Some People Want You To Think Apple ‘Sold Its Soul’ Today

Robinson Meyer, writing for The Atlantic:

Today’s messaging was a little different.

The company announced new laptops: They will be available in gold. It showed us an example Apple Watch user: She was Christy Turlington Burns, a supermodel who Apple’s video shows taking time off from philanthropic work in Tanzania to run a half-marathon around Kilimanjaro.

And even the less-obviously luxe marketing seemed tailored to an aloof elite: You can call an Uber with your watch now! If you forget to stand up every so often (perhaps because your trans-Pacific first-class Emirates seat is just so comfortable), your watch will remind you to walk around a little!

But these are details. Most will correctly fixate on the price of the most-expensive watch, the 18-karat-gold Apple Watch Edition. Apple hasn’t released an upper price window for these watches, but Tim Cook mentioned on-stage Monday they started at $10,000.

Ignoring the stupid hyperbole of the second and third paragraphs (yeah, Apple should be ashamed for putting Every Mother Counts on the radar screen of millions of people), I’d just like to clear up two things for the author:

1. I’ve seen almost no one talking about the price of the most-expensive watch.
2. Apple has released the “upper price window” [sic]—$17,000.

I can go on store.apple.com right now and buy an almost $12,000 computer—and that’s only purchasing Apple products. Forget about the thousands of dollars of peripherals that someone who needs that computer would almost certainly buy. One of the most popular fallacies around is that because something doesn’t work for you, it must not work for anyone.

And that’s the funny thing about that word—need. Nobody needs anything. Nobody needs an Apple Watch. Nobody needs any luxury watch. Yet, somehow, people keep buying them. And the dream that Apple’s corporate charter is somehow a twenty year-old television advertisement? Some people need to believe in that too.

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