Apple are an increasingly intriguing company. They are a huge multinational – bigger than Sony or Samsung – yet constantly define themselves as the trendy outsiders, in opposition to the fat hulking mass that is Microsoft. As Steve Jobs said recently (thanks to Tomal Price for sending me the quote) ‘why join the navy when you can be a pirate?‘

I’d argue that Apple are much closer to being navy boys than anyone would like to admit, and that the ‘outsider’ image is simply a clever piece of corporate spin to make people feel edgy and excited.

In the article I try to look a bit at Apple via the history of their logo. For Apple, this logo-come-halo is all-important. Subtly adorning every product, the Apple device has naturally undergone a transformation in parallel to the corporate image that they want to project. The original logo was an etching of Newton sitting under a tree: nerdy, earnest and complex:

This evolved into the rainbow shades of a bitten apple – which Jobs thought would present a friendly image: the computer as helper.

Now the colours have gone, and all is flattened. Thin, sensual, intelligently simple, sleek… The logos speaks clearly, and we see our own values mirrored in the shiny new surfaces it decorates.

Jobs is clear, the bite on the Apple logo was to stop it looking like an orange. But this particular fruit has always been rich in meaning. The bitten apple is the birth of knowledge and the end of innocence, perhaps even the birth of the ‘i’.

Yet it is also the beginning of something remarkable, and one cannot fail to be caught up in the technologically optimistic world that Jobs presents to the faithful: everything will be alright. He has created, and from the chaos of the modern digital life, he wants us to see that what he has made for us is good.

This is what Apple do so very well: they sell us our desires. Like the icons of old, we will gaze into our iPads wanting solace and communion and equilibrium and connection. What exactly they will offer us is, as yet, unknown, but without disappointment there will be no more demand.

So while few have actually put their hands on one yet, we can guarantee one thing about gazing into the dark glass of the iPad: after the initial rush, it will be disappointing. It won’t heal us.

[Cartoon by Dave Walker.]

In the last couple of posts I’ve been thinking about what the form of texts add to their meaning, springboarding from a book reviewing experiment in The Believer in which the reviewer was given a novel to read which had been stripped of its cover and all meta-data about the author.

I’ve also suggested that what we see in a fundamentalist reading of Scripture is not the ‘word speaking for itself,’ as evangelicals might like to think, but ‘the word gagged’ – it is not allowed to speak, unless it says something that might challenge our unquestioning belief.

So what of the iPad?

When we look at a book what the cover and design does is aid our ability to see ourselves in it. The glossy cover acts as a mirror, so that we can see ourselves when we look at it, and see ourselves as the sort of person who would like to buy it.

With a product like the iPad, this mirroring effect has been deliberately maximised. Jobs and Apple have carefully cultivated a sense of anticipation so that our desire for the product is hyped up, and now it is finally released, the whole emphasis of the promotion is a polishing of the mirror – helping us to see ourselves in the product.

So what does the desire for this product say about what kind of person we wish to see?

Thin               Fast                  Robust

Sensual                Simple, yet sophisticated

Enjoyable                  Intelligent                  Desirable

Tough, yet soft edged                  Well Connected

These are the sorts of words that come to the fore. This is the mirror that Apple polishes.

But what of the product behind the mirror? When the reviewer had to read the stripped back novel, they were forced to actually engage with the text in a much more careful way. What is this saying? became the core question, not How is this making me feel?

I wonder, if it were possible to strip away the black polo-neck, to take away the hype and glitz and the Apple mystique and to simply use an iPad with no idea who had made it – what would we make of it then? It’s only then that we would properly be able to ask What does this do? rather than How is this making me feel?

Perhaps then we could think beyond the consumer idiocy of ‘want one, but don’t need one,’ and may be send those few hundred dollars to Haiti instead. In the mean time, ht to The Onion for another great send-up: