Comfortably numb: Apple hyperbole is boring

Last week Apple announced their Autumn 2015 line of hardware. I avoid the live events these days, as they're a bit too sycophantic for me. The triumphalist tone is fine for internal corporate event, but for a public event it's a bit crass. So, instead, I skim various reliable news sources for the gist. Usually, the famous Jobs "reality-distortion field" is pretty effective, even since his death, and much of the press gushes with as much hyperbole as Apple itself. Not this time.

The mainstream sites are rarely, if ever, damning of Apple, but the levels of praise were distinctly fainter this year. Sure, it's an 'S' year, which is usually just upgrades to existing kit, but the point is that the hyperbole was full force and, yes, unwarranted.

Don't get me wrong, I love their passion for their work. I know the guys at Apple are feverish about the details. But not everything they do deserves the "incredible" or "epic" labels. There are refinements this year, but there's nothing new. There's nothing 'epic' or 'incredible', and to claim so is to dilute the power and impact of those prior triumphs.You can find other versions of all this stuff from competitors. Yes, Apple tech is probably smoother and more integrated but it also costs 50% more.

The trick of Jobs' reality distortion was to suspend disbelief, to maintain that fragile bubble of attraction and interest without over-inflating it with hyperbole. When the stuff wasn't ground-breaking, he'd still delight in it but would use words like 'neat' and 'cool', and avoid vacuous, overblown words like 'epic', 'awesome' and 'incredible'. I get the sense that Cook, Schiller et al are trying to press the same buttons, but it's mimicry rather than feeling.

There have been quite a few mock Apple adverts out there, like the Ikea catalogue.

It's almost like nobody at Apple has seen them. Or they have, but just can't change the formula.

So keep the products rolling, Apple, but please show a bit more sensitivity with your tone.

The battle for the living room

This article (ReadWriteWeb) makes a good case for the next big consumer electronics battleground being in the living room.

It mentions, but doesn't really expand on, the key success criteria too: content, intelligence and user experience. Two of these are radically from traditional media. User experience is generational: older generations are used to being served content, to 'tuning in' to a broadcast. Whereas kids these days are very selective, and fickle about their content - they have to be because there's so much of it. So how to find the middle ground? That will be the critical challenge, and I suspect Apple will crack it first because that's what they excel at.

Intelligence on the web is massive, literally: every click or tap you make is tracked by something, somewhere. At the very least, it's the site you are on, more likely it is tracked by Facebook (if you browser is aware of your Facebook account), Google (ditto) and a few of the common advertising cookie trackers. Attach that to your TV and movie watching habits and that's a considerable portion of peoples' lives fully mapped. But data capture is only half the story. To engage and monetize you have to use the data intelligently. That's where Google have the advantage.

Content (which the article mainly focuses on) is the same issue as traditional media: it is still king, but cheaper to produce than ever. Sure, good stuff is still expensive, but that's about production, not distribution.

There's one other aspect that the article does not mention, but that I think will be vital: social.  Sharing content is a big thing already, but there's still some friction when you do it. Imagine a monetized version where you get a micropayment whenever you successfully share a piece of content (like, say, a movie trailer). There's also the participation aspect of social: gaming. Currently, there are very few multi-platform online games: an Xbox player cannot play with a Playstation player online. On some games they can play against PC players, but for quick reaction games the PC players have the advantage of a richer, more responsive interface (a mouse has a greater more accurate range of movement, plus a keyboard has more programmable combinations than a gamepad). This limitation is tolerable because consoles are primarily about games, with media playing being a bonus feature. In the future living room, audiences will not tolerate being restricted to sharing only with others on the same platform.