01:55:00
After putting down yet another slavishly admiring profile of top Apple designer Jony Ive this
weekend in the egregiously-named "How to Spend It" magazine published
by the Financial Times, I had a nagging
sense that something was wrong. Of course, like all the strategically placed
articles about Ive in recent weeks, this one was yet another indirect attempt
by Apple to create a slavishly admiring article about the incipient Apple Watch.
The Watch, Apple is
desperate to let us know, is imminent, and we ought to care. But what is it, exactly, that Apple is
telling us we ought to care about?
The FT piece was
the second major article I have read recently about the impressive Ive and the
watch that failed to tell me – a long time tech journalist and two-decade user
of Apple's products – why I should want it.
Of course it was laden
with scrumptious and colorful pictures of the watch up close, with a tight
focus not just on the screen, a compressed version of what's on an iPhone app,
but on gleaming cases and well-designed bands in many materials.
The opening shot was of a
"gold Apple Watch Edition," which as the caption tells us, has
"an as yet unconfirmed price of about $4,500." [Note: Monday it was
confirmed--the actual price for this highest-of-high-end Apple Watches will be
$10,000!]
The other article was two weeks ago in The New Yorker – a very long
profile of Ive, who has never been properly profiled until lately. (The first significant profile appeared in last October's Vogue, timed
carefully to correspond to Apple's much-trumpeted first watch announcement in
September.)
The one in The New Yorker was meant
to be the authoritative explanation of Ive's priorities as the watch – his
baby, by all these accounts – emerges.
Ive is being positioned as
the new company figurehead, the visionary substitute for Steve Jobs.
The New Yorker article reiterated endlessly how close
Ive was to Jobs, repeatedly quoted Jobs' wife Laurene Powell Jobs saying nice
things about Ive, and in its very 16,000-word-plus essence made the case that
this person, and his judgements, are of world-changing importance.
But my biggest takeaways
from the New Yorker piece, that were more or less news,
were things like how Ive is driven around Silicon Valley in a chauffeured
Bentley (not unheard-of but unusual behavior among moguls there).
Or that he has for many
years collected expensive watches and that he pals around with a long list of
bold-faced names strategically dropped here, no doubt with help from the Apple
PR department, including filmmaker J.J. Abrams, Bono, Yo-Yo Ma, Chris Martin,
and Paul Smith.
I was already a believer
in Ive's aesthetic brilliance. And few would dispute he is the most influential
designer in the world.
The article satisfied my
curiosity about him. It showed me how much he appreciates the life and
aesthetic of luxury.
But it did not help me
understand why I would want an Apple Watch, nor how the much-discussed
limitations of the watch might be addressed.
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