[HN Gopher] Things that do not exist in Dimension Apple
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Things that do not exist in Dimension Apple
Author : lysozyme
Score : 186 points
Date : 2023-09-17 16:26 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (maxread.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (maxread.substack.com)
| sdwr wrote:
| > Dimension Apple trip destinations have become increasingly
| vague, as the "Road Trip" group chat suggests, part of an overall
| and troubling vague-ening of the Dimension Apple
|
| This bit was hilarious. It's comfort food in the same vein as the
| Barbie movie - everyone is polished and no one needs to work.
| xwdv wrote:
| Apple should take a page from Hollywood and create an Apple
| Cinematic Universe where there is continuity on the various
| storylines and characters created in their presentations.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| That's the product line.
| [deleted]
| twic wrote:
| If you worked on these images, surely you would be irresistably
| tempted to leave little easter eggs referring to past characters?
| "Hey Kim, how are you doing?" "Great, thanks! Apart from going a
| littleh hard on the ravioli last night!".
| ajmoo wrote:
| I worked on many of these! Was on the Marcom team that rebuilt
| screenshots for content swaps and hi-res output. Every screen
| went through multiple rounds of approvals by many different
| teams, including writing. Unfortunately any Easter eggs I tried
| to hide in there were all caught ;)
| ImaCake wrote:
| Thanks for trying. I think it would have played to Apple's
| advantage to keep easter eggs in these but bureaucracies
| abhor risk.
| tobr wrote:
| > rebuilt screenshots for content swaps and hi-res output
|
| Can you explain this work in more detail? Are you basically
| reconstructing the contents of a screenshot in vector
| graphics so it can be translated/edited/scaled up but still
| look correct?
| zamalek wrote:
| "Dinh ran off with some floozy from a group chat about the
| presentation on Tuesday. :cucumber: :sunset: :shoe:"
| jodrellblank wrote:
| > " _going a littleh hard on the ravioli last night! "._"
|
| Mmm. that. looks. delicious.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-jK37C4CxA
| [deleted]
| abruzzi wrote:
| I didn't know "chillax" was a word, especially one that would
| auto correct "chill".
|
| So from the authors comments, I take it I am a rare minority in
| that all my texts are in full, grammatically correct sentences,
| with proper punctuation?
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| *author's
| tobr wrote:
| > I didn't know "chillax" was a word, especially one that would
| auto correct "chill".
|
| The picture shows the opposite: you tried to type "chillax" but
| it is correcting it to "chill", but offering you to revert the
| correction.
| lxgr wrote:
| Quite likely!
|
| There's nothing wrong with either, though, and I wouldn't
| recommend judging anyone's mastery of style or grammar based on
| only a single (and quite idiosyncratic) communication channel.
| smegsicle wrote:
| studies show that kids these days interpret texts ending in a
| period as passive aggressive or something
| dtech wrote:
| ok.
| smegsicle wrote:
| calm down bro it's just what i heard
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| "I'm responsible only for what I say, not what you
| understand." - John Wayne
| lxgr wrote:
| Capitalization at the beginning of your sentence would have
| made for an even more dramatic effect ;)
| lwhi wrote:
| It's called full-stopping.
| elcritch wrote:
| Sure.
| jwells89 wrote:
| In a similar vein, ending with an ellipsis (...), while used
| by many to indicate thought, consideration, or other sort of
| pause in speech often comes across to younger readers as a
| sort of passive aggressiveness or shortness of patience.
| astrange wrote:
| It's interpreted as old person, because there's a class of
| boomer that ends all their sentences with ... and then puts
| them in the middle of half of them too.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Surely it's always meant that. It's just a long pause.
|
| I'd think something like "are you serious..." would be
| pretty universally understood.
| Nition wrote:
| This doesn't even delve into the hidden deceit!
|
| In the first image, the sender says they went camping in the
| mountains, but then sends a photo of the seaside. Did they really
| go camping at all?
|
| In the soapbox derby image, the sender claims they "just finished
| the latest renderings" for the sushi car design, yet the design
| is clearly AI generated! They've been lying to the team about how
| they're creating the designs.
|
| Rich Dinh, who's dominating the chat with his ravioli dish? It's
| a stock photo by Helen Rushbrook! Is he making _anything_
| himself?
|
| How many people in Dimension Apple are secretly struggling like
| these three? There must be huge pressure to conform.
| tardibear wrote:
| The title of the linked page is "A literary history of fake texts
| in Apple's marketing materials".
| Kiro wrote:
| Yeah, don't understand why they chose this title for the
| submission.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| I'm 85% sure that the first road trip pictures with the "secret
| beach" are taken on the southern side of Banks Peninsula in NZ.
| derefr wrote:
| > they form group chats centered around trips that only one
| participant was on
|
| It never occurred to me until now, but there's actually a
| somewhat-coherent "sharing philosophy" woven through many of
| Apple's products. It seems like Apple envisions a world where
| social networks and "broadcast"-sharing of content don't exist.
| In this world, when people want to "tell people" an update about
| their life, they share that update on a whitelist basis -- first
| meticulously considering exactly the people they want to receive
| the update, and then pushing the shared item directly into those
| people's faces as a realtime push-notification-generating event,
| as if with the intent of starting a synchronous conversation.
| They may then later rope a few more people into the conversation,
| as they become relevant -- but only on a strictly need-to-know
| basis. Doing this pings them as well, showing them the whole
| conversation so far -- and they're expected to read back and keep
| up.
|
| In other words, in "Dimension Apple", nobody has a parasocial
| desire for people they don't know to see their posts. People only
| share things with people they know; and even then, only certain
| friends get to see certain things. And those friends don't mind
| at all that you had a long conversation that you excluded them
| from, until you didn't.
|
| Even more intriguingly, in "Dimension Apple", people seemingly
| only find out news about you _because_ you 've shared that news
| directly with them. No "following" someone; no copying messages
| from one conversation to another; no gossip, even.
|
| I would say that real people don't work like this... but now that
| I think of it, I'm pretty sure that this is exactly how people in
| the upper class -- people for whom "discretion" is core to their
| lifestyle -- would _prefer_ all their "sharing" be done.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| Well, this is how I live. I don't use any broadcast-based
| social media. The only form I consume would be YouTube or
| Twitch, I believe without any parasocial weirdness.
|
| After I finish a trip (recently I went to Supai, AZ) I send
| little bundles of photos to different people via my phone very
| much like these screenshots.
| theragra wrote:
| It would feel a bit weird to me, because it looks like
| marketing myself and my ego. In blogs or social networks,
| people only check you if they want.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I think different people could do the same thing for
| different reasons. For me it's just about catching people
| up, and sometimes people return the favor.
|
| Regarding social networks, though - people aren't exactly
| looking at your photos because they want to. Most social
| networks decide what you see, so the algorithm will put
| vacation photos in front of you even if you don't like that
| content.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| musictubes wrote:
| I doubt that anyone on Apple's C suite has a personal Facebook
| or other social media. Once you get to a certain level of
| fame/wealth/corporate importance your social media output will
| go down or at least become not personal. Having a private
| social network makes a lot of sense for them. Might be better
| for everyone else too.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I feel that a line from this could be traced back to the era
| prior to ubiquitous social media, where the vast majority of
| sharing was happening over messengers like AIM, MSN, and Skype
| or via email, and if you go back Apple stuff at that point was
| fairly geared around sharing through iChat (AIM) or Mail.app.
|
| There was a period earlier on where macOS and iOS had Facebook
| and Twitter posting built in where those got some airtime in
| promotions, but as the shine of social media wore off those
| integrations disappeared and their promotional material
| reverted to a world where sharing happened over the modern
| equivalent to iChat (iMessage) or maybe Mail.app.
| derefr wrote:
| > where the vast majority of sharing was happening over
| messengers
|
| Arguable -- mass-mailing async updates (think: postcards)
| about your life has been ubiquitous for as long as people
| have been going off and doing interesting things. This
| evolved into mass-emails. I was BCC'ed a _lot_ of "wedding
| photos.zip" and "in paris.jpg"s emails in the 1990s; _much_
| more often than such a thing was ever directed _at_ me by a
| friend or relative, let alone directed at me _synchronously_
| in a messenger app.
|
| Remember also: messengers back in the 90s and early 2000s
| didn't have a concept of "server-buffered message sends." For
| a message to transmit over AIM/ICQ/MSN/etc, both people had
| to be online _at the same time_. If you were travelling --
| and so potentially in a separate time zone -- messengers
| really didn 't work very well as a way to send large image
| files. Until very late in the lives of their protocols, most
| of them didn't even _support_ sending files!
| jwells89 wrote:
| All very true. My perspective is no doubt skewed by growing
| up with AIM/MSN and having become an adult and starting
| doing interesting things right around the time social media
| had begun to peak, a fair deal after the heyday of mailed
| postcards and BCC'd email threads.
| ruffrey wrote:
| I think this is mostly how human communication worked until the
| internet era. Those who aren't plugged into social media still
| operate this way - sharing directly with others. In real life,
| when people interact, they begin by asking "how are you?" Which
| is the opposite of social media.
| derefr wrote:
| Social networks work a lot like mass-mailing your friends and
| relatives with postcards / greeting cards.
|
| Also, the lack of _gossip_ in "Dimension Apple" is a crucial
| distinction. You don't need a social network to spread news,
| if you know that everything you tell that one aunt is going
| to be repeated on every phone call she makes for the next two
| weeks. (And she makes a lot of phone calls.)
| Loughla wrote:
| I'm on no social media (besides this site). The number of
| times a day I have to say, "no, I didn't see [insert random
| event here]." Would honestly surprise you.
|
| There is just an expectation in society today that you know
| everything that's going on in everyone's life. It's very,
| very strange to me. It's hard to explain why, but I get
| serious black mirror sort of vibes from it.
| Gigachad wrote:
| No one expects you to view social media all day. That are
| asking "did you see ___" because they want to tell you
| about it but first check you haven't already seen it.
| cafeinux wrote:
| At least you get asked about those events. In my family I'm
| known as the guy who knows everything last: often
| conversations go like "He's been sad for two months now,
| but it's understandable - Why? What happened? - Well, you
| know, the break-up... - What? John broke up? I didn't even
| knew he had someone..."
|
| So now, my mother (who lives on Facebook) usually calls me
| to let me know when she learns something she might deem
| important on Facebook. And I honestly appreciate the
| attention, it's good when you feel that people think about
| you. And it's usually important information she gives me,
| because we're not into gossip.
| iseanstevens wrote:
| Wow - fascinating observation!
|
| Feels to me similar to the "companies ship their org chart"
| concept.
| brightlancer wrote:
| Could this be because Apple doesn't run a social media service?
| On some levels, are their products/ services competing
| _against_ social media?
|
| Or is this just part of Apple's (and many of its users')
| elitist and exclusivist mentality: they're better than everyone
| else, they don't need to interoperate with the rest of the
| world, and their sharing is reserved for the select.
|
| (Not all Apple users are like that and probably not even the
| majority anymore, but it _is_ Apple's mentality, it was the
| dominant mentality among Mac users, and it's still common
| enough and OMG loudly pronounced enough by current Mac users.)
| mortehu wrote:
| I think what you are describing is how most people use Google
| Photos, or perhaps Dropbox or iCloud, and I think this is the
| main way people share photos.
| jl6 wrote:
| It's even funnier if you've heard of John Bishop.
| Almondsetat wrote:
| I love going to the Apple store every time a new OS version comes
| along and browse the various devices on display to see all the
| fake messages, photos, emails, notes, drawings, bookmarks, etc.
| they have set up
| xg15 wrote:
| See also: Every Amazon commercial.
| lxgr wrote:
| No article about Apple's staged sample content can be complete
| without at least an honorable mention of the Raccoon Basement
| Incident:
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-displays-weird-message...
| cpeterso wrote:
| A screenshot of (an ominous excerpt from) the basement message
| is in the article's "iOS 17" section:
|
| _"Hey Mom, I figured out what all that noise coming from the
| basement is."_
| [deleted]
| qingcharles wrote:
| Are wild racoons that friendly? There is one living in my attic
| and I've seen racoon claws, so I'm not tempted to try and spook
| it.
| CharlesW wrote:
| I'm surprised the author missed the most obvious weirdness: Every
| message ends with a punctuation mark.
| samastur wrote:
| Like mine do. And most messages I receive. I find it weird that
| some started seeing punctuation as some weird imposition.
| jayd16 wrote:
| You even send messages like "lol." with the period?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I don't think I've typed out 'lol' in a message since circa
| 2005, on online chat in some dark corner of the web.
| Culture bubbles are an incredible thing.
| cafeinux wrote:
| I don't usually text in English so my style is definitely
| different, but I wonder if I may be living in the Apple
| Dimension (despite my last Apple device being an iPod Touch
| from 10 years ago and a MacBook Air from the same time that
| I bought used to try to install Linux on it): I do end
| every one of my texts with grammatically correct
| punctuation, never use "lol" or other abbreviations, and
| typically write in a very clean, sometimes too verbose,
| style. I wonder if something up with "us". Maybe a new
| pathology name ought to be coined.
| lawik wrote:
| > These eerily cheery, aggressively punctuated messages suggest
| a alternate dimension
|
| I don't believe they did.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| woah periods, so aggressive
|
| apple employees: blink twice if you're okay
| in3d wrote:
| That's how you communicate when you have a first date set with
| someone you've only talked to through messages. At this point,
| you can only mess it up and nothing you say can substantially
| help.
| corbezzoli wrote:
| I don't think real world messages would look good in marketing
| copy, too many emojis, "uhhh", "no cap" and bathroom pics. I
| don't know what the author is expecting/analyzing here.
| bluedays wrote:
| I'm disturbed that you have a lot of bathroom pics in your
| texts
| jalict wrote:
| Random bathroom selfie seems pretty standard.
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| It's really not
| hotnfresh wrote:
| There are clearly many _texting dimensions_.
|
| Bathroom selfies are not a thing in the one I'm a part of.
| [deleted]
| bestcoder69 wrote:
| He's analyzing what looks good in marketing copy.
| tptacek wrote:
| This is very funny, but it's also disquieting, because people who
| text like this absolutely do exist; I know because I'm on the
| list for the block I live on. Modulo a lack of spelling and
| grammar errors, this is what normal people sound like. The idea
| that very normal people behavior is this odd or telling is,
| itself, pretty telling!
| zamfi wrote:
| I'm also on the list of the block I live on, and people also
| text like this on that list...
|
| ...including, me. On that list.
|
| I think part of what's disquieting is that there is a "formal
| text English" that exists (and people know about), but people
| use it only in certain circumstances, like when you're texting
| a group of people that you don't know very well, and that you
| don't want to offend, or that you want to seem "proper" for.
|
| It's temping to think that what we observe on these lists is
| how those people _are_ , but every now and then someone on my
| list will post a message intended for someone else...and it no
| longer fits "formal text English".
|
| I suspect this language's use is highly contextual. To me, part
| of the the oddness of it all is that I would almost never use
| formal text English in the contexts shown in these marketing
| images.
| rz2k wrote:
| In addition to your block's list, from the article:
|
| > Does the Dimension Apple exist?
|
| > For a long time I have enjoyed the stilted, improbable
| cheeriness of fake Apple texts for their extreme distance from
| my own texting habits and experiences. (As my friend Emma put
| it to our group chat "if any of you texted me like this I would
| immediately call your significant others to make sure you
| hadn't been kidnapped.") But in the last year or so I have
| realized that Dimension Apple does exist--or at least overlaps
| with our own--in one very specific place: The WhatsApp groups
| that the parents at my son's daycare/school create to share
| information or set up play dates. In these groups, and only in
| these groups, do I encounter the same kind of earnest
| helpfulness and baffling ebullience that exists in the
| Dimension Apple. Naturally, I find them totally alienating.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| I text back and forth like this at the beginning of dating
| sometimes. Though if that happens, things usually don't work
| out because it means we just don't vibe naturally.
| sctb wrote:
| I text almost exactly like this. Probably both Dimension Apple
| writers and myself are pretending to be normal in the same
| way...
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| Okay that was surprisingly funny to read through. It's
| interesting how in isolation the texts are probably fine and work
| well for demonstrating the software, but taken together they do
| present an oddly stilted view of the world.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _Like a lot of troubled young men, I used to pay close
| attention to Apple's developer conferences and special
| announcements, eagerly anticipating each new generation of iPhone
| and operating system._
|
| ... As a deranged older man, I now collect artifacts from Apple
| advertisements, to reconstruct the characters and interactions
| portrayed in their fantasy world, to inform the public about how
| (for instance) they text differently from real people. In my
| defense, it 's no worse than collecting Princess Di memorabilia,
| or being crazy into Pokemon or Harry Potter.
| Taek wrote:
| Quite the contrary to deranged, I think its exactly in line
| with someone who collects sports jerseys or old coins with
| manufacturing defects.
|
| The world of Apple propaganda is expansive and rich, and has
| more than enough depth to justify a worthwhile hobby.
|
| In fact, at a party or gathering I'd be way more excited to
| hear about your collection than to hear about a guys collection
| of stamps or WWI era guns (not to disparage those hobbies, they
| just don't interest me personally much)
| 4oo4 wrote:
| I would posit that Dimension Apple also extends into the shows it
| does product placement in, where they stipulate that villans
| can't use Apple products.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/02/apple-wont-let-f...
|
| Once you see it, it's really hard to unsee and can make certain
| shows like Law and Order SVU seem like a longform Apple ad. Ted
| Lasso on Apple TV (and presumably other Apple TV shows too,
| though I haven't really watched others) is very bad about the
| amount of Apple product placement and comes close (but doesn't
| quite) ruin the show.
| midasuni wrote:
| I find Sony the most egregious example of poor product
| placement - especially in Spider-Man films
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