{"id":7293,"date":"2016-09-07T09:56:16","date_gmt":"2016-09-07T15:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7293"},"modified":"2016-09-08T04:36:19","modified_gmt":"2016-09-08T10:36:19","slug":"the-unbitten-apple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=7293","title":{"rendered":"The unbitten Apple"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"iPad:<\/a><\/p>\n

Apple’s logo remains one of the great business\u00a0marks: simple, eloquent, indelible. But, more and more, the stylized apple with the bite missing\u00a0is looking like an anachronism.<\/p>\n

The colors went long ago, of course, those happy, trippy rainbow stripes that connected the company with its flower-child origins.\u00a0But the bite remained, signifying and celebrating\u00a0the human: organic,\u00a0flawed,\u00a0sweet. The missing piece was our<\/em> piece. It welcomed us in. It made us part of the company. It put the personal in personal computing. It familiarized the machine.<\/p>\n

At some point, though,\u00a0Apple lost patience with us, with our fiddling, our ineptitude. It began to see the bite as a wound, and ever since it has been seeking to heal the damage. Apple\u00a0wants to be pristine, untouched by outside forces, entire onto itself.<\/p>\n

Apple’s ideal now is the unbitten apple, the immaculate fruit.<\/p>\n

One by one the portals go, the entrances and exits\u00a0are sealed. The customer is locked out of the device\u00a0\u2014\u00a0and locked into the “ecosystem.” Today, in a media ceremony, it\u00a0was\u00a0the headphone jack that\u00a0was exorcised<\/a>. That tiny analog orifice linking\u00a0the iPhone back to\u00a0the transistor radio, the Walkman, the iPod: gone. And why not? With the socket\u00a0and\u00a0its audio\u00a0converter removed, the phone will become\u00a0even slimmer, even lighter, even more elegant. It will be better insulated\u00a0against the elements. It will be more totemic. It will be purer.<\/p>\n

Removing the headphone\u00a0jack was\u00a0an act of “courage” on Apple’s part,\u00a0explained<\/a>\u00a0the company’s marketing chief, Phil Schiller:\u00a0“The courage to move on and do something new that betters all of us.”<\/p>\n

With just the one port remaining, the proprietary, tightly guarded Lightning port, the iPhone is getting very close now to the ideal. Apple will soon be whole.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apple’s logo remains one of the great business\u00a0marks: simple, eloquent, indelible. But, more and more, the stylized apple with the bite missing\u00a0is looking like an anachronism. The colors went long ago, of course, those happy, trippy rainbow stripes that connected the company with its flower-child origins.\u00a0But the bite remained, signifying and celebrating\u00a0the human: organic,\u00a0flawed,\u00a0sweet. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7293"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7300,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7293\/revisions\/7300"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}