I’ve worked on iOS Beta updates for the past 2 years and I’ve been delightfully surprised by what I find in Jane’s account. From her extensive family, to hidden text threads with her lovers and even her menstrual logs in the health app, the interns are doing a fantastic job of keeping her alive.
The idea here is to populate data into all of the native OS apps to make them feel “lived-in”. This helps them understand the way people use the apps and also present the new features using an ideal profile.
I love that you found these emails and dug into them haha, such an easter-egg view into a behemoth of a brand.
You did bait me I thought I was gonna read an epic heist hehe but it is very beautiful to care this much for someone’s writing that lies only in Apple Store emails.
I remember reading all the sample documents on AppleWorks and then iWork in the early noughties. They painted a very specific picture of suburban America, which I found fascinating as a child growing up in the UK.
> 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.
I used to work at the Genius Bar and I, too, have fallen victim to Jane and her emails. I, too, think about her children and her conversations with her self. I wonder if the soccer team ever game in first. I expect not.
I’ve worked on iOS Beta updates for the past 2 years and I’ve been delightfully surprised by what I find in Jane’s account. From her extensive family, to hidden text threads with her lovers and even her menstrual logs in the health app, the interns are doing a fantastic job of keeping her alive.
The idea here is to populate data into all of the native OS apps to make them feel “lived-in”. This helps them understand the way people use the apps and also present the new features using an ideal profile.
I love that you found these emails and dug into them haha, such an easter-egg view into a behemoth of a brand.
This is so unbelievably beautiful, i think im going to cry
🥲 thank you!
this was the most pleasant result of clickbait i've ever read
Incredible, paying attention to this kind of stuff in life is so fun
You did bait me I thought I was gonna read an epic heist hehe but it is very beautiful to care this much for someone’s writing that lies only in Apple Store emails.
I remember reading all the sample documents on AppleWorks and then iWork in the early noughties. They painted a very specific picture of suburban America, which I found fascinating as a child growing up in the UK.
> 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!
great analysis! thanks for writing
I hope somewhere, sometime the intern(s) who crafted Jane Appleseed’s world get a chance to see this post
<3 same
Truly inspired. This is and I am.
I used to work at the Genius Bar and I, too, have fallen victim to Jane and her emails. I, too, think about her children and her conversations with her self. I wonder if the soccer team ever game in first. I expect not.