I know that Apple is just getting started. I was in attendance for every major Mac OS X Demo since 2003 and I was in 15th row when the MacBook Air came out or Apple’s famous, “Redmond start your photocopiers” sign-age at WWDC 2006. I’m no lightweight when it comes to absorbing, falling for and often rejecting Apple marketing pitches. These days, I don’t listen to Steve Jobs tell me about a product’s features or how revolutionary or magical it is. What I look for is what Steve isn’t saying. This is far more important for anyone spending money on Apple gear or writing about it.
The truth is, I know if Apple doesn’t put a “2x as fast” badge on a computer, you need to ask yourself why or if they don’t highlight the screen as being 20% brighter, you have to assume it’s unchanged and it is those minor notes that make you realize that Apple is incrementally changing things year after year and we step up to drove $x999 on whatever they’re selling. That’s fine, but today’s marketing headline dedicated to Mac OS X 10.7 ‘Lion’ (what a mouthful) is just dissapointing.
Apple’s Lion Teaser Page is pretty basic. I won’t spend all day dissecting each feature but I can see how each feature highlighted is a derivative of iOS. Apple’s tagline is pretty weak:
Mac OS X Lion: The power of Mac OS X. The magic of iPad.
Half of our readers will say, “so what?” but the real Mac geeks who were there for the OS X public beta and the iPhone launch will read this as, “huh?”
There are two key things wrong with this statement. The first is that the iPad is based on Mac OS X. Mac OS X is derived from NEXTstep, which was a company Steve Jobs founded in the 90s and Apple bought that company years later after they had trouble selling ten thousand dollar computers aimed at classrooms and science labs. The kernel of NEXTstep is FreeBSD and Apple has made some huge changes and they now call it Darwin. Darwin powers iOS, AppleTV and Macintosh. It’s the heart of everything Apple does.
Consumers don’t know this. They don’t know that the “power of Mac OS X” is what makes the iPad so “magical” Then again, there’s that “magic” thing. I think we’re all adults and those of you reading this that are under 10 and believe the adventures of Harry Potter is non-fiction, may want to stop reading.
We all understand that the iPad isn’t magical in a literal sense. Apple’s idea of magical is that it elevates the user to do magical things in a way they never imagined such as the ability to hold the Internet in your hand and to do it anywhere in a device that only weighs 1.5 pounds and is priced so low that anyone can afford it.
That is magical to Apple.
What makes “Lion” so magical? I’ll assume since it has some minor features borrowed from iOS that any Mac running Lion will get some pixi-dust but my fear is that, in 12 months, everything Apple touched will turn to gold (figuratively) or at least be “magical” and doesn’t that get a little boring? If everything, including those cute iPod socks are magical, I guess Apple’s next step is just going to be to call everything “super-magical” and then “ultra-magical”.
It’s also odd to me that Apple chose iPad instead of their iOS devices on the whole. iPod touch and iPhone have separately sold more units than iPad but, since Apple won’t be shipping Lion until June of next year, maybe they’re crossing their fingers that iPad will overtake the other iOS devices and be the product consumers align with when Lion is released. More of the iOS “halo effect”?
You bet.