SHORT ESSAY
Delighting in Tech Failures
I know it’s immature to laugh at a marketing failure, but come on, Apple
We all love a good tech comedy failure — like what happened at MySpace back in the day, or Google glass, or Google+ for that matter — and while we know that tech bosses are far too rich to really care, we lowly mortals still get a hearty schadenfreude hit when they stumble. What a fantastic couple of years we’re having?
The Humane AI Pin was doomed from the get-go thanks to a total lack of porn watching functionality; Amazon’s cashierless stores turned out to have lots of employees in India making sure that the checkout processes were happening correctly (effectively making them cashiers); and there’s something going on with a space-man at Twitter.
It is Apple, however, the stalwart of tech elegance, that may have just taken the biscuit. And the irony of it is just… chef’s kiss, hilarious. Apple has released one of the crappiest adverts ever, and I don’t mean Flash Gordon or Howard the Duck “so crap it’s good.” I mean crap.
If you haven’t seen it yet, Apple’s advert for the thinnest iPad yet shows a range of musical instruments, paintings, sculpture, science, mathematics and cultural icons being crushed in a hydraulic press. A piano splinters, an ancient…
