morning and his death was announced that evening.
In college I lugged around a giant Dell laptop because it was the cheapest on the market. When it’s keyboard gave out I bought a cheap keyboard and kept at it.
My MacBook Air was sleek—and sexy—but when I bought an iPhone it was simply revolutionary.
You could pick the iPhone up, unlock it with your face, and then turn it off again. It was a doorway to another world. It didn’t try to mesh the digital world with our world. If you look closely you can see Cook’s iPhone, turned with the screen toward the table. He is preserving his privacy even as he dons the absurd.
The truth is that Apple was about trying to make the real world more beautiful. You were supposed to go out into the world and take photos. You were supposed to be on the go as the iPod commercial makes clear.
One of the few products which has worked for Apple is the AirPods. I think this was the beginning of the end of this sort of “go forth” into the world ethos that Steve Jobs celebrated.
Whenever someone is wearing iPods you have to ask: Are they here with me? Or are they listening to their AirPods?
Apple may well go on to make money but it’s lost its magic.