The One Device

by Brian Merchant

  The factory itself looked nicer than average—clean, modern, efficient. The operation was a standard assembly-line process, where workers manned stations, picked up pieces from the conveyor belt, did their part, then put the items back, where they moved on. About four hundred and fifty workers were employed here, I was told. At the moment, they were producing nice iPhone cases for European markets like Italy.

  But throughout the factory, vertical LED screens were hung between the stations. Each broadcast a worker’s portrait in the upper left-hand corner beside a readout of numbers, then changed to a screen full of stats in a clean, iOS-friendly UI. It was, of course, part of an iPhone app. Using the Ash Cloud, executives or floor managers could track worker productivity down to the number of units produced, and they could do so remotely or from different parts of the floor.

  If a worker’s production rate slowed below the standard, the numbers turned red. If it was on or ahead of target, they turned green. And each time the worker successfully performed a task on an item passing down the assembly line, a number ticked up toward the quota.

  They had done it. They’d closed the loop. They’d made an app for driving the workers that make the devices that enabled apps. They were hoping to spread the word, that licensing the Ash Cloud app could become another part of their business; a couple factories had already been using it, they said. Now, factory workers could be controlled, literally, by the devices they were manufacturing.

  I thought of one ex-Foxconn worker we interviewed. “It never stops,” he said. “It’s just phones and phones and phones.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Sellphone

  How Apple markets, mythologizes, and moves the iPhone

  The Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in downtown San Francisco, which can seat six thousand people, is going to be absolutely packed. I join the shuffling masses—tech journalists, Apple employees, industry analysts—and inch forward with the plaid-shirt-and-jeans-patterned glacier. It feels more like the entrance line to a rock concert. The lights are low, and people are genuinely excited. And so am I.

  We’re here because the iPhone 7 is about to be announced. This is all an elaborate, well-choreographed sales pitch, but I can’t help being excited. News vans are parked outside, video cameras are angled to capture reporters with the giant Apple logo installed atop the auditorium over their shoulders, idle chatter buzzes, laptops are everywhere.

  Product launches are a pillar of Apple’s mythology/marketing machine. Steve Jobs introduced every major Apple product since the Mac from a stage like this one. When Aaron Sorkin wrote a film about Jobs, he set it entirely backstage at three product launches. The keynote speeches at the events became so closely associated with Jobs that fans took to calling them Stevenotes.

  For good reason: Jobs was a master salesman. He didn’t typically get up on the stage and tick off product specs or descend into the effusive marketing-speak his competitors and successors sometimes do. He wasn’t telling you why you should buy an Apple product; he was matter-of-factly discussing the attributes of this Apple product that was about to change the world. His declarations felt natural, emphatic, and true. When he told you Apple was “revolutionizing the phone,” he believed it. The tradition has persisted since his passing in 2012; Tim Cook has dutifully taken over the presenter-in-chief slot, though he clearly relishes it a little less than his predecessor.

  This time the buzz isn’t about what the next great addition to the iPhone will be—in the past, it’d been features like a front-facing camera, Siri, or a larger screen—it’s largely about a big subtraction. For months, Apple blogs and tech sites had speculated that Apple was going to pull the plug on the headphone jack in an effort to anoint wireless headphones as the new norm.

  I sit down next to Mark Spoonauer, the editor in chief of a trusted gadget-review site called Tom’s Guide. He says he’s been to at least seven Apple product launches, and he attends the Events to try to discern what really is new and “what’s worth caring about,” and to answer the ur-question for gadget blogs: Is it worth upgrading?

  “Even if someone has done a feature before, Apple needs to prove that they can do it better. It’s also about proving that Apple can still innovate in a post-Jobs world,” he says. After years of attending these product-launch events, Spoonauer is still glad to get the email invite from Apple (the Event is invitation only). “There’s still excitement about being here,” he says. “It’s not just about the product; it’s about the atmosphere.”

  The lights go down, and a video rolls. It shows Tim Cook calling a Lyft for a ride to the Apple Event—the very event we are waiting for him to show up at—only to find that the car is being driven by James Cordon of Carpool Karaoke, who is then joined by Usher for some reason. They all sing “Sweet Home Alabama” together, and the flesh-and-blood Cook runs out onstage.

  He makes some announcements, and then invites Shigeru Miyamoto, the legendary founder of Nintendo, up to the stage to announce the company’s first foray into iPhone games, Mario Run. The crowd’s rapt quiet gives way to enthused pandemonium.

  Eventually, he gets to the iPhone. “It’s a cultural phenomenon, touching lives of people all around the world,” Cook says as the video feed cuts to a pan of the audience, which, of course, consists of hundreds of people staring at their iPhones. “It is the bestselling product of its kind in the history of the world.”

  Presentations like this—especially when they were given by Steve Jobs—are one of the major reasons that everything Cook is saying right now is true. Simply put, the iPhone would not be what it is today were it not for Apple’s extraordinary marketing and retail strategies. It is in a league of its own in creating want, fostering demand, and broadcasting technologic cool. By the time the iPhone was actually announced in 2007, speculation and rumor over the device had reached a fever pitch, generating a hype that few to no marketing departments are capable of ginning up.

  I see at least three key forces at work. Together, they go a little something like this:

  1. Shroud products in electric secrecy leading up to…

  2. Sublime product launches featuring said products that are soon to appear in…

  3. Immaculately designed Apple Stores.

  Of course, for any of it to work, the product itself has to be impressive. But creating a mythology around that product is, especially in the early stages, as important to selling it as anything else.

  Traditional marketing campaigns are important too, of course, and Apple has run plenty of iPhone ads. There hasn’t been a truly classic iPhone spot or campaign, on the level of the famous Ridley Scott–directed “Big Brother” ad that introduced the Macintosh during the 1984 Super Bowl, the “Think Different” ads that reminded audiences that the Apple brand was associated with geniuses and world-changers in the late 1990s, the earbuds-and-silhouette campaign that created an efficient aesthetic shorthand for iPod cool in the early 2000s, or even the “I’m a Mac,” “I’m a PC” ads that played off Windows-based computers’ reputation for being buggy and lame.

  The closest thing the iPhone has to a classic is probably the “There’s an App for that” campaign in 2008. The debut ad for the iPhone, “Hello,” was a mashup of famous faces answering the phone and is largely forgotten today. Other early ads were largely explanatory, which makes them interesting to watch; they’re artifacts from a time when the concept of browsing the web with your finger and then taking a call needed an introduction. One nicely executed and entirely prescient spot, “Calamari,” shows a user watching a Pirates of the Caribbean clip of a giant squid attack, getting a hankering for seafood, switching to Google Maps to search for a place nearby, and calling the restaurant, all with a few finger taps. A sequence of actions like that was pretty revolutionary at the time. Others highlight the ease of surfing the “real” internet, listening to music, and using Facebook on the go.

  Still, the majority of major corporations can afford well-produced ad campaigns, and even the most uncool can score
the odd hit. In the absence of a definitive iPhone ad campaign, it’s worth looking at what Apple does differently than its competition to elevate its marquee product.

  So, number one: You can’t talk about the iPhone without talking about Apple’s secrecy. The way that Apple has honed its ultrasecretive approach to cater to and exploit the online hype machine is an innovation unto itself, one that rivals many of its other more tangible technological innovations. It too is steeped in history.

  Apple is one of the most secretive companies in the world, and the imperative originated at the top. Jobs was always proactive in managing his company’s media appearances; from the early days, he was keen on developing relationships with editors and writers at the major magazines and newspapers. But he wasn’t always super-secretive. The New York Times reporter John Markoff, one of the writers who’d earned access to Apple, noticed the change in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

  “Since Mr. Jobs returned to Apple, he has increasingly insisted that the company speak with just the voices of top executives,” Markoff noted after being denied an interview with a driving force behind the iPod, Tony Fadell. Another Times writer, Nick Bilton, observed that Jobs frequently described his products as “magical,” and, “as Mr. Jobs knew so well, one thing that makes magic so, well, magical, is that you don’t know how it works. It’s also one reason Apple is so annoyingly tight-lipped.”

  Harnessing secrecy to generate interest in a new technology isn’t a novel idea. It’s been a key element in ginning up interest in new commercial technologies—even the ones that seem in hindsight like obvious breakthroughs.

  “Flight represented the pinnacle of human achievement,” writes the technology historian David Nye. “To raise a heavier-than-air vehicle into the sky was a technological marvel, the fulfillment of a centuries-old dream. Yet when the Wright Brothers flew for the first time, in 1903, almost no one saw their achievement.” They hadn’t fed anyone’s sense of intrigue; there was no anticipation. So the brothers changed tack. “The Wrights remained secretive about their plane’s design during subsequent development, seldom allowing the press to see what they were doing,” Nye explains. Word trickled out, and the Wrights let it. When they were invited to discuss their invention at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, they refused. “They had their eyes on commercial applications, and they were unwilling to disclose the details of their machine.” The Wrights waited until 1908 and held a grand demonstration for the U.S. Army. “Huge throngs turned out to see them… Until the time of World War I, many people ran out of their houses to stare at any airplane that flew into view.”

  Similarly, clamping down on Apple’s public doings was a conscious decision.

  In Becoming Steve Jobs, Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli explain that Jobs “directed Katie Cotton, his communications chief at Apple, to adopt a policy in which Steve made himself available only to a few print outlets… Whenever he had a product to hawk, he and Cotton would decide which of this handful of trusted outlets would get the story. And Steve would tell it, alone.” And he, of course, would keep the details close to his chest. Schlender, who covered Jobs for years, talked with him “many times about his reluctance to share the spotlight with the others on his team, since I asked repeatedly to speak with them and was largely unsuccessful.” Jobs would say he didn’t want his competitors to find out who was doing the best work for fear of losing them, which struck Schlender as “disingenuous.” What he did buy was that “Steve didn’t think anyone else could tell the story of his product, or his company, as well as he could.”

  The effect was to create a vacuum of official Apple news. As the company reemerged from its 1990s slump with a bevy of popular, sexy electronics like the sleek Bondi Blue iMac and the iPod, the demand for intel on the company’s doings boomed. Fan blogs, industry analysts, and tech reporters all commenced circling the reawakening tech giant, turning Apple-watching into a full-time job.

  Speculating on the rumored iPhone became a cottage industry unto itself in the mid-aughts, and the practice continues. “Apple is so secretive that there is essentially an entire industry built around creating, spreading and debunking rumors about the company,” the Huffington Post declared in 2012. Indeed, there are too many Apple-dedicated blogs and websites to count; Apple Insider, iMore, MacRumors, iLounge, 9to5Mac, Cult of Mac, Daring Fireball, Macworld, iDownloadBlog, and iPhoneLife are a few. All of these publications, in serving their audiences, are both meeting a real demand in an iPhone-heavy world and giving the iPhone reams of free press.

  So here’s the thing about that annoying secrecy: It works. At least, it has for Apple, helping to elevate the status of the iPhone as a product apart. One former Apple executive estimated that keeping the first iPhone secret “was worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”

  How’s that, exactly? In addition to the free press generated by Apple-dedicated sites, secrecy plays a powerful role in ratcheting up demand among consumers. In a 2013 paper for Business Horizons, “Marketing Value and the Denial of Availability,” David Hannah and two fellow business professors at Simon Fraser University theorized how Apple’s secrecy benefits its product sales. “According to reactance theory, whenever free choice—for example, of goods or services—is limited or restricted, the need to retain freedoms makes humans desire them significantly more than previously, especially if marketers can convince people that those freedoms are important. Apple applies the principle very effectively.” Not only are product specifications and launch dates closely guarded secrets, the authors wrote, “the company also keeps supplies immediately post-launch artificially low.” You can’t know about it before it’s launched, and you still can’t get your hands on it once it’s available.

  So die-hard Apple fans turn to the live-stream or their Twitter feed to see the secrets of the new iPhone. That sense of revelation propels a sense of desire, which Apple exploits by introducing the new iPhone with highly regulated scarcity. Fans will “happily wait in line—often throughout the night—for stores to open in order to be among the first to purchase the new product, despite the obvious fact that it will be readily available in just a few weeks more.”

  That spectacle of lines of die-hard Apple fans stretching around city blocks of course further feeds the story about how in demand the iPhone is, which further feeds the gratification of all those who participate in the ritual of obtaining one.

  After the first iPhone began its ascent to most-profitable product, period, secrecy inside Apple naturally only increased in its wake. Employees who leaked details about upcoming products could be fired on the spot. Teams charged with a project Jobs deemed especially important would be made to operate in secrecy, even among their peers.

  Of all the complaints about working at Apple I gathered in the course of talking to the iPhone’s architects, its secrecy was at the top of the list—engineers and designers found it set up unnecessary divisions between employees who might otherwise have collaborated.

  Abroad, Jobs is said to have distributed false product schematics to Apple’s suppliers in an effort to locate leakers—if the fake product showed up on fan site, Jobs would know the source of the leak and fire the supplier.

  Tony Fadell, a senior vice president and once one of the company’s stars, told me that at times, the secrecy made working on the iPhone—which he was in charge of hardware for—next to impossible.

  “I saw the falling-out because of that, especially when it’s such an incredibly hard program, and we all had to be working together, but yet, we weren’t on the most critical pieces,” he says.

  That impulse to secrecy was transmitted to Steve’s peers. “It was fueled by not just Steve but others who had the power that Steve gave them, and they wanted to make sure they secured it at all times, and they would not necessarily tell us stuff. They would make us intentionally look bad, and point to us, and we couldn’t defend ourselves because we had no information.”

  Today, the company is much larger, and since Jobs’s passing,
it’s under the command of a CEO with a less paranoid style. As Apple’s supply chain has continued to expand, more leaks have dripped out, and Cook has shown less interest in punishing the leakers. “The leakers have gotten so much better over the years, there’s not much left in the way of mystery,” Spoonauer says, so when he comes to an Apple Event, “I’m more interested in how they’re going to spin those leaks.” So one might think that secrecy inside the company would fade as well. Apparently not.

  “It’s worse than ever,” Brian Huppi, the input engineer who helped conceive the original iPhone design paradigm, tells me. He went back to Apple after a few years’ hiatus and found that interdepartmental secrecy had reached new heights, before he left again.

  Even current Apple employees at just about every level of seniority chafed at its near-total nondisclosure policies when I managed to get through to them. Many that I reached out to told me that they’d love to be able to sit for an interview, would love to discuss their contributions publicly, but that, per company policy, they couldn’t talk.

  I did meet with a representative of iPhone PR at Apple’s HQ in Cupertino. “The only reason we’re even talking to you,” he said as we sat outside the cafeteria at a table in the middle of Infinite Loop, was that Apple was in the process of opening up. But it never really did.

  One result of all that secrecy is that it allows Apple to more tightly control its message and keep the focus expressly on the products and away from its more controversial practices—conditions in the factories that manufacture the phones, say, or its offshoring of $240 billion in tax havens in Ireland. Or even less controversial things, like the role a particular employee played in developing the iPhone.

  Apple has essentially cultivated a new set of norms among the public and the tech press—no access, no official comment, no transparency. So I called up the editor of the Atlantic’s tech section, Adrienne LaFrance, who had recently written a treatise on the neutering of the tech press. I wanted to hear how this Apple-led trend was affecting the public sphere.