History Lesson 1: Beware of geeks bearing gifts, especially if it's Apple
History Lesson 1: Beware of geeks bearing gifts, especially if it's Apple
I wrote this deadbeat tale 10 years ago and exhumed it just for you
You can help me with an experiment in time and (storage) space.
Autosave is for Wimps is a paid-for newsletter, as you know, that reaches you every Friday lunchtime. Thanks for paying up. I like receiving your money, probably in a precisely inversed proportion to your dislike in parting with it. Let’s not go into the details of our awkward financial relationship, you and I, but we can agree it has something to do with economics.
Naturally I would like more readers to join the gang and I feel sorry for those who are not able to read past the paywall that I set about a quarter of the way in to each Friday’s missive. A little sorry, that is; not a great deal, to be perfectly honest. But I don’t see any harm in doing my bit for the environment by recycling an old column from the distant past and republishing it here, in its entirety, at the beginning of the week for a change – and for free!
I hope this bonus Monday posting will bring cheer to you, my faithful paid-up reader – while also keeping the can-pay-won’t-pay cheapskates mollified. If nothing else, it’ll give you something you can share with your social media mates without them complaining that they can’t read the full story because the arsehead who wrote it hid the funnier bits behind a paywall.
The context…
A recent story on The Register observed that Apple was likely to reserve 4GB of your iPhone’s storage space purely for its on-device AI model Apple Intelligence when you allow the iOS 18.1 update to self-install this month. The story’s subhead – “Better or worse than a surprise U2 album?” – refers to an incident a decade ago when Tim Cook ended an international press launch by telling the world he’d just now given them all an album by U2. What a nice man!
Sure enough, everyone with an iTunes (as it was known then) account soon discovered that Bono, The Edge and, er, the other two not only dressed like new romantic gypsies when performing for the geeky attendees but had now set up camp across a couple of dozen megabytes of their iCloud space without bothering to ask permission from the local council.
It was a less than universally popular gift from Apple. The online whingeing that followed the next day took the shine off the main event – which had been convened principally to launch the iPhone 6 and reveal the original, and up to then much-rumoured, Apple Watch.
Here’s what I wrote for The Register that week in September 2014…
U2 uncool – and what’s with all the crotch-rubbing?
Plus: ‘NostrilTime’ wristjob vid action
We would know when Peter had scored the night before because he’d walk into the office rubbing his crotch. The “lucky” girl to have been the subject of his special favours would invariably trot in a few paces behind, beaming smugly at her colleagues.
These were the 1980s. Today everyone is obsessed with arses – Miley Cyrus’s arse, Kim Kardashian’s arse, Rhiannarse’s arse – but back then it was the Decade Of The Crotch. It wasn’t just uncouth scaffolders and Traci Lords who rubbed their crotches, either: Michael Jackson did it, child-friendly Five Star did it, and while Larry Blackmon didn’t, you couldn’t help staring at his.
Defining himself by his virility rather than his appreciation of post-modern feminism, Peter enjoyed a variety of casual relationships with willing members of staff. And over time, we came to associate Peter’s 9am nob-kneading to mean that he’d had sex with the very next person to enter the room behind him.
Often the rest of us in the open-plan office would sit in anticipation of his arrival, wondering whether he’d scored the previous night. If he turned up while rubbing his crotch, the excitement would, er, mount further as we looked around to see who was missing from their desks and tried to guess whom he’d scored with before she walked in a couple of seconds later. Sometimes, bets were placed. And if Peter wasn’t tackle-tickling on his arrival, the room would resound with a communal sigh of disappointment.
On one occasion, his dramatic arrival was inadvertently hijacked by Andy, who was suffering from the previous night’s curry. Exiting the toilet at precisely the wrong moment, he managed to step between Peter and his latest girlfriend as they entered the building and passed through reception.
Imagine our delight to see Peter striding onto the floor, proudly rubbing his crotch, followed by Andy, gingerly picking at his backside, followed by the girlfriend, looking confused. There was uproar as the entire office pissed themselves with laughter.
The theme of this anecdote is classical conditioning. Through repetition, we expected a specific series of events to take place, and even though there was an interruption of these events, we interpreted them according to our conditioned response. We knew Peter had not had sex with Andy – believe me, you’ve not seen Andy – but it was amusing to have the thought automatically pop into your head that he might have done.
And this is why they say you should never analyse comedy.
It is also my clumsy way of trying to interpret the negatively conditioned response to Apple’s mishmash presentation this week. I say “mishmash” because it was made up of a launch, a promise and an incoherent musical freebie.
The bigger new iPhones need no comment from me, or indeed from anyone else in the whole world. They are iPhones. They are new. They are bigger. What else is there to say?
Now, the Apple Watch – that’s interesting. Why, you ask? Why should such a disappointing, shiny turd that looks like the kind of cheap crap you buy from the ‘Jouets Cassés’ section of a French supermarket to keep the kids quiet during a long continental road journey be interesting, you ask?
Well, conditioning had prepared me to dislike the Apple Watch regardless of its merits… and yet it made me yearn for a return to wearable tech.
Yes, I said “return”. The invention of the wristwatch was a blinder: before that, people had to fish a fob watch on a chain from a pocket or the dark recesses of their petticoats. Waistcoat-wearing hipsters aside, no-one really wants to do that any more because it makes you look like a dick. Instead, tech fans have tended to get into the habit of checking the time using their smartphones – which, if you haven’t realised, still makes you look like a dick. No, really, it’s clumsy and fussy and makes you look like a no-mates checking social media every two seconds to see if your last Tweet went viral you sorry sad bastard.
Put some of that smartphone tech on a watch, and it’s more convenient to use and cooler to operate. Sure, there are some important limitations. It was noted that Apple did not slap FaceTime into its watch. Want to know why? Here’s me talking to you on FaceTime:
You know what they say about holding the camera high for selfies? Chin up, brow down. That’s the way. Now imagine I put that camera on the back of my wrist. This is what I’d look like making a video call from a wristwatch:
If it was a personal call, I might lean in to whisper into the microphone, in which case I’d probably look more like this:
They could call it NostrilTime. This is not how Brains and Mr Tracy communicated, that’s for sure.
Forget all that videowatch nonsense, it’s dead in the water. What I liked about Apple Watch – and what most people hated – is that it’s really nothing more than an add-on for the proper computer already located on your person: your smartphone. To me, reaching for a smartphone and fiddling with it for every single brilliant little thing it does is ungainly and uncool. It’s like the day you invited your friends round to see the VHS video player your parents had bought, and you spent the entire afternoon crawling back and forth between the sofa and the TV just to operate the massive cash-register-style keys every time they wanted you to demonstrate FF, REW, PAUSE or PLAY.
Wow, you say, that Apple Watch is one damn expensive remote control, and you’d be correct. But what is a remote control other than a convenient user interface to a bigger system? We’re surrounded by these interfaces and we’re already prepared to pay lots of money for them. What is a TV other than a remote screen interface to someone else’s broadcast transmitter or online video library? So you’ve paid your TV licence and bought a Netflix subscription, does this mean you’re going to start complaining that you have to pay for the TV set as well? It’s the quality and usability of the interface, not the raw tech, that makes the whole product lovely to use.
Ah, but then the Internet generation has been conditioned into expecting everything for free, or at least ad-supported. Fine, get yourself a free watch that flashes up ads for Mac Defender every two fucking seconds. Enjoy.
More conditioning was in evidence at the end of the Apple keynote when U2 turned up on stage, played a bit and gave away their new album on iTunes for free. That’s a free album given away within a software program that Apple also gives away for free but people still complained. They tell me that U2 are old and corny and that Apple must be out of touch if they didn’t understand that people LOVE or HATE bands with a passion. By giving away a U2 album, I’m told, Apple will alienate millions of customers who HATE the band and everything it stands for.
Well, this might be true if you’re a seven-year-old. Grow up for fuck’s sake. I lost interest in U2 after they released The Unforgettable Fire but so what? They still delivered a crunchy live performance (compare it with the weedy recorded version of The Miracle on the album to see what I mean) and the free album seemed a friendly gesture even though it’s not my cup of tea. But as soon as they took the stage, the interwebs were full of trolls furiously demanding to know why Apple hadn’t struck a deal instead with Cradle of Filth or Half Man Half Biscuit.
I’m reminded of a rich dickhead I met in my student days who wouldn’t speak to his mum for two weeks because the brand new car she’d bought him didn’t come with the personalised number plates he’d asked for.
One theory that arose soon afterwards, as people blew blood vessels at Apple’s effrontery in putting 11 free tracks in their free iCloud accounts accessible with their free copies of iTunes, was that Apple was testing fresh ways of pushing unsolicited sample music at customers en masse. Nice conspiracy theory, guys, but there are cheaper ways of running user acceptability testing… unless perhaps Apple wanted to get into the Guinness Book of Records for the most expensive UAT project ever.
That’s not to say I did not suffer from my own conditioned response to the Apple presentation. When Tim Cook returned on stage to thank U2 for playing their song, it was exactly like a head teacher congratulating Year 9 after the performance of its school play. For dads around the world, this lame-o, cringeworthy part of the show was justifiably hilarious.
Not quite as good as the tale of Peter’s groin and Andy’s arse, but perhaps that’s just as well for Tim and Bono.
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing*. His sister-in-law once bought him Achtung Baby on cassette tape but he feels U2 never surpassed their rain-drenched performance at Red Rocks in 1983. He is also curious to know what Americans would have made of it if Apple really had done the deal with Half Man Half Biscuit instead. Surely a match made in Birkenhead.
(*) Yes, this is what I was mostly doing in 2014, getting paid to turn daily newspapers and Sunday magazines into content apps. I have plenty of stories from that time but I might have to wait until the protagonists (or their lawyers) are dead before recounting them here.
Anyway, I wish you a good week and I hope you will share this freebie story with colleagues, Apple-haters and students of consumer IT history.
See you all, back here, on Friday.
Oh, I remember the Apple event. Not that I was watching it live, I was never that much of a geek over Apple products, but I do remember the moment I saw the album land in my it iTunes. Did anyone I know really care about the sudden appearance of a random Album - nope. Most of us deleted it and got on with our life’s, having never heard any of the tracks at all.
Right now, I’m more concerned about what they are doing with a 300MB update that needs 6.5GB of free space on both my iPhone SE 2020, and 9th Gen iPad… infact, any update needs multiples of free space that’s not there so it constantly wants to remove apps during the upgrade. Sigh.
For fun - Approximate maximum download speeds of Server Providers in the UK in 2014.
1. Virgin Media – 53.21Mbps
2. BT – 25.21Mbps
3. Zen Internet – 23.82Mbps
4. PlusNet – 21.81Mbps
5. Eclipse Internet – 14.83Mbps
6. TalkTalk – 14.20Mbps
7. Sky Broadband – 13.71Mbps
8. EE – 12.82Mbps
Hmm. So the U2 album went in the ‘meh’ pile but because it was virtual my offspring could not borrow the CD to help form their musical tastes. That’s a win in my book. But the watch thing …. I later bought a series 3 which is still going but has never reached its full potential due to wildly insufficient storage. Nowadays it tracks what it calls my workouts and times dinner in the oven and tells the time. I long since turned off the yoga-tastic Breathe app that is actually way more annoying than the free U2 album ever was. And I can also tell when Mars is close to Earth, though if Elon ever gets there it won’t be far enough away for my liking.