While my stance on Apple products has mellowed in recent years, my disdain for the company’s ad campaigns, each of which manages to be even more aggravatingly smug than the last, is still burning strong. The recent spot for Siri, the AI assistant nestled inside the latest iPhone incarnation, manages to outsmug even the appalling “I’m a Mac” ads I spent my teenage years hating. The thing is, Siri is a genuinely interesting bit of tech. Real “world of tomorrow” type stuff, but the world depicted in this ad isn’t wonderful, oh, no. It’s awful. It’s some kind of appalling, dystopian nightmare-future, where the streets are filled with coiffed, jogging shits, barking orders into their five hundred dollar rectangles while slightly off kilter elevator music plays in the background. Ordinary people will be cramming themselves into the suicide booths, or lining up outside the Soylent Green factories. Anything to escape the endless mechanical chorus of confirmed business brunches, weather reports and advice on what specific kind of chorizo goes best on Tuscan flatbread.
Your choice in phone or OS really says nothing about you, but the way a company markets their products does show what they think you. If this latest ad is anything to go by, Apple still thinks you’re a twat.
In other news: We’ve got our mitts on a tumblr. We’ll be using it to post up potential T-shirt and merch designs for your non-purchasing pleasure. The Escapist News team are all growing, or attempting to grow, moustaches for Movember, that includes me once I break out a razor and digital camera, there may be some Critical Miss themed sketches in it for anyone who donates.
