on 16 January 2009As I write, everyone’s speculating feverishly – literally, in my case, thanks to a parcel of Christmas flu bugs kindly provided by the kids’ primary school – about what Apple will announce at Macworld San Francisco. By the time you read this you’ll already know (unless you’ve accidentally locked yourself in your porch and have been sitting alone and shivering until this magazine dropped through the letterbox, which probably only applies to a small minority of readers, and in case you were wondering, no, you can’t eat it), so you can snigger smugly at my wildly inaccurate guesswork. I’ll keep it brief.
With Phil Schiller replacing Steve at the top of the bill, a safe bet for the launch roster would be ‘a pile of unrelated and largely pointless bits of technological navel fluff that will be forgotten even before he stops talking’. I base this, quite unfairly, on the first time I went to a Phil Schiller keynote, which admittedly was a long time ago. Long enough ago that the eldest of my offspring, or ‘vectors of disease’ as I like to call them, was still too small to get excited about new Apple stuff. If only my own expectations had been similarly truncated.
On that occasion they gave out T-shirts printed with pictures of a shopping trolley, a biscuit and a screwdriver. There was some reason for this, but nobody ever understood what it was. A new Cupertino variant of Scissors, Paper, Stone? As it turned out, the main point, perhaps unwittingly, seemed to be that absolutely nothing connects a shopping trolley, a biscuit and a screwdriver, and exactly the same thing connected Apple’s three announcements. (No, I can’t remember what they were.) The effect was reminiscent of a Samuel Beckett play, where people talk a lot but nothing happens and the only message is something about the futility of existence.
And it’s truly futile ever to try to fathom what Apple is up to, so I’ll stop. Whatever emerges at Macworld, what I’m really wondering is how they’re going to advertise it. Last year’s hot product, the iPhone 3G, ran into a couple of problems with the Advertising Standards Authority. ‘All parts of the Internet are on the iPhone,’ burbled the TV spot. Which is like saying all parts of Iraq are under government control. In the continuing absence of Flash or Java, reports from the field indicate that many parts of the Internet remain brutally resistant to the iPhone.
The next ad promised the ability to ‘find your way really fast’, while a demo showed an iPhone finding someone’s way really a lot faster than it would in real life. The ASA’s critical response seemed slightly harsh. After all, as Nigella said when the Daily Mail accused her of cheating in her TV show: ‘Listen, dingbats, when I bake a cake and one minute later it’s ready, what do they think I’ve done? Viewers are not idiotic.’
But most idiots do know roughly how long it takes to bake a cake, and none of us know how fast the Internet is going to work on a gizmo we haven’t tried yet. Disclaimers notwithstanding (the current iPhone ad has a bit of text at the bottom of the screen saying ‘Rub chin now’), there’s something corrosive about claiming technology can do what it can’t. There’s a long tradition of this, of course. We may not know who invented the Antikythera Mechanism, but we can safely assume he told everyone it could calculate the positions of all seven planets, keep the Olympics on budget and run Windows Vista.
Yes, the reach of the tech industry has always exceeded its grasp. Remember the ‘amazing 3D graphics’ of 1980s computer games that turned out to be about as three-dimensional as Nicole Richie? Voice recognition software, another perennial under-achiever, claimed close to 100% accuracy decades ago, so either its makers have been wasting their time or they were previously telling paw keep eyes. Perhaps developers are deluding themselves, not just us: the Microsoft Zune people seemed genuinely convinced that they’d created a credible rival to the iPod, when in reality they’d just stuck some coat buttons on an old matchbox.
Similarly, artificial intelligence researchers just don’t learn. They’ll cheerfully predict the eclipse of the human intellect within months, yet anything they can show you right now inevitably demonstrates the problem-solving skills of Jade Goody, the natural language processing of David Beckham and the social intelligence of Gordon Brown. The reason people talk about ‘hard AI’ is that they’re more likely to build a machine that can have Vinnie Jones in a fight than beat his score on the Year 6 SATs.
The danger of pretending technology’s limitations have already been overcome is that it removes the incentive to actually overcome them. Whether it’s Steve or someone else who leads Apple through 2009, they need to make a resolution to create products that don’t just look good on the TV and the stock ticker, but actually get closer to delivering all the things we’ve always wanted.
Adam Banks asked Santa for a Mighty Mouse that scrolls in all four directions on the same day.
adambanksdotcom Apple founder @ronaldgwayne has had several careers; on this showing, tech policy punditry could be a keeper