5 Dirty Tricks Apple Uses to Get You to Buy a New iPhone
Apple sold more than 10 million units of the iPhone 6 in only three days, which means that at least a few of you are reading this on your brand-new future phone. Congratulations! Also, whatever the opposite of congratulations is, because there's a good chance you might have been tricked into buying that thing when you absolutely didn't need it. Here are some of the ways Apple (and our own brains) are pulling a fast one on our pockets:
#5. Making You Think Your iPhone Gets Slower When a New One Comes Out
So a new iPhone is out and, as fancy as it looks, you say to yourself, "Do I really need to spend hundreds of dollars when my trusty old phone works perfectly well?" Then you start up said trusty phone and it takes like a minute to load the Facebook app, so you dump the piece of shit in the garbage and head for the nearest Apple Store.
Well, you're not the only one who's been there -- every time a new iPhone has launched, Google searches for "iPhone slow" shoot up like John Travolta in Pulp Fiction:
Google Trends/NY Times
The search keywords "old," "bloated," and "low-memory" are interchangeable between the two.
The New York Times makes the argument that this could be purely a psychological thing -- we start contemplating whether or not we should replace our phones, which in turn causes us to criticize every millisecond longer it takes to upload the latest picture of breakfast. The weird thing is that this phenomenon happens only with Apple phones, which could mean two things: either the media focus on the iPhone is so pervasive in society that we all brainwash ourselves into believing our phones are getting slower ... or they are getting slower.
See, whenever Apple releases a new phone, they usually also release a new version of iOS, their mobile operating system, to go along with it, but downloading it is a death sentence for any phone older than a couple of years. Apps get slower, animations get choppy, and since everything is designed for bigger screens, you'll be constantly reminded that your phone's size is inadequate:
arstechnica.com
iPhone Magnum coming 2015.
Even if you have a more recent phone, that doesn't make you immune to iOS 8's infuriating battery drain and sluggish WiFi capabilities, problems that have been flooding Apple's bug forum since the operating system launched. Of course, none of these complaints have stopped half of all iPhone and iPad users from upgrading to iOS 8 anyway, so come to think of it, Apple would be pretty dumb if they didn't try to take advantage of everyone.
#4. Using Trick Photography to Make iPhones Seem Thinner Than They Are
If nothing else, Apple will be remembered for its poise. Apple's sleekness has been a company trademark since they upgraded their monitors from gray squares with sharp edges to bright orange translucent oblongs. Which is why when they first announced their latest iPhone, they made sure to point out that it is sleek as shit -- they even put together a nice graphic showing how much thinner the new iPhones look compared to the previous model:
The problem is that the old version (on the left) is misleadingly shot in a different light: it doesn't have any shadowed black edge and is a completely silver shade, whereas the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus are cleverly shaded at the sides to make them appear skinnier than they actually are. Here's a handy GIF to show what we mean:
qz.com
Real phones have curves.
The graphic made the new phone look around 30 percent slimmer than the old one, when it's actually just 9 percent slimmer. Is Apple so insecure that they would try to erase a few millimeters off an already ridiculously thin phone just to make it look sexier? Apparently they are: the initial iPhone 6 press photos proudly displayed what tech sites have dubbed "the camera bulge" ...
Apple
The technical term is "lenscrotum."
... only to remove the bulge in later photos to make the phone look slimmer.
Apple
"How am I supposed to photograph my bulge now?!"
With the camera, the phone would be an extra 0.7 millimeters thick, which means Apple Photoshopping it out is the equivalent of Calvin Klein digitally removing Kate Moss' ribcage. We're not saying Apple is an evil corporation for trying to shave a few tenths of a millimeter off their new phone, but the fact that they even thought it was necessary seems to suggest that they don't have the highest opinion of their customers.
#3. Bombarding Us With (Posthumous) Celebrity Endorsements
Apple has been struggling to keep up lately in the world of celebrity endorsements. They haven't had anything at the level of the "spontaneous" star-studded selfie at the Academy Awards that turned out to be an ad for a Samsung phone. Not one to be left behind, Apple retaliated by filling the iPhone 6's launch event with the strangest mismatch of celebrities money can rent. You probably heard that U2 made an appearance at the event (and in your iPhone) ...
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images News/Getty Images
No, no, no, no,
no, no, no, nooooo
... while the rest of the event showcased the likes of Dr. Oz, CoCo Lee, Will.i.am, and at least half a dozen other celebrities that you'd have to Google just to know who the hell we were talking about. But, you know, Apple still has a lot of fans everywhere. Just ask Joan Rivers, who gave her personal thumbs up to the iPhone 6 ... two weeks after her death.
Instagram
"I just talked to Jobs, and he said he loves it too! He still dresses like a community college art professor, though."
The post was obviously a pre-negotiated deal that someone forgot to delete after Rivers passed away. We're pretty sure Rivers had no strong opinion on the iPhone 6 one way or another, and yet her digital ghost still managed to throw a jab at the inferior screen size and battery life of the older models. We can probably blame this on Apple's recent hiring of a "buzz marketing manager," which is exactly the insufferable social media non-job that it sounds like. And the unfortunate truth? This shit really does work. Even if the celebrity endorser is obviously lying (or obviously dead), attaching a popular face to a product helps attract consumers. True, it mostly works on young and impressionable customers, but that's exactly who these companies are after.
So, sure, everyone thought U2's dark magic album suddenly appearing on their phones was a creepy borderline invasion of privacy -- but it got people talking about Apple, so mission accomplished.
