You might remember my post ‘Talk about product placement!’ which featured President Obama demonstrating a new government health website on a MacBook Pro with the Presidential seal over the Apple logo…
Here’s today’s NZ Herald displaying no such coyness — in fact the article is about kids wanting Apple products for Christmas. (Enthusiastic consumers of trinkets just like their forebears.)
Product placement — what would an advertisement like this cost in the NZ Herald? (click)
As I mentioned in the earlier post, I’ve used Apple gear for decades, when only a few of us regarded it as cool — although educators have long seen the benefits of the Mac interface. I suffered through the wilderness years when using a Mac was almost an article of faith that the company would pull out of its doldrums — but always fed by finding delight in the elegance, the flexibility, the future-looking-ness of the software, and the irrepressible ‘attitude’ of the Apple geeks, hippies and aesthetes.
They made a few bum blind alley moves on the hardware front — falling into a beige box me-too bunker and sticking with Motorola 68XXX chips too long followed by the then promising but ultimately disappointing Power PC chips … before bringing back Steve Jobs, ‘buying’ his NeXT as the basis of OSX and switching to Intel and making silicon sing. Some of the software developers were geniuses, the da Vincis of our age.
Now Apple is custom-making their own silicon with the A4 chip in the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch — and it’s game on. Good on them. Apple is a business that succeeds with vision, style and substance. Not perfect, but the best, in my opinion.
