My Customer Feedback Form After Purchasing a New Apple Product

Tell us about your experience at the Apple Store. It was a very busy Saturday.  Think of the sound of trickling water.  The customers outnumbered the employees by 20:1.  The cleaning lady from Eastern Europe dusted the shelves silently but efficiently.  The middle-aged moms waited for their apps to download.  The conversations were chatty, clipped, […]

Need Help with the New BookBook?

You may have heard about IKEA’s innovative move to release its latest catalog as a BookBook: If you have any trouble operating it, just call the Medieval Help Desk:

Girl with a Gadget

Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s A Young Girl Reading (1776) resides in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and is perhaps one of the most familiar paintings of a girl reading coming to us from the eighteenth century. When it was painted America was in revolt and France was on the verge of doing so. Despite […]

Reading List: Mass Mobs, Internet Inequality, and Big Ads

This week check out how much time you’ve wasted on Facebook, how not to get massively hacked, and read about the ‘likability’ of different sized internet ads. And if you missed it last week, be sure to check out Brett Robinson’s piece on what Apple is really selling: poetry, beauty, romance and meaning. Touching is […]

The Marriage of Religion and Technology: Reading Apple’s Allegorical Advertising

Steve Jobs invited a number of lofty comparisons during his career. The New York Times likened him to Thomas Edison. Others have called him the Leonardo da Vinci of our generation. Jobs also had a lot in common with the early American philosopher-inventor, Benjamin Franklin. He inherited Franklin’s “Protestant ethic” of mixing morality and capitalism […]

Apple and Technological Fundamentalism

In a post earlier this year at Re/Code, Walt Mossberg nails his 95 theses to the door of the Church of Apple. Apparently fed up with the amount of criticism he receives from unwavering Apple fans, Mossberg argues that users need to remember that “it’s not a church, it’s just an Apple Store.” As a […]

The New Cathedrals: An excerpt from Appletopia

The following is an excerpt from Brett T. Robinson’s new book Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs (Baylor University Press), available starting August 15th. In 2011 by one estimate the most photographed landmark in New York City was not Rockefeller Center or Times Square; it was the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. […]

Another Apple Ad Translation

Just last month, we published a translation of a recent Apple ad by an anonymous contributor with the alias Lex Rex. Here’s another translation published by Funny or Die in which the voice over has been changed:

How To Speak Mac: A Translation of Apple’s June 10, 2013 TV Advertisement

This is it. This is what matters. The experience of a product. How will it make someone feel? Will it make life better? Does it deserve to exist? We spend a lot of time on a few great things… until every idea we touch… enhances each life it touches. You may rarely look at it, […]

The Beautiful Chain

A young girl with a red sweater, a silver chain with large links around her neck, and an Apple product, clutched with feeling close to her heart. Click the image to see it full size. Copyright © 2013 Juliette Aristides

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