> Utopia. Geoffrey went to Thailand and “couldn’t have asked for better weather.” Q4 sales are outperforming expectations. Lily’s soccer team finished the year in second place. Everything is second place. Nothing goes wrong, nothing exceptionally well. The world is quasi-infra-ordinary. Everything is perfectly imperfect.
I think this is extremely astute and in fact is the distilled essence of Apple's brand promise: they make products that enable people to become better versions of themselves. But "better" has very specific qualities like physical fitness, spiritual/new-agey wellness, wealth, minimalistic aesthetic taste in fashion and home decor, left-center politics, ecologically minded "adventure" travel etc.
There's always room for improvement in this framework, and by implication there's always a product tier of memory/cores/fit&finish that's above the one you are likely to purchase.
There are very few brands/companies that have this kind of totalized worldview integrated across their marketing and product development - Nike comes to mind and maybe BMW or Disney. But being steeped in the framework (as your postulated intern would no doubt have been) means that you can generate content that feels superficially consistent - even if, as you found once you delved too deeply, the timelines don't line up and there's an uncanny emptiness behind the façades.
This is so unbelievably beautiful, i think im going to cry
🥲 thank you!
Truly inspired. This is and I am.
> Utopia. Geoffrey went to Thailand and “couldn’t have asked for better weather.” Q4 sales are outperforming expectations. Lily’s soccer team finished the year in second place. Everything is second place. Nothing goes wrong, nothing exceptionally well. The world is quasi-infra-ordinary. Everything is perfectly imperfect.
I think this is extremely astute and in fact is the distilled essence of Apple's brand promise: they make products that enable people to become better versions of themselves. But "better" has very specific qualities like physical fitness, spiritual/new-agey wellness, wealth, minimalistic aesthetic taste in fashion and home decor, left-center politics, ecologically minded "adventure" travel etc.
There's always room for improvement in this framework, and by implication there's always a product tier of memory/cores/fit&finish that's above the one you are likely to purchase.
There are very few brands/companies that have this kind of totalized worldview integrated across their marketing and product development - Nike comes to mind and maybe BMW or Disney. But being steeped in the framework (as your postulated intern would no doubt have been) means that you can generate content that feels superficially consistent - even if, as you found once you delved too deeply, the timelines don't line up and there's an uncanny emptiness behind the façades.
Great piece at any rate, thank you for sharing!
I hope somewhere, sometime the intern(s) who crafted Jane Appleseed’s world get a chance to see this post