The Cult of Apple is now the Cult of Moleskine

The first stationary was, appropriately, immobile.  Early Man used cave walls and ceilings to record pictures of Woolly Mammoth hunts and other cardio activities.  The first cave painting was probably followed by the first scathing review, possibly followed by the first critic being chased from the cave, and being trampled to death by a Woolly Mammoth.

Fast forward a few thousand years to dawn on the Nile, where Pharaoh has gathered his architects for the latest tomb project management meeting.  Folk are still putting stuff on walls, although this being a more modern society they carve as well as paint.  That’s progress.  Papyrus is the latest thing but wait, one of the younger architects has papyrus that is somehow thicker, creamier and of a heavier weight than the sheets of papyrus used by the other architects.  Surely, this fellow must be cleverer.  He gets to speak first and suggests that if they cut costs by making the tomb pointy instead of a cube as was originally suggested, Pharaoh can afford to take another two dozen handmaidens with him into the afterlife.  Good help is hard to find and so Pharaoh agrees, meeting adjourned, Pharaoh goes off to stand in profile for the rest of the day for his official portrait, and the rest of the architects know two things, that they too must get this papyrus of authority, and that this cocky kid will be crocodile fodder by sundown.

Vegetable matter continues to be pulped for paper to this very day.  There have, of course, been a couple of diversions along the way.  Velum is the writing surface of choice if you want to record something for posterity and really, really, don’t like goats.

Today, despite technological advances such as the Apple Newton, stationary and paper is more popular than ever.

Indeed, it’s reached cult status.  When Apple were opening up their new stores all over the planet, they were likened to temples, with all the staff dressed like members of a religious order and Apple users showing a devotion to the company’s products that is surely more faith based than reasoned.  Like the Church, Apple continues to rely on the devotion of its followers to get it through scandals or, as Apple prefers to call them, iOS updates.  I’m not saying that changing the interface on my iPhone is as bad as diddling choirboys, I’m just saying that at least the Church has acknowledged that that kind of behaviour is a problem.

The analogue equivalent of the Cult of Apple is the Cult of Moleskine, or stationaryphelia.

Over the last few years, the Moleskine has made something of a comeback.  For all I know, or care, the brand was invented in 2005 but the thing looks as though it has been in the pocket of the combat jacket of war correspondents everywhere from the Normandy landings to the bars of Saigon.  It is, it has to be said, a fabulous product, having a cover thick enough to act as a reasonable writing surface on its own, and bearing paper that can take the ink of a fountain pen without blotching like a teen in a titty bar.  I don’t think it could stop a bullet, blade or broken bottle but I do think it’s sturdy enough to beat off an enraged artist who has read your piece on her latest exhibition and is trying to pummel you screaming, unaccountably, ‘to the mammoths with you!’.

The value in a decent notebook is twofold.  The first is that even if you are writing ‘eggs, milk, foot cream’ during a meeting, it looks like you are the sort of person who is writing ‘synergy’.  A good notebook is, in business or art or recreation, a commitment to a serious attempt to do something.  Once it’s in there, it’s there forever.  This is not thermal fax paper, this is a cave wall.

The second is an extension of the first.  If you treat yourself to a decent notebook, you make a commitment to yourself to be worthy of those who the advertisers would have you think used this brand before you.

Or choose a new brand, and be the one others will follow.

Let me help you with that

‘It looks like you have finished looking at porn sites, would you like me to clear your browser history?’

‘It looks like you are writing an email after midnight to an ex girlfriend, would you like me to save it to ‘drafts’ when you hit send?’

‘It looks like you are looking at porn sites for the tenth time this week, would you like me to order keyboard wipes from Amazon?’

These are just three useful prompts that your computer could give you when engaged in everyday activity involving IT.  Thanks to Downton Abbey and Brexit, more of the population has been given a taste for having servants do shit for them, with less chance of the economic climate making that achievable, than ever before.  This has led to the popularity of those internet speaker things that sit on the corner of your room, spying on you for North Korea and occasionally giving you either the weather report or playing some music should you remember to bellow ‘Alexa, play ‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA’ across a room, an exercise requiring the clarity of diction that would make the Queen think she had better take elocution refreshers.

The idea is that we can interface with the internet by simply shouting at a speaker.  The notion of speaking to technology is not new, the notion of it actually doing what you tell it to do is.  If only PCs had been able to understand the simply command ‘work you fucker’ in the 80s, a lot of grief could have been spared.

Not that I am quite sure that the technology is quite there yet, there’s still a few years for lazy sitcom writers to get a joke out of the following:

INT. DAY.  TOM and CINDY’S flat.  TOM is showing off his new purchase, an Amazon Echo.  His girlfriend CINDY is there, as is all her family and TOM’S family.

TOM

Alexa, play Dancing Queen by ABBA.

MACHINE VOICE

Did you say play secret recording you made of you taking your girlfriend’s sister up the chuff?

TOM’S MUM

Oh Tom, not again.

CINDY’S DAD

What have you done to my little girl?  I’m going to kill you you cunt.

And so on.

Software trying to assist us is not new.  Anyone who struggled with early versions of Word will a) deserve a medal and counselling and b) recall that shortly after you started typing anything, a little animated paperclip would appear and ask you if you needed any help, without ever offering any advice that was either practical or appropriate.  If the little fucker had suggested ‘Hi, it looks like you are trying to write a novel.  Let me tell you now, you have no chance, so best you shut me down, fire up my cousin the spreadsheet and put your creative energy into optimising accounts and devising ever more elaborate ways to brood about increasingly younger writers than you winning literary prizes, topping the bestseller charts and getting huge movie adaptation deals’ then that might have been some use, but it was always ‘Hi, looks like your making a list, can I help?’.  Yea, yea paperclip, putting bullet points next to the words bread, milk and cat food is really, really going to add value.

Why was it a paperclip anyway?  Microsoft is essentially trying to engineer the paperless office, so the avatar they chose to annoy you was something that they considered so pointless they were trying to remove from existence, which is something all Word users would cheerfully have done to animated paperclip, the tossers who created it and, collateral damage being a feature of any just but extreme solution, anything in a six block radius of their office.

So yes, for a time, the Word paperclip was the most irritating thing about technology.

(Obviously this was before some douchbag handed Donnie Trump a smartphone and told him about this thing called Twitter.  Jesus Christ, what is wrong with that guy (now there’s a question for Google)?  When you get sent to prison, they take your ‘phone off of you.  This is presumably so you can’t organise an escape attempt or play Angry Birds, but also presumably because it’s not a good idea to give certified scumbags access to social media.  Except the problem with Li’ll Donnie is that his Tweets get reported in the national media.  Daily.  It’s like somebody gave a certified scumbag, like some clueless idiot who had been given a community sentence for interfering with goats or something, some orange jumpsuited idiot, a smartphone and a Twitter account and told them ‘go nuts!’ and then broadcast every thoughtless Tweet on a billboard in Times Square.  Sad.)

Not anymore.  For a while now (well, since Steve Jobs sadly passed away without having the foresight to upload his consciousness to a mainframe) Apple appear to be engaged in a worldwide social experiment designed to test the loyalty and, lately, sanity, of their consumers.

Every time they update the operating system for their iPhones or iPads, you get ten messages a day urging you to upgrade, so you eventually snap and upgrade the fucker and three things happen:

1.  No obvious change.  A pity as you were hoping that this would be the upgrade that delivered on that holographic display you’ve been secretly waiting for.

2.  Except your battery doesn’t appear to last as long as it used to.  WTF?

3.  Every single forum you visit warns you not to install this upgrade.  Some of these posts are dated 2011.

By the way, THAT’s how you make a list!

The latest upgrade installed a new security feature.  It requires you to enter a pin that is sent to another Apple device you own.  The two day process of actually getting the fucking thing done was so rage-inducing that the best use of my Apple ‘phone was researching Android ‘phones.  Luckily I had a breakthrough before I had a breakdown and eventually managed to get the thing sorted before I had to resort to calling the North Korean secret service, who were probably listening to my attempts to sort my technology issues via my toaster anyway, for technical support.

But it was all just so unnecessary.

The trajectory of the technology is for more voice activated stuff, quietly upgrading itself in the corner of the room to be more useful and do more on command than play Dancing Queen.  But it’s still a long way to go to get the same effect as pulling on a cord in the corner of the room come the Cocktail Hour and unleashing a flurry of activity on the other side of the green baize door.

Red Wine

Aggghhhhhh!

Can I just assure you that the above is an exclamation of my mixture of frustration and anxiety at having spilled red wine over my laptop.

You know what this means?  I no longer have to take the ‘Which Big Bang Character Are You’ test twelve times to get to ‘Sheldon’.  I’m Penny.

And it’s a merlot.  A variety that, as was pointed out to me this very evening, is so detestably rough that it has its own scene in the movie ‘Sideways’.

It was bound to happen one day.  Lets face it, the amount of food and drink that falls into the average keyboard could probably feed a family of five for a week and merit its own cookbook and C4 show; ‘Cooking with QUERTY’.

I was expecting one of two things; the final reel of a 007 movie style explosion, or the insides of my laptop fusing into some sort of pissed AI.

Maybe I’ve been saved by the age of the laptop.  Let’s just say that if I used this bad boy in a Starbucks, I would not be mistaken for somebody working on their screenplay, rather I would be taken for somebody trying to e mail 1997.

I bet you couldn’t do that with the new Powerbooks.  Anything short of Petrus spilled on them and they would probably restore to factory settings, meaning you’d have to delete that bloody U2 album all over again.

U2 can't even give it away

Ah, Bono. 

Ah, the other lads in the band. 

What have ye done now?

Like many men, I have a relationship with U2.  As a young man, I bought ‘Rattle and Hum’.  You had to, it was the law, like belonging to the Hitler Youth in 1930s Germany but slightly less regrettable.  Achtung Baby was an important album.  It must have been, as I don’t think I bothered to remove it from my CD player for about two years.

Then came the later albums and, even though I am partial to Flood as a producer, the band’s move to megalither status was never quite ironic enough to convince me that U2 had not sold out. 

Then they went so far up their own arse that it needed a prospecting proctologist to locate them, aided by the light that Bono by now thought shone from there, or so we were led to believe.

The sound became less edgy which, given the moniker of their lead guitarist, was ironic.

Then came this.

In an act of stunning philanthropy (unless that’s the one to do with stamp collecting) or, alternatively, the greatest act of piracy since Cap’n ‘Beardless Nancy’ Coot captured an entire Spanish silver fleet at the mouth of the Amazon single-handedly (literally, the left one had been eaten by a shark, instead of the traditional hook, he sported the much more practical, and piratical, corkscrew), U2 gifted their latest album ‘Songs of innocence’, to the nation, or at least that portion of the nation that has iTunes.

I downloaded and listened and it’s not bad.

Some people, however, are not happy.

Presumably some are unhappy because they take the same view of a free U2 album that I took of getting a free ‘Times’ delivered with my groceries whether I wanted it or not; at free, it’s overpriced.

But more were unhappy because this was an affront to their personal space and an assault on their taste and was clogging up their new iPhone with unwanted music.

Finding an album already installed for free on your new iPhone and thinking ‘meh’ rather than ‘woo-hoo’ is, I would contest, one of those ‘first world problems’ that are supposed to exist.  If there is a problem here, it’s twofold.

The first is that anyone who doesn’t like what is essentially a free gift must have a sense of entitlement so vast it has its own gravitational pull.

The second is, if you have just bought a ‘phone that has something installed on it by the manufacturer that you don’t like…then maybe you made a mistake buying an Apple product.

Really.

Because I don’t know if you did any research before you spunked what I’m pretty sure was more than a fiver on your new ‘phone, but Apple, who make the lovely, desirable and apparently bendy iPhone, do have something of a reputation for installing shit on their devices that you need the cyber equivalent of penicillin to shift.

For years, we had Google maps on our iPhones.  Now we have Apple’s own mapping system.  This is because either:

a)    the data that Apple can collect about our roaming habits has to be worth something to somebody; or

b)    Apple have been paid eighty galizzion dollars by the people who make maps to make paper maps relevant again by making a mapping app so unreliable, you’d be better off packing a sextant and a compass than an iPhone if considering a trip.

All in all, U2 did a good thing in a cruel world.  The album is good (the best for a whole actually, maybe because it was free, maybe not, but what the hell) and the intention was too.

As for those who complained..the Department of Homeland Security thanks you for your feedback on what happens when you overtly install benign compulsory technology on a device that can track your movements and monitor your calls, txt messages and e mails.  And that, Congressmen, is why we install monitoring software, in all ‘phones, covertly.

Oh come on, why else do you think your brand new ‘phone comes out of the box with 0.4GB memory already used?

I look for forward to songs of experience.

A ringing endorsement

Once, we all knew where we stood with advertising, especially advertising for products that were actively bad for us, instead of products that we simply didn’t need.  We don’t require any encouragement to buy things we don’t need, but things that are actively bad for us require a little thought.  Specifically, fags and booze.

Time was, it was simple.  Shot of a bloke smoking, or having a drink, or both, with a final five second pack shot so that you knew what packet of fags to look for the next time you were in the fresh vegetable aisle (ahh, simpler, happier times).

Then, things got tricky, as new rules were introduced to stop booze being advertised to children and as making you successful with women, and fags being advertised…er, at all really.  Luckily, the new restrictions on advertising came in at the same time as creativity and coke consumption surged in the ad agencies and ad budgets blossomed to ensure that your average TV fag ad had a bigger budget than Bond and more creative talent working on it than ‘Blade Runner’, and booze adverts became funnier than the ITV sitcoms that interrupted them.

Now, there’s no money to buy coke or film big budget ads and the created world can’t compete with the reality, which is that if you go to the pub and nip out into the storm to smoke your fag, your bird will have been pulled by the time you get back by a non-smoker with a gym membership or a sports car (either, but not both, affordable with the money he’s saved on fags), a taste for wine and, probably, a sex dungeon.

Instead, manufacturers have turned to subtler means to influence our buying decisions, such as product placement. 

When James Bond was washed up, in hiding and hopelessly out of condition in ‘Skyfall’ his booze of choice was Heineken.  He may as well have been drinking cider on a park bench.  Once he got himself sorted out it was back on the vodka martinis but the message was clear – drink booze!

So in times when advertising budgets are stretched and audiences are sophisticated to a degree that a pack shot of a horsemeat lasagne with the phrase ‘buy me!’ flashing on the screen twenty times a second is more likely to have people running to post abuse on Twitter than running to the supermarket, manufacturers are working hard to associate their products with success and things that are high profile, or beloved, or both. 

This means that premiership soccer teams have their sponsor’s logo shirts, stadiums are renamed after tile grout or whatever and from 2014 anyone getting a tattoo of their soccer team emblem will be legally obliged to have the name of the sponsor added below.

I’d like to see endorsement and sponsorship developed.  There are, oh I don’t know, bloody hundreds of soccer leagues and thousands of teams, surely if top-tier soccer is supported by global brands then lesser teams should be sponsored by second and third division products, more poundland than premiership.  There must be loads of obscure stuff out there that could benefit from a marketing push; energy drinks imported from North Korea?  Snacks featuring horsemeat, because horsemeat has proved hugely popular, and that was before people knew it WAS horse.  Just re-brand Findus frozen lasagne as ‘Jockey Jerky’ and away you go!  And what about brands that are big in New Zealand or Australia – ‘Kangerpee, the true taste of Brisbane’.

Apple are famous for their product placement, in films maverick computer geniuses rarely save the world using anything other than a powerbook.  What’s noteworthy is that Apple have taken product placement to a new level by product placing in real life, making a deal ensuring that every Starbucks coffee shop must have at least one person in it using a powerbook.  Early tests where that person was a bloke with a beard working on the script for his documentary which he hopes will be filmed in black and white have been so successful that later this year Apple will role out its upgrade – ‘hot girl using laptop while wearing huge headphones over a knitted cap.’

Valet app

Why did Apple include a feature on their last iPhone that was supposed to be a robotic personal assistant?

The answer may be that they were trying to integrate the personal organiser functions on their telephone using an interface that saved you from having to flip from feature to feature to try and find out the simplest local information, or remember your dry cleaning, or your mother's birthday. In other words, they spent millions of dollars developing an application on their gadget to replace the Yellow Pages, or a diary, or a post it note, or a conscience. Or some basic sentient being skills like remembering.

This was presumably because the cognitive energy otherwise needed to remember that you are meeting Simon for cocktails at five on Tuesday can be instead channeled either to work on your next oh-so-droll tweet, or vigerously deny that binging on spirit-based drinks early on a Tuesday afternoon is evidence of alcoholism.

Selling a voice recognition package as some sort of personal assistant went well beyond the obvious reason why Apple may have done this; to make iPhone users' relationship with their iPhones even more unhealthy, reaching the point where the dependency is actually a recognised medical condition that The Metro can publish articles and Channel 5 can screen sensationalist documentaries about.

So perhaps the real reason was the economy and Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey cut right through any doubts whatsoever that Britain ever had a chance of becoming, in John Major's term, a classless society. Britain bloody loves being a class-structured society. We love it so much that we recently invented a whole new class - 'under' - to meet increasing demand to have somebody to look down on. It's like the Indian caste system but without decent railways. Downton Abbey's success, penetrating the nation's consciousness like a sex toy in a novel that sells well on Kindle, demonstrated that we know our place. It's in front of the TV at nine o'clock on a Sunday night.

Two things unite Downton Abbey viewers, they all think they are at least one social class higher than they actually are, and all of them think their life would be a whole lot easier if they lived in a stately home and had an army of servants to iron their pyjamas.

That's why Apple produced an interactive feature on their 'phone, because having something that reminds us that we are due at the pox clinic tomorrow, or that we have forgotten to pickup our dry cleaning, again, is the closest that most people are going to get to having staff. Even the gripes about the voice recognition was a deliberate feature, as it allowed people to complain about the staff (it also gave long term Apple gadget users a warm glow of satisfaction, they have been moaning about Apple's interfaces for years, like the handwriting recognition on the Newton. Long term users consider recent adopters nouveau riche).

But the economy being what it is, the middle classes can't afford to retain servants any more, though that doesn't mean that they don't want them, if only to fire.

What's needed is to confront this thing head on and model the interactive features on the iPhone 5 like a traditional country house. This means that instead of having one feature that does everything a bit crap and can't understand you if you have a speech impediment, like a lisp or working class accent, it has lots of apps with different specialist functions.

Surely it can't be that difficult to interface the iPhone's camera with a valet app that could archly criticise both your grooming and your lifestyle with pithy comments, all the while maintaining a faintly camp and slightly sinister tone? A simple click of the shutter, some diagnostics and the phrase 'sir is pleased to jest' will alert you to a potentially shaming sock/tie combination.

Certainly such an app is needed. While the erosion of the servant classes may have resulted in a removal, at least superficially, of some class barriers, it also means men's grooming has reached the point where an association football shirt is considered suitable attire, the away kit being deemed 'formal'.

G&P Awards - Science and Technology

Innovation of the year – iSay! There was much excitement in the offices of G&P when ‘smartphones’ where introduced. This excitement was diminished when one actually started using one. They did not, it appears, automatically mute themselves during Opera. Nor did they automatically ring with an urgent, not to be ignored tone during the interminable second act of ‘De Fingermaus’, allowing one to slip away from the box and test the service at the bar. Worst of all, they did not self-erase browsing history or scramble text messages from annoyed mistresses. What, was the collective opinion, is so f**king smart about that? This all changes with the introduction of ‘apps’, an acronym of A Perfect Procrastination Solution, they are indeed supreme at wasting time. Previously, the staff of G&P thought angry birds were the ones one clipped but did not kill on a shoot, instead it turns out to be either a way for your sullen child to while away that difficult lunch when you tell him he can’t come home from Christmas after all because Daddy’s new wife does not like the way he looks at her in the hot tub, or you to while away the time during any meeting featuring a powerpoint slide with the word ‘vision’ on it. Occasionally though, there is a useful app. Such an app is iSay. iSay is an English translation app. Unlike other translation apps, that spits out tinny mechanised unintelligible versions of ‘can you show me the way to the nearest lavatory that features a Sturley and Armington flush mechanism’ and other phrases that one clearly needs abroad, it turns your phone into a PA system while at same time printing the message, dot matrix style, on the screen. So for instance, if one types in ‘would you mind awfully advising me where the railway station is please?’ it turns it into English Abroad: ‘WHERE. IS. RAILWAY. STATION!’ Now, this is doing nothing one cannot do oneself, but the clever bit is if one is having trouble being understood, one hits ‘repeat’ and gets, in this instance: ‘RAILWAY. STATION.’ ‘CHUFF CHUFF, YOU KNOW, THAT WE BUILT’ ‘Oh for fuck’s sake’. And thence on to the inevitable scuffle, local law enforcement involvement and appearance of British consulate. The G&P staff have used this in Wales and found it most effective.

Steve Jobs R.I.P

Sad news today that Steve Jobs, top man at Apple and Messiah figure to the high priests, acolytes and devotees of the cult of Apple, has passed away. I wonder how many people, like me, found out the news while browsing the internet with Safari on their iPhone.

Film fans have their screen stars, music fans have their pop stars, geeks had Steve Jobs – who was a film star, a rock and roll god and techhie guru rolled into one. There’s no doubt that the Apple brand is, at the moment, all conquering, given the expense of the iphone their ubiquity is astonishing. Less expensive but more common is the iPod in its various guises. These days it’s odd to see somebody on a train without the tell-tale white wires disappearing into a pocket.

The close association between Jobs and the creation, and then revival of, Apple means that he’s probably linked more than any other individual to something that it would appear everyone carries around with them, whether they realise it or not.

From the images that accompanied the headline it appeared that little shrines had sprung up outside Apple stores. Apple fans are. Of course, no strangers to keeping vigil outside a store, although usually it’s because of the birth, or at least the release, of something rather than the demise of somebody. Rock and rollers have their shrines, like Jim Morrison’s in Paris, they even have their temporary shrines, like the bouquets, bottles and fags and candles left outside Amy Winehouse’s flat so it was entirely appropriate that Apple fans should leave offerings of apples with bites taken out of them or even messages written on them, along with their candles flickering on the screens of their iPads, iPhones and iPod touches.

Of course, everyone knows that geeks have a strong sentimental streak. Want to make one cry, just say ‘you have been, and always will be, my friend’ and have the tissues ready.

Goodbye Steve, and thanks for some truly amazing gear that really did transform lives. I’m not saying that the decision to ask my wife to marry me was entirely related to her buying me an iMac…but I’m not saying it was entirely unrelated either.