Nik Rawlinson
The invitations are out, but could Apple be sending coded messages?
Apple has an eye for detail. Look at MagSafe. Such a simple idea, yet so brilliant. A magnetised power adaptor that’ll stop your MacBook crashing to the floor. Smart. Look at all the hidden features in Mac OS X, like the ability to flick through the pages of a PDF in icon view without even tapping for Quick Look. Nothing is left to chance. So keen is Apple’s eye for detail that using its products is a constant education. The longer you use them, the more you discover, day after day after day. Apple wants you to learn, and its Easter Eggs are no mere folly: they’re features lying in wait. You almost feel it enjoys watching you learn, letting you work it out for yourself.
And it goes beyond its products.
I’m writing this column in limbo. It’s 20th January. One week today will be the great unveiling: the event about which every tech mag, every fanboy website and even the broadsheet nationals has been talking. That day is T-day: the day Apple unveils its tablet. Apparently. You know there’s an Apple event approaching from the sheer weight of invitation scans that appear on the web, each of which gives a subtle hint of things to come. So what can we deduce from the (possible) tablet invitation seven days before the event?
The artwork is… a mess. ‘Come see our latest creation’, it implores (we’ll ignore the missing ‘and’) beneath a splatter of dripping, spray-can paint. Hmmm… graffiti? Vandalism? Something subversive? Certainly the latter if the rumours are anything to go by. This is set to be a device that rewrites the way magazines and newspapers work. Rewrites the way we write, if you like.
If this really is a tablet invitation, though, the paint doesn’t work with everything we know about Apple from the last three years of iPhone sales. Apple doesn’t like styli. The iPhone is a finger device, and that’s its brilliance: you don’t need to hunt and peck with the digital equivalent of a cocktail stick, and there’s nothing to lose beyond the device itself. The tablet is sure to follow a similar line, only on a much larger scale. So what’s the paint all about?
By the time you read this, you’ll know, but I’d love for it to be a subtle dig at Palm. Apple and Palm haven’t been on the best of terms lately, and there was a bit of cat-and-mousing over Palm Pre and iTunes compatibility. Palm made it work; Apple broke it.
Palm built its fortune on the Palm Pilot and Graffiti, its innovative handwriting recognition system. Now here we have an invitation adorned with a crisp Apple logo stamped on top of a lot of messy graffiti.
Coincidence? Subliminal dig? Or a subtle, brilliant hint that will become obvious between now and the date you read these words?
My money is on the latter.
