“We came to San Francisco ostensibly to witness the second coming of Apple’s white-hot tablet – the same gadget that Google, Motorola, Research In Motion and a hundred other companies are now desperately trying to catch up with. You’ve no doubt by now heard everything there is to say about the iPad 2: it’s fast, good-looking and thinner than air,” Omar El Akkad reports for The Globe and Mail Update.
“In a few months, the same stage will feature a different act: maybe the next iPhone, and then the iPad 3, and so on. In a sense, every one of these events is less about the product and more about taking a very first-world kind of cultural pulse, witnessing the next sleek gizmo that folks will voluntarily sleep outside in the cold just to be the first to purchase,” El Akkad reports.
“But there’s something bigger going on, something weirdly political. The more interesting part of all this hoopla is how Apple got to be far and away the best company in the world at making people want things. Over the past decade, nobody has come close to generating the kind of rabid, euphoric frenzy that Apple has for its iProducts. Outside the world of high-end auctions, rarely does the basic act of buying something elicit applause from onlookers,” El Akkad reports. “But show up at any Apple store on the morning of a new product launch and there they are, crowds of beaming people cheering wildly as one of their own successfully engages the cash register.”
El Akkad reports, “A day spent in the middle of a high-profile Apple product launch sheds some light on how this company became perhaps the best marketer on Earth.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: People love Apple products because when they’re in use, or even merely in view, they reaffirm humanity’s capacity for genius and precision in a world chock full of mediocrity or worse.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Joe W.” for the heads up.]