For the record, it hasn’t been that long since we last ragged on Mister Jobs, but he makes it so easy. We don’t dislike Apple products here. Hell, I’m even considering defecting to the Macbook Pro for my next machine. But for all that was said about multitasking and interactive ads at last week’s iPhone OS 4 preview event, there was an startling amount of insight into the psychology of the company.
There was a sense of deeply felt remorse for being late to add some of these features, particularly multitasking. Scott Forstall described Pandora playing in the background as the way “it was always meant to be.” It’s also apparent they’re still not over the guilt from missing the cut and paste boat for almost a year, but at the same time Jobs admits they weren’t the first to implement it, he purports they are somehow the best at it. This is like claiming that although it took a year of idly watching other people, you inhale with superlative technique.
This hubris carried over into the question and answer period when Steve-o was asked why there were no widgets on the iPad and replied cooly, “We just shipped it on Saturday. And then we rested on Sunday.” Apparently those widgets haven’t been forgotten by the Apple gods, they’re just resting up for a rough Monday of the A4 processor taking a byte of the forbidden fruit of Flash and trying to blame it on the WiFi antenna. It was with such laconic finality that he spoke the word “no” in reply to the perfunctory probe into Flash or Java support that I wonder if he had actually heard the question or just categorized it Terminator-style into a sentence with those two technologies mentioned and retrieved the only possible response.
Of course there was the occasional jab at Google, the first being a subtle claim that the having ads in an iPhone app offers more exposure than advertising on a search engine. Then there were some bitter comments about a corporate acquisition Google stole from them. I still find it surprising that the iPad’s Maps application is still powered by Google Maps. Maps must be the mutual friend of the bickering couple of once-bee-eff-effs Google and Apple after their horrible breakup.
If you weren’t already concerned for this company’s wildly imbalanced mental architecture, there was also some outright crazy shit here and there, mostly in the form of slides. One depicted an image of Bruce Springsteen giving turn-by-turn directions on an iPhone, another listing the key features of the new iBook concluding with “Free Winnie the Pooh” as if the lovable bear were being held for ransom. My personal favorite was a graph whose horizontal axis bore the title “Emotion,” the vertical “Interaction” and then proceeded to plot a frame from a television advertisement, a frame from a web advertisement and a simple “X” where the sweet spot on the indecipherable chart supposedly was. The only thing it managed to communicate was that the guy who setup the slide was, like, super high at the iMac that day.
In closing, here is a photo of Steve Jobs looking like a cat whose eaten a whole family of canaries as he introduces his foray into the ad-selling business, but now I’m just straight-up heckling.
Ja.
PS: That photo, as you may have guessed, is shamelessly linked from Gizmodo. If you want to see the other slides mentioned you can check out their transcript of the their live coverage by placing your cursor over these words and clicking on them.