Fashion victimhood a la Apple

Late last night, by Indian Standard Time, Tim Cook stepped on to a stage in San Francisco to announce the arrival of the New iPad. With Retina Display, Quad Core Processor, iSight camera (5 megapixels, no less), two utterly novel colours (BLACK and WHITE, get?) apart from the Classic Silver, Clairvoyance, Levitation, 12 Side Impact Airbags (oh, okay, some of these will only be activated once we give you iOS 6.0 as a free upgrade from the AppStore), the shiny new device was enough to get the social media all atwitter at that ungodly hour. You'd think people would have more interesting things to do at 1 a.m. than staring at eerily glowing monitors, but there you have it.

Soon after, it can be safely assumed, a lot of these insomniacs would have started plotting their fastest path to acquiring their own new thingy. After all, they would be saying to themselves, timing is critical. Next 3 or 4 weeks and flipping open the smart cover on their new WHITE iPad 3 and there would be audible gasps from the admiring and envious in the Boardroom or Airline lounge. Any later than that and the thing would become so ubiquitous, the whole cache would have evaporated.

Even as they were thus planning, they would have little or no consciousness of their older tablet devices. Or of the little they had discovered of its capabilities. Reading, and sometimes responding to email, browsing the web, posting to their soc med pages, watching YouTube and TED video, and shooting violent birds out of catapults at cherubic pigs...this would probably be a fairly comprehensive enumeration of their usage pattern.

A year back, a friend walked in on me as I was busy fooling around with my then still new ipad 2. Having recently received his own as a birthday present, and not having done much with it yet, he was rather keen to know what it could really do. Replace his lappie perhaps? After running through features, tricks and some must have apps, he was reassured that it was more than a really expensive paper weight and I'm sure he must have become a regular user. I would be surprised, very pleasantly of course, if he has discovered too many more uses for the device than those I left him with that morning.

Forget the iPad for a moment. Notwithstanding how many features our lappies, or mobiles, or televisions, music systems, air conditioners - heck or anything else at all, actually come preloaded with, how many do we actually use? Have you ever used the 'Sleep' function in your AC? Did you even know your AC had a 'Sleep' function?

I like to believe I'm immune to the allurements of marketeers, (don't we all?), and don't readily get inveigled into profligacy. Regrettably, these intentions come seriously unhinged with Apple devices, most particularly the iPads. Long before I had fully discovered what the original was capable of (this post is being typed on it, as it happens), I had to, just had to, get me the shiny, slim iPad 2. Having done little with either in the period since, except read email, browse the Web, consume and post to the social media, view YouTube and TED video (yup, tha typical user was, you guessed it, me) and watch my daughter play 'Angry Birds' and 'Cut the Rope', and at the risk of ridicule, using the iPad 2 as a video camera at her School Sports Day, I am already on the slippery slope that will lead to acquiring the latest hatchling from the Cupertino farm.

Why is that?

Apple has pulled off incredible mass hypnosis, that's why. With its monomaniacal committment to a Minimalist, almost ascetic design philosophy, mirrored rather self consciously in the uniforms sported by Jobs or Cook, Apple becomes the standard bearer for defiant, almost rebellious individualism. The visual vocabulary of the legendary 1984 Macintosh television commercial comtinues to echo newly three decades on. What makes it strange, of course, is that with a billion iDevices sold around the planet, it is utterly mainstream. Hardly the javelin thrower that will destroy the Big Brother who is watching you, it has quietly segued into Big Brother. Who will think nothing of slipping in a few lines of code deep, deep in its innards that will be watching your every move. What's more, it seems to have an impenetrable, Teflon- make that Kevlar- hide. All criticism simply ricochets off, Chinese child labour, despotic management styles, hidden tracking or whatever else.

Makes you despair how gullible we are.

p.s. Anyone coming back from the US in the next few weeks, can I ask you to carry a small parcel for me please? ;)