There have been concerns about how Apple will run without Steve Jobs, but with Tim Cook and Jon Ives at the helm, it seems the operational and creative aspects are fine. However, I’m not so sure about marketing. With the introduction of the new iPad, it seems less like Think Different and more like Marketing Gone Wild.
Let’s start with product naming and numbering. It’s never been terribly consistent and clear – the 2nd-gen iPhone was the 3G, the 3rd-gen was 3GS, 4th-gen was the iPhone 4, and I think iPhone 5 is the 5th gen? (If I got that wrong, that just proves my point). Edit: oops, I meant the iPhone 4S, not the iPhone 5. And the iPod touch meanwhile had no distinguishing names among the various generations.
However, the iPad and the iPad 2 was crystal clear, yet now with the “new iPad”, you have an iPad 2 that’s older than the iPad and I guess you’re just supposed to throw away the original iPad. This is naming to sound cool, without any regard to causing confusion, similar to longstanding peeves I have about Java 2 actually being 1.2 and a product that I worked on that was bundled with an entirely different name.
This is what happens when people who don’t create anything think they’re creating something by making up words. Which brings us to “resolutionary”. I tried it out on myself last night – “resolutionary…resolutionary…resolutionary” Nope, doesn’t work. (Now, “beetlejuice…”, that rolls off the tongue)
And then there’s the image of the iPad – maybe this is due to my high school class research on advertising where we scoured ads for subliminal images of penises, but it seems to me there’s a Georgia O’Keeffe vibe here. If I’m reading too much into it, well, perhaps I should go into marketing.