By John Moltz
September 27, 2024 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: The executive suite, in D minor
Executives are in the news this week as Tim Cook discusses pressed meat products, Jony Ive is what you’re not wearing and Sonos… hoo, boy, those ding-dongs at Sonos.
The Timmy and Jimmy show
You won’t believe this. In an amazing coincidence, TV’s Jimmy Fallon happened to be first in line at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store, and who should come out to deliver his new iPhone to him? Guess. You’ll never guess in a mill-
Yeah, it was Tim Cook. How did you know? That’s so weird!
The result is a five minute ad for Apple that ran on The Tonight Show in which Fallon touches Cook’s face as part of a Vision Pro gag. This is not something I would personally want to have done to me knowing where that hand’s been, but your mileage may vary.
Still, it’s very informative. For instance, did you know that Tim Cook will sometimes get a hot dog while in New York? True story. Or… maybe. Who knows? It’s a thing he said. Fallon then correctly guessed that Cook likes mustard on his hot dogs which, wow, might as well have also guessed that he likes a bun.
Fallon: You don’t just eat the hot dog bare with your hands?
Cook: Noooo. Noooo ah doooon’t.
What’s harder to believe is when Cook, in touting the benefits of Apple Intelligence, says he personally likes it because it can summarize all the emails he gets. Does Cook really use that feature, though? I’ve seen some of those summaries. I don’t think I’d bet the most valuable company in the world on them. Or a New York hot dog.
Jony’s jackets
Who’s got $3,000 I can borrow?
“Here are Jony Ive’s $3,000 jackets”
Thanks to a collaboration between Ive’s LoveFrom and a French fashion brand, you can get these nylon jackets with revolutionary new buttons made from magnets, the thing where no one knows how they work. It’s nice that they’re made from recycled materials, but if I’m paying $3,000 for a jacket, it better be made out of something rarer than nylon, like the silk of an extinct spider or the dreams of children stolen throughout history by a time-traveling sword mistress and her sassy robot sidekick.
The magnetic buttons are cool, though.
Ive was also in the news this week for confirming in an interview with The New York Times that he is working with OpenAI’s Sam Altman on an AI hardware product. That’s quite a feat in and of itself as no one else seems to be able to work with Altman for very long. But with the track record of these AI hardware devices to date, I hope Ive’s getting paid up front. Otherwise he’s going to have to sell a lot more $3,000 jackets.
Facing the music
Apple updated its Apple Music Classical app this week, an app which is now already a year and a half old. They grow up so fast. The new version adds liner notes, orchestra information, and composer biographies. Yes, now you can easily see whether the composer died from consumption, war, lead poisoning, or just patron neglect. At least Apple is paying them some respect.
Apple commissioned high-resolution digital portraits of famous composers like Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, and Johann Sebastian Bach for the app…
What, they didn’t use Image Playground? What happened to eating your own dog food?
(By the way, as someone who once ate a Beggin’ Strip just to see what all the fuss was about, I can say the analogy is appropriate. Both look like the real thing but lack all the essential quality and taste that make them the real thing.)
One app that hasn’t received a much-need update (right into the sun) is the Sonos app. Despite the company’s promise to update it every two weeks until it’s just right (or all the yelling stops), the company has failed to keep up with that schedule. What’s more, according to Bloomberg, Sonos shipped the app over the protests of its employees.
Executives. You can’t live with them, you can’t… uh, live with them? I don’t have another option.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]