Apple's Launch Event Was Creepy as Hell

Entertaining commentary:

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.