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A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials
- xwdv 3y agoApple should take a page from Hollywood and create an Apple Cinematic Universe where there is continuity on the various storylines and characters created in their presentations.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y agoThat's the product line.
- hnburnsy 3y agoMaybe they laid the foundation for that with the Mother Nature skit.
- xwdv 3y agoYea, will be interesting to see if there’s more episodes in later events.
- fragmede 3y agoNext season, on Apple Tv+. Will Nanditha make it with her friend? Did their trip end in romance?
- saagarjha 3y agoThey do that for certain things, such as when they come up with marketing names for their OSes.
- nxobject 3y ago...even if the corpus is small, I think it's time to start training an LLM on these chats. I need to ask these aliens from Dimension Apple: what are their deepest thoughts and desires? Why do they do nothing by go on trips every weekend? Why are they the way they are?
- tardibear 3y agoThe title of the linked page is "A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials".
- Kiro 3y agoYeah, don't understand why they chose this title for the submission.
- CharlesW 3y agoI'm surprised the author missed the most obvious weirdness: Every message ends with a punctuation mark.
- lawik 3y ago> These eerily cheery, aggressively punctuated messages suggest a alternate dimension I don't believe they did.
- yieldcrv 3y agowoah periods, so aggressive apple employees: blink twice if you’re okay
- samastur 3y agoLike mine do. And most messages I receive. I find it weird that some started seeing punctuation as some weird imposition.
- jayd16 3y agoYou even send messages like "lol." with the period?
- ricardobeat 3y agoI don't think I've typed out 'lol' in a message since circa 2005, on online chat in some dark corner of the web. Culture bubbles are an incredible thing.
- samastur 3y agoSame
- cafeinux 3y agoI don't usually text in English so my style is definitely different, but I wonder if I may be living in the Apple Dimension (despite my last Apple device being an iPod Touch from 10 years ago and a MacBook Air from the same time that I bought used to try to install Linux on it): I do end every one of my texts with grammatically correct punctuation, never use "lol" or other abbreviations, and typically write in a very clean, sometimes too verbose, style. I wonder if something up with "us". Maybe a new pathology name ought to be coined.
- yjftsjthsd-h 3y agoOkay that was surprisingly funny to read through. It's interesting how in isolation the texts are probably fine and work well for demonstrating the software, but taken together they do present an oddly stilted view of the world.
- sdwr 3y ago> Dimension Apple trip destinations have become increasingly vague, as the “Road Trip” group chat suggests, part of an overall and troubling vague-ening of the Dimension Apple This bit was hilarious. It's comfort food in the same vein as the Barbie movie - everyone is polished and no one needs to work.
- twic 3y agoIf you worked on these images, surely you would be irresistably tempted to leave little easter eggs referring to past characters? "Hey Kim, how are you doing?" "Great, thanks! Apart from going a littleh hard on the ravioli last night!".
- zamalek 3y ago"Dinh ran off with some floozy from a group chat about the presentation on Tuesday. :cucumber: :sunset: :shoe:"
- jodrellblank 3y ago> "going a littleh hard on the ravioli last night!"." Mmm. that. looks. delicious. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-jK37C4CxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-jK37C4CxA
- ajmoo 3y agoI worked on many of these! Was on the Marcom team that rebuilt screenshots for content swaps and hi-res output. Every screen went through multiple rounds of approvals by many different teams, including writing. Unfortunately any Easter eggs I tried to hide in there were all caught ;)
- ImaCake 3y agoThanks for trying. I think it would have played to Apple’s advantage to keep easter eggs in these but bureaucracies abhor risk.
- tobr 3y ago> rebuilt screenshots for content swaps and hi-res output Can you explain this work in more detail? Are you basically reconstructing the contents of a screenshot in vector graphics so it can be translated/edited/scaled up but still look correct?
- ajmoo 3y agoYep! I worked there from 2007-2012, and at the time we used Photoshop, which on the surface sounds counter-intuitive (being a primarily raster-based program.) We would take screenshots of product (or get screenshots from HI if we weren't allowed access), and would redraw everything in Photoshop at a minimum of 288ppi (4x) using vector shapes and type layers, lots of nested smart objects, and layer effects (back in the iOS <6 days everything had gloss and shadows and reflections.) Content teams pop in retouched photography, photos of employees as avatars, names of employees to go with those avatars, and text to tell a story for that launch. Our 4x vector screens (sometimes well over 2GB PSBs) would then be shared with international teams for translation, and translations would come back to HQ for a final approval. We would also sometimes scale these screens as high as 32x for output to MacWorld / WWDC hero banners which was fun. You better believe we put our names in all these screens (mine appears once in the linked article!)
- corbezzoli 3y agoI don’t think real world messages would look good in marketing copy, too many emojis, “uhhh”, “no cap” and bathroom pics. I don’t know what the author is expecting/analyzing here.
- bluedays 3y agoI’m disturbed that you have a lot of bathroom pics in your texts
- jalict 3y agoRandom bathroom selfie seems pretty standard.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y agoIt's really not
- hotnfresh 3y agoThere are clearly many texting dimensions. Bathroom selfies are not a thing in the one I’m a part of.
- positr0n 3y agoIn what context? From or to multiple people? I don't think I've ever sent or received a bathroom selfie.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- fragmede 3y agoit's not of the toilet, it's where the mirror is
- Nextgrid 3y agoIn many cases the former ends up in the mirror reflection anyway.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- abruzzi 3y agoI didn't know "chillax" was a word, especially one that would auto correct "chill". So from the authors comments, I take it I am a rare minority in that all my texts are in full, grammatically correct sentences, with proper punctuation?
- Doctor_Fegg 3y ago*author's
- smegsicle 3y agostudies show that kids these days interpret texts ending in a period as passive aggressive or something
- dtech 3y agook.
- lxgr 3y agoCapitalization at the beginning of your sentence would have made for an even more dramatic effect ;)
- smegsicle 3y agocalm down bro it's just what i heard
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago“I’m responsible only for what I say, not what you understand.” – John Wayne
- lwhi 3y agoIt's called full-stopping.
- elcritch 3y ago
- Almondsetat 3y agoI love going to the Apple store every time a new OS version comes along and browse the various devices on display to see all the fake messages, photos, emails, notes, drawings, bookmarks, etc. they have set up
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 3y agoThis is very funny, but it's also disquieting, because people who text like this absolutely do exist; I know because I'm on the list for the block I live on. Modulo a lack of spelling and grammar errors, this is what normal people sound like. The idea that very normal people behavior is this odd or telling is, itself, pretty telling!
- Traubenfuchs 3y agoI text back and forth like this at the beginning of dating sometimes. Though if that happens, things usually don‘t work out because it means we just don‘t vibe naturally.
- krsdcbl 3y agoWhat's making the "apple dimension texts" kinda creepy is not directly the language or lack of typos. It's the overly formalized way everyone seems to interact regarding anything, the formulation of every little remark showing signs of a communication environment where the participants take care to conform to certain social norms and expectations, like normal people _would_ in spaces with such unspoken constraints (like the list of their block for example) -- but they seem to do that with close friends and family!
- sctb 3y agoI text almost exactly like this. Probably both Dimension Apple writers and myself are pretending to be normal in the same way...
- rz2k 3y agoIn addition to your block's list, from the article: > Does the Dimension Apple exist? > For a long time I have enjoyed the stilted, improbable cheeriness of fake Apple texts for their extreme distance from my own texting habits and experiences. (As my friend Emma put it to our group chat “if any of you texted me like this I would immediately call your significant others to make sure you hadn’t been kidnapped.”) But in the last year or so I have realized that Dimension Apple does exist--or at least overlaps with our own--in one very specific place: The WhatsApp groups that the parents at my son’s daycare/school create to share information or set up play dates. In these groups, and only in these groups, do I encounter the same kind of earnest helpfulness and baffling ebullience that exists in the Dimension Apple. Naturally, I find them totally alienating.
- jl6 3y agoIt’s even funnier if you’ve heard of John Bishop.
- lxgr 3y agoNo article about Apple's staged sample content can be complete without at least an honorable mention of the Raccoon Basement Incident: https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-displays-weird-message-about-basement-raccoons-to-demo-feature-2023-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-displays-weird-message...
- cpeterso 3y agoA screenshot of (an ominous excerpt from) the basement message is in the article’s “iOS 17” section: “Hey Mom, I figured out what all that noise coming from the basement is.”
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- qingcharles 3y agoAre wild racoons that friendly? There is one living in my attic and I've seen racoon claws, so I'm not tempted to try and spook it.
- mikestew 3y agoTwo days late on the reply, but in case there's any question of the friendliness of raccoons, no, they don't like you and they will fuck you up. If your dog gets hold of one, it's a trip to the vet for stitches. If you have one in your house, and you live in the U. S., I believe you want to call your state's Fish and Wildlife department or Department of Natural Resources, or summat.
- qingcharles 3y agoHe's eating all the mice up there from what I can tell, so I'll leave the fellow for now. Thanks for the advice. I've seen racoons fighting and they really fucked each other up good, so that's why I've been wary of them since.
- derefr 3y ago> they form group chats centered around trips that only one participant was on It never occurred to me until now, but there's actually a somewhat-coherent "sharing philosophy" woven through many of Apple's products. It seems like Apple envisions a world where social networks and "broadcast"-sharing of content don't exist. In this world, when people want to "tell people" an update about their life, they share that update on a whitelist basis — first meticulously considering exactly the people they want to receive the update, and then pushing the shared item directly into those people's faces as a realtime push-notification-generating event, as if with the intent of starting a synchronous conversation. They may then later rope a few more people into the conversation, as they become relevant — but only on a strictly need-to-know basis. Doing this pings them as well, showing them the whole conversation so far — and they're expected to read back and keep up. In other words, in "Dimension Apple", nobody has a parasocial desire for people they don't know to see their posts. People only share things with people they know; and even then, only certain friends get to see certain things. And those friends don't mind at all that you had a long conversation that you excluded them from, until you didn't. Even more intriguingly, in "Dimension Apple", people seemingly only find out news about you because you've shared that news directly with them. No "following" someone; no copying messages from one conversation to another; no gossip, even. I would say that real people don't work like this... but now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure that this is exactly how people in the upper class — people for whom "discretion" is core to their lifestyle — would prefer all their "sharing" be done.
- jwells89 3y agoI feel that a line from this could be traced back to the era prior to ubiquitous social media, where the vast majority of sharing was happening over messengers like AIM, MSN, and Skype or via email, and if you go back Apple stuff at that point was fairly geared around sharing through iChat (AIM) or Mail.app. There was a period earlier on where macOS and iOS had Facebook and Twitter posting built in where those got some airtime in promotions, but as the shine of social media wore off those integrations disappeared and their promotional material reverted to a world where sharing happened over the modern equivalent to iChat (iMessage) or maybe Mail.app.
- 3y ago
- in3d 3y agoThat’s how you communicate when you have a first date set with someone you’ve only talked to through messages. At this point, you can only mess it up and nothing you say can substantially help.
- EdwardDiego 3y agoI'm 85% sure that the first road trip pictures with the "secret beach" are taken on the southern side of Banks Peninsula in NZ.
- xg15 3y agoSee also: Every Amazon commercial.
- kazinator 3y ago> Like a lot of troubled young men, I used to pay close attention to Apple’s developer conferences and special announcements, eagerly anticipating each new generation of iPhone and operating system. ... As a deranged older man, I now collect artifacts from Apple advertisements, to reconstruct the characters and interactions portrayed in their fantasy world, to inform the public about how (for instance) they text differently from real people. In my defense, it's no worse than collecting Princess Di memorabilia, or being crazy into Pokemon or Harry Potter.
- Taek 3y agoQuite the contrary to deranged, I think its exactly in line with someone who collects sports jerseys or old coins with manufacturing defects. The world of Apple propaganda is expansive and rich, and has more than enough depth to justify a worthwhile hobby. In fact, at a party or gathering I'd be way more excited to hear about your collection than to hear about a guys collection of stamps or WWI era guns (not to disparage those hobbies, they just don't interest me personally much)
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y agoThat’s deranged.
- jychang 3y agoYep. At the end of the day, all humans are moderately deranged. If we were all rational value optimizers, the world would be a lot shittier place.
- goosedragons 3y agoHow far does it go? Does your kitchen look like this [0]? Do you have that picture of an apple hanging there? Do you check your stocks at the kitchen table while your partner weirdly looks on while chopping vegetables? [0] https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ug105jVWociHnn_oPJoa8gPjahU=/630x847/media/img/posts/2015/06/image_208/original.jpg https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ug105jVWociHnn_oPJoa8gPj...
- Nition 3y agoThis doesn't even delve into the hidden deceit! In the first image, the sender says they went camping in the mountains, but then sends a photo of the seaside. Did they really go camping at all? In the soapbox derby image, the sender claims they "just finished the latest renderings" for the sushi car design, yet the design is clearly AI generated! They've been lying to the team about how they're creating the designs. Rich Dinh, who's dominating the chat with his ravioli dish? It's a stock photo by Helen Rushbrook! Is he making anything himself? How many people in Dimension Apple are secretly struggling like these three? There must be huge pressure to conform.
- dylan604 3y ago>yet the design is clearly AI generated! They've been lying to the team about how they're creating the designs. if the sender is the one tweaking the prompts for the AI to render, then why would they not be correct in saying they are finished with it. you sound like one of those that think any use of AI imagery is wrong.
- Nition 3y agoNo, it's just that I think of a render as a 3D render done in a 3D modelling program. I haven't seen anyone say something like "I just finished the latest renderings" when talking about AI image generation before.
- 4oo4 3y agoI would posit that Dimension Apple also extends into the shows it does product placement in, where they stipulate that villans can't use Apple products. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/apple-wont-let-filmmakers-put-iphones-in-villains-hands-rian-johnson-says/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/apple-wont-let-f... Once you see it, it's really hard to unsee and can make certain shows like Law and Order SVU seem like a longform Apple ad. Ted Lasso on Apple TV (and presumably other Apple TV shows too, though I haven't really watched others) is very bad about the amount of Apple product placement and comes close (but doesn't quite) ruin the show.
- midasuni 3y agoI find Sony the most egregious example of poor product placement - especially in Spider-Man films
- tmpX7dMeXU 3y agoThe Apple product placement in Ted Lasso was upsetting. You’re right. It came this close to souring me on a good show. Right up to the point of just dumping it. But even walking that close to the line is disrespectful to one’s audience.
- neilv 3y agoSomeone should go find earlier examples of this genre, in ads for consumer online services, as early as the 1980s.
- araes 3y agoThe article's funny, and kind of surreal read considering a dimension fading away while all the characters become cartoons and the landscape becomes vague. Have similar thoughts occasionally. However, also creepy. Not sure if its the way humans have always written, that ChatAI got too good too fast, or that they all secretly had them all for years (Multiple massive AI releases in a year???, "had em all in a box in the back") The 2nd image (with pair of images) on the Sharing Photos subsection [1] literally looks like StableDiffusion++. Somebody wrote two prompts, that had something like "Male with frizzy hair next to girl in pink shirt with glasses with brick building behind" and then it didn't care whether it was the same male in both, or what skin color. Most text also seems weirdly similar to: Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra [2] [1] https://maxread.substack.com/i/137044198/sharing-photographs-as-dimension-apple-cultural-practice https://maxread.substack.com/i/137044198/sharing-photographs... [2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03442.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03442.pdf
- rafram 3y agoI highly doubt that they were using Stable Diffusion to generate marketing images in 2013.
- hnburnsy 3y agoNote that it is typically 9:41 AM or 10:09 AM [Watch] in the Apple Dimension.
- Apocryphon 3y agoI still want to play the isometric CRPG featured in the page for UICollectionView: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicollectionview https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicollection...
- stephc_int13 3y agoAs a rule of thumb, the apparent politeness of the language is inversely proportional to the potential violence of the culture it comes from.
- rational_indian 3y agoCase in point: countries with high levels of gun violence. You never know when an unhinged person might unload into you.
- bruce343434 3y agoNot really a concrete case but an abstract and plausible-sounding hypothetical
- cainxinth 3y agoCan you give some examples, because I’m not sure that’s true. Modern Japan is famously polite and their crime rates are quite low. Likewise, I grew up in a Quaker community that is exceptionally polite and nonviolent.
- dools 3y agoJapan may not be the best example. Their history of politeness extends from the extreme violence of the samurai era.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoUp through the age when they nearly took over the Pacific and their wartime tactics were known for brutality
- Pomfers 3y agoI think they'd agree with that example. If we take their quote and invert it: > apparent politeness of the language is inversely proportional to the potential violence of the culture => apparent politeness of language directly proportional to the peacefulness of the culture
- ikerrin1 3y agoCould the boss asking for photos be passive aggressively asking for proof to show why the people aren’t at work?
- dools 3y agoWhenever someone starts using Apple as an example of how we can all do better at marketing our startups I cringe. And yet I obviously have so much to learn. When tasked with creating a fake conversation for my own telecommunications app BenkoPhone whose primary point of difference is the ability to send and receive picture messages, I created a conversation that goes like this[0]: [Contact Name: My Colleague] Inbound message: [PHOTO OF KITTEN] Check out this cute kitten! Outbound reply: That’s adorable now GET BACK TO WORK!! Now I’m rethinking my whole strategy. [0] https://apps.apple.com/au/app/benkophone/id1588846472 https://apps.apple.com/au/app/benkophone/id1588846472
- blharr 3y agoI'm a little confused on your description. You say the primary point of difference is in being able to send and receive picture messages, but can't you do that in any messaging app as well?
- dools 3y agoOnly to other users of the same messaging app. This is a mobile phone number that works with any other mobile phone number for voice calls, txt and picture messages. There are about 10 apps that do this in North America (the most start uppy of which is OpenPhone) but zero apps that do this outside of North America (apart from BenkoPhone). BenkoPhone users can send each other messages and pictures (and other files) directly, just like WhatsApp or Signal or whatever, but when they send to a mobile number that is not hosted by BenkoPhone it will go out over the mobile network, a bit like how when you send a picture to an Android user from iMessage it goes as an MMS but if you send to another iMessage user it goes via Apple's internal messaging.
- mproud 3y agoThe people who make these marketing materials often use people’s names they know of, and sometimes employ inside jokes, or more common ones even. Apple had a page for an iOS release one year explaining new calendar features. On the page I saw a calendar event for name of a guy I personally knew who worked at Apple! It was a dentist appointment at 2:30.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y agoIf you think about it, irony is often mean and disingenuous. I could see a dimension where irony is socially unacceptable, like cursing at children and old people. Or cursing in general.
- DHPersonal 3y agoThe direct and incredibly interconnected aspect of Apple’s marketing is incredibly interesting and alluring to me. I often find their presentations brewing a sense of loss or maybe envy because the people in their universe buying their products seem to have friends who care very specifically about each other and who are very involved with the interesting lives of the small friend group. The products Apple sells seem to offer up the chance to have relationships like those, even though in practice I can’t find anyone who wants to invest that fully into the very specific Apple method of social networking.
- JamilD 3y agoI worked there for a few years, and, though I never thought of it this way, I keep in touch with my friends there in much the same way. We send each other and ask for photos, and talk in kind of the same way (though the marketing copy is of course a bit more cheesy and contrived) Not sure if it's a Bay Area thing, an Apple thing, or what, but I don't think it's a "fantasy"
- mannyv 3y agoOne really hilarious thing only Apple could do is have a ruling relationship of their fake people in messages/emails. Like "oh, baby is born", then "first day at school" a few years later, "diagnosed with cancer," etc. It's a shame they didn't do this, especially for Johnny Appleseed. Or maybe they tried and got shot down.