montyfood

Guy starts blog. Writes first post sounding off about Apple. Ground-breaking. That's gonna shake up the internet.

(I wanted the title to be some clever wordplay like "Spilling some ink about Apple" or "Writing on Apple Inc" etc etc, but of course the whole blog thing is so far removed from any printed medium, real ink never enters the equation. Note to self: writing own blog is not big break in journalistic career.)

In case you missed it (and if you're the kind of person who reads blogs I doubt you did) Steve Jobs Keynote at Macworld San Francisco this week launched the iPhone. Though for legal reasons I'm not allowed to mention Apple's iPhone and Cisco in the same sentence, so I cunningly disguised it in a well-known place name.

Natch the cybersphere has been rife with people both griping about and praising the thing even though it won't be a real product for another half-year. So I don't want to cover all that ground again. I did want to highlight my fave moment of the Keynote, if you'll indulge me.

When Apple design swami Jonathan Ive -

(Digression: Actually I noted that he is now informally referred to as Jony Ive - not Johnny, Johnnie, Jonny or Jonnie, mind you: Jony is the most ergonomic and elegant way of spelling it. Remember, this guy thinks different. Although calling him Johnny - sorry, Jony - for some reason of my misspent youth makes me think of the Human Torch.)

When Apple design swami, Jony "Flame On" Ive chatted with Jobs on the first public iPhone call, there was a beautiful moment of self-deprecating British humour when Ive declared the device "not too shabby". Behind his laugh I could sense Jobs cringe. Besides Steve's hyperbole, this was the first comment about the revolutionary gadget before the effusive well-crafted praise from the cavalcade of CEOs with their misshapen suits, shirts and ties, and Jony Ive is sarcastic but without any malice in it, as only we Brits can be. I can imagine a private word bewteen the two afterwards as Jobs tells Ive to save his limey irony for Cupertino and not for PR events.

(Further digression: around the time of the first iMac, as Ive's star was rising, I worked with a nice lady who said she used to go on holiday with his family and remembered what a "nice lad " he was. Super. However to me this info nugget was dynamite. In terms of my six degrees of separation portfolio I could now link myself to the almighty Steven P Jobs with barely a couple of hops. I'll blog about my six degrees well-connectedness another time, purely for the purposes of name-dropping.)

In other name-changing news, Apple itself did a sly little rebrand - and I'm not alluding about the brouhaha about the device's moniker. (I'm confident that the iPhone will stay the iPhone despite the trademark owner's comments to the contrary.) But, as my casual reading of Roland Barthes all those years ago at college reminds me, names are signifiers that can carry rich layers of meaning. Everything Jobs does has meaning. Not necessarily consciously, but in some zen-like way anything he says or does has the sense of coming from a deep part of his soul. It is purposeful. His choice of rainbow fish as the iPhone wallpaper has Nemo resonances of Disneyan depths. He scrolled through the music on the device and plucked out the Beatles. Remember the Beatles catalogue isn't available on iTunes - this was either ripped from a CD or there's a deal in pipeline. But it was also a reminder of the recent court battle where Apple Corps tried to squeeze some more juice out of their namesakes and lost, exonerating Apple. He chose With a Little Help from my Friends, perhaps a hint at a new amity between the two Apples, perhaps a wink to all the corporate partnerships that made the iPhone a reality.

But the coup de grace, renaming Apple, was the flag of triumph in the soil of the defeated Apple Corps lawsuit. Previously, Apple were a computer company and the Beatles entourage were being foolish to assume that tech geeks would tarnish the integrity of their brand. But now Apple is a fully-fledged media empire so it's just Apple Inc. Boom.

The new year teaser "The first thirty years were just the beginning. Welcome to 2007." with the Apple logo eclipse graphic (I liked Paul Boutin's description of it as "He-Is-Risen imagery") had a lot of Apple pundits trying to guess where this might be leading. I didn't have a blog this time last week (a lot can happen in seven days, huh?) so you'll have to take my word for this, but I saw it and said quietly to myself "Apple becomes the new Sony". In other words they move further into consumer electronic marketplaces besides computers. Now they could very easily have made computers, music players, digital TV boxes and mobile phones and still been Apple Computer Inc. After all, all these things are to one degree or another computers; they don't run on gears and pulleys. But the name change indicates a newer bolder Apple. One that is positioning itself to further infiltrate product territory where brands like Sony have previously been revered. And maybe one day, like the iPod, that infiltration will lead to domination as Apple's winning combo of innovative design and user-centric functionality enable them to take the spoils.