Apple Is Chasing Luxury And It's Painful To Watch - 2

Amazingly, that endless New Yorker article didn't even mention that you will need to have an iPhone on your person at the same time you wear an Apple Watch.

And the word "charge" does not appear among its 16,000 words except when the author tells how Ive first took charge of various Apple design functions.

Yet one of the biggest commercial questions facing the watch is whether it will retain a battery charge long enough to satisfy users for even one day.

The iPhone itself already has significant battery life weakness relative to other smartphones.

So if we Apple addicts, or more importantly new users, are to adopt the Watch/iPhone combination we will be repeatedly charging two different devices.

I dwell on these two recent articles because they say volumes (literally) about Apple's aims.

This company, because of the unique global interest in its activities, can literally stipulate who writes the articles with which it cooperates and where they appear, particularly on topics as important as Jony Ive.

Apple never cooperates with articles that are not strategic; that they do not, quite literally, "place." Ive, who by all accounts prefers not to put his personality in the foreground, clearly has consented to be used nonetheless because he is so eager to help his watch succeed.

So the fact that Ive was rolled out only for magazines with a very elite and wealthy audience is significant.

Also significant and indicative of Apple's priorities is that both the FT's How to Spend Itarticle and the one in The New Yorker were written by authors who do not typically write about technology.

The authors instead were, respectively, one who typically writes about luxury, high society, and watches, and one who writes most often about the arts. Apple wanted it that way.

But here's the thing about luxury. Apple has become the colossus that it is today in large part because it uniquely has contributed to a fundamental redefinition of what luxury is.

Or rather, it has shown that in the modern technologized world "luxury," in the traditional sense, is increasingly meaningless.

Apple's core competence is democratizing capability in tech-centric products.

That's one reason there has been much excitement lately about the possibility that Apple might take on Tesla in building an electric car for everyman.

One of the most defining and ironic facts about modern life is that despite the shameful wealth and income inequality that besets the world, the differentiation such wealth can achieve for its beneficiaries is diminishing.

I have an iPhone 6. Elon Musk has an iPhone 6. Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg and Madonna and all the stars at the Oscars have one, or a semi-equivalent Android device.

But a large percentage of the kids on the subway also have an iPhone, as do several of the service employees in my Manhattan apartment building.

There is no way a rich person can get a better phone than I can, than we can. I like that, and so does the world.

This egalitarianism is not only possible but necessary. That's because it takes large market economies of scale to justify the expenditure necessary to develop such a sophisticated product. Thus if it was truly luxury, it would not truly be tech. This reality will continue to insure that the best things are evenly spread over the planet.

The latest predictions are that by 2018, as many as 3.8 billion people will have smartphones not much different from the one Steve Jobs pioneered only 8 short years ago.

Apple has triumphed and become the most valuable company in history because it was able to sell state-of-the-art technology at gigantic scale for a price affordable to huge numbers of people. In so doing, it has helped make the world more equal.

It's distressing and maybe a little worrisome to see a company that has achieved its extraordinary scale and influence by those means now devolving back to thinking about luxury in such a conventional and even pedestrian sense.

Not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with golden beautiful luxuries. But many companies can make such products. Hardly any can make an iPhone or iPad or MacBook Air.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-luxury-apples-watch-beside-point