Apple Gets Weird

Source: Independent, Andrew Griffin
Photo: ChatGPT

Phones that fold in half. Laptops whose screen you can touch. Displays meant for your kitchen counter. Maybe, eventually, robots that fold your laundry or fly around your house.

Apple is getting a little weird with it, in short. The last month or so has seen it launch three major products that either offer a very new take on its existing devices, or represent a whole new kind of device for the company entirely. The company is of course well known for innovation, but that innovation tends to be quite tightly constrained: the iPhone has been basically the same shape since the launch of the iPhone X in 2017, for instance, and in the decade since the release of the Apple Watch it has only really released one major new platform, in the Vision Pro headset.

So the sheer volume of recent releases is notable in itself, and clearly marks something of a different approach for Apple. (That approach has arrived with new chief executive John Ternus, but it is not clear how much it is a result of it, especially given that transition has been so deftly managed that it was more like a gradual blurring than a discrete switch.) But what is more notable – and perhaps both more exciting and more risky – is that those products are all a little strange.

Why would you want to fold your phone? It’s a question people have kept asking me in the couple of weeks I’ve been carrying around the new iPhone Duo – it’s the first time in a very long time that I’ve been reviewing a new gadget and people have expressed a kind of surprise and delight and reached out to have a look at it themselves, which has happened a lot – and while “why?” is an interesting one to ponder, I don’t yet have a straightforward answer. Why would you want to touch your Mac screen? Apple for a long time certainly didn’t think so, with Steve Jobs having explicitly ruled it out and many other Apple executives echoing him in the time since. But it is fun and refreshing to be asking these kind of questions at all, about a company that has long been best known for making devices that were so straightforwardly good that you couldn’t actually ask all that many questions about them.

Of course, none of Apple’s new products are notably weird for the tech industry: Samsung made its first folding phone in 2019, touchscreen laptops are so common in the PC market that they are barely even remarkable, and Amazon and Google have been making smart displays to house their voice assistants for years. And there is no guarantee either that Apple will do it better, or that its experiments will succeed – the last strange and new thing that the company made was the Vision Pro, and it has been far from a standout success.

But how thrilling not to quite know the answers: what it’s for, what Apple has planned, why it has made this strange decision and whether it will actually work out. In his review of the iPhone Duo, IndyBest’s Alex Lee said that it had made him feel like “a kid with a new toy”. And perhaps that’s a hint of what is so refreshing about Apple’s current era: it is childlike, with all the confusion, wonder and yes maybe even sometimes productive mistakes that it brings.