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Apple and the Art of Reinvention

The relentless pursuit of flashy new features will eventually exhaust tech's ability to overpromise.

Is Apple running out of things to reinvent? Some critics think so: they point to the newest iPhone model released this weekend, suggesting that its design rips off the Samsung smartphone. Others point to the impending release of the Apple Watch, arguing that the demand Apple used to reasonably expect for their new products just doesn’t exist for this batch. Ryan Raefelli of the Harvard Business School told Forbes in an interview:

“Whether it was the iPad’s touchscreen, or the iPod’s music library, Apple devices either made you an artist, or gave you a better way to consume art…Nothing about the Apple Watch will fundamentally shift the way we experience TV, movies, photos or music.”

The initial iPhone’s success was mostly due to the fact that, yes, it was innovative, but it was also timed perfectly with an already-existent, growing interest in cell phones and their capabilities. The new iPhone, to many, is a stale version of a competitor. The iPod’s success was built on the fact that it, paired with iTunes, took the consumer demand for music and gave it unprecedented access and customizability, but the Apple Watch has no such novelty to offer. For one, watches are almost entirely a fashion statement, an accessory built around style, not utility. To market a repurposed watch, lacking the beauty and complexity that make classic models popular, seems to be appealing to a demographic that values watches for their utility rather than their style, which (beyond aficionados of these) barely exists.

Why the faltering faith in Apple? The company built an empire around innovation. It perfected sniffing out trends, jumping on board the consumer demand train and radically altering its path. But now its trajectory seems less dramatic. In the end, we can’t know if Apple did indeed rip off Samsung, or how Apple Watch will perform on the market, but what is clear is that Apple can’t reinvent forever. And American consumers will figure it out, now or later.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Perpetual investment in technological innovation is a key component of the materialist dream; “upgrading” is a way of life for Americans.  In his book Lost in the Cosmos, Walker Percy says that the modern man, seeking to evade his problems of self-identify, will invest himself in diversion. “The self is free to divert endlessly from itself,” he says, describing the creation of a consumer. The consumption becomes compulsory for the self, as it has become “a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out.”

Perhaps, a la Kierkegaard, conscious disappointment is the first step to personal reflection. Maybe the underwhelming delivery of any hyped product, be it this Apple invention or the next, can lead us to reconsider our own investment in the infinite upgrade sequence, a questioning of how devoted we are to the “consumer” persona. Apple marketed enchantment, and marketed it well, but an individual consumer cannot be enchanted by shiny, new things ad infinitum. Disenchantment might just be our ticket to a quieter, less materially-focused life.

Stephen Gibbs is an editorial assistant at The American Conservative.


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