Apple: Innovation or Bullshit?

I would like to draw some attention to an iPhone commercial I recently saw on TV. In it, a person shakes their head back and forth, whipping their long hair in slow motion. The ad presents the ‘slofie’, which seems to be an important feature on iPhone 11, or at least important enough to make an ad dedicated to it. Now, I don’t know if I’m using my iPhone entirely differently from everybody else, but the capability of taking slow motion selfie videos is not something which will make me run out the door to buy a new iPhone.

Snapshot from the slofie commercial

And it doesn’t seem like it’s the first time Apple makes an entire ad campaign to announce a trivial feature on their products. With the release of the iPhone X, Apple presented the possibility of animating emojis with one’s facial expressions. I mean, what in the world? In addition to these questionable features, every new iPhone seems to come with a groundbreaking processor and some super strong glass, but honestly who knows how different these are from the previous generation’s anyway (I certainly can’t tell them apart).

All in all, Apple’s tricks seem to be getting old, at least compared to the days when new iPhones brought actual innovation, like Siri and TouchID. Yet, Apple does not seem to be affected by their stagnant level of innovation. The iPhone continues to be the trillion-dollar company’s star product, which means that hundreds of millions of people keep buying new iPhones every year. This also means that, realistically, many of us are still buying a new iPhone with a perfectly fine phone at home, or when we could simply be investing in the almost identical (and cheaper) previous generation.

Why? Why are we still falling for the company’s old marketing techniques of minimalistic designs and big talk of technological revolution? Well, it’s all bullshit, and Apple is super good at it. The company has the responsibility to meet a deadline every Fall. Just like a high schooler completing an assignment, the company sometimes has substance for their product and sometimes they simply don’t. But, unlike their substance, their marketing techniques are always there.

And that’s exactly what the company has been doing to us for the past couple of years: convincing us that the innovation in their newer generations is up to par with that of actual revolutionary products. And we all fall for it.