The One Device

by Brian Merchant

  “There gets to be this danger of when people expect the tech companies to not give you on-record interviews or not to ever comment, then you slowly get to this place where it’s not clear to me always that journalists are really doggedly going after information—assuming, often correctly, that they’re not going to get it,” she says. So by denying journalists access for so long, Apple (and other increasingly secretive tech companies) trained them to accept the official line or the details doled out at the public-facing launch events.

  “Everyone on all sides is getting too comfortable with this arrangement,” she says. “If you look at the ecosystem of tech coverage, how much is dedicated to the evaluation of a product versus the practices of the company?” she says. It has positioned the product as the center of its universe. It exists almost apart from the world of workers, of developers, of users, of business.

  So how do you crack the code? “Even if the answer is no every single time, you have to keep trying,” she says.

  So I did.

  The Register, a UK-based tech pub known for its strident, critical views of the industry, ran a funny story detailing its employees’ efforts to obtain an invite to the iPhone 7 Apple Event. They installed an email tracker to see if Apple’s press folks were in fact reading their entreaties. It turned out they were. (They didn’t get in.)

  So I decided to do the same. Apple hadn’t responded to my latest futile request for interviews for months. So, I installed an email tracker made by a company called Streak, and I sent a fresh query. By the end of the day, it had been read on three different devices, presumably by three different people. I never heard back. I tried again a week later, with the same result. Nice.

  Eventually, I decided to cut out the middle man and write directly to Tim Cook. You never know, right? Jobs was famous for randomly responding to notes in his in-box, and Cook had done the same once or twice.

  I sent Tim Cook an email requesting an interview on August 31, 2016. That’s when things got interesting. The tracking software I installed works by loading a tiny, transparent 1x1 pixel into an email message. When it’s opened, the image pings the server it came from with data that includes the time and location that the email was opened as well as the kind of device used to open it.

  That was the weird thing. When Tim Cook opened my email, the software showed me what kind of device he’d opened it on: A Windows desktop computer.

  That couldn’t be right. I emailed Streak to ask how accurate that part of the service was. Their support team told me, “If it has specific device data: Very accurate.” I sent a follow-up email to Cook. Once again, it was opened—on a Windows desktop computer.

  Was Tim Cook using a PC? Or was whoever was sorting through his emails? Either possibility seemed odd.

  Apparently, the email I sent to Cook made its way to Apple PR; my Hail Mary had been hailed. I asked the PR rep if Tim Cook had actually opened my email. “Yes,” she said, “he read it and forwarded it on.”

  Okay, then. A couple weeks later, I sent one more follow-up. It was opened, again, on a Windows desktop computer. He never did write back.

  Okay, okay. So we have a company that has long put an emphasis on extreme secrecy, giving rise to media that feverishly reports on anything and everything Apple-related, giving rise to a core of user-consumers awaiting the latest release. Sounds like the groundwork has been laid for a well-honed message—the entry of a definitive voice that can correct the record once and for all and excite the masses anew.

  And so we get the biggest public displays that Apple offers—the invitation-only, tech-demo spectacle of the storied Apple Event.

  These Stevenotes aren’t a novel format. Alexander Graham Bell, recall, went on tours and put on shows in exhibition halls and convention centers across the Eastern Seaboard to demonstrate his new telephone.

  But the most famous tech demo of all was the one that may have most informed Jobs’s style.

  In 1968, an idealistic computer scientist named Doug Engelbart brought together hundreds of interested industry onlookers at the San Francisco Civic Center—the same civic center where the iPhone 7 demo was made nearly forty years later—and introduced a handful of technologies that would form the foundational DNA of modern personal computing.

  Not only did Engelbart show off publicly a number of inventions like the mouse, keypads, keyboards, word processors, hypertext, videoconferencing, and windows, he showed them off by using them in real time.

  The tech journalist Steven Levy would call it “the mother of all demos,” and the name stuck.

  A video feed shared the programs and technologies being demoed onscreen. It was a far cry from the more polished product launches Jobs would become famous for decades later; Engelbart broadcast his own head in the frame as, over the course of an hour and a half, he displayed new feats of computing and made delightfully odd quips and self-interruptions.

  “As windows open and shut, and their contents reshuffled, the audience stared into the maw of cyberspace,” Levy writes. “Engelbart, with a no-hands mike, talked them through, a calming voice from Mission Control as the truly final frontier whizzed before their eyes. Not only was the future explained, it was there.” The model for today’s tech-industry keynote presentations was forged, almost instantly; the presentation style was perhaps not as influential as the technologies presented, but they were closely intertwined.

  Through his suite of inventions, which were further developed at Xerox PARC—yes, PARC again—Engelbart laid the foundation of modern computing. But he insisted that PCs were antisocial and counterintuitive; his dream was augmenting the human intellect through collaboration. He imagined people logging on to the same system to share information to improve their understanding of the world and its increasingly complex problems. He advocated something a lot like the modern internet, social networking, and a mode of computing that, through the smartphone, has indeed begun the supplanting of the PC as the primary way we most often trade information.

  Though Engelbart’s mother of all demos became legendary among the computer crowd, it was an outsider, it seems, who would turn Steve on to the format he later became famous for. Apple expert Leander Kahney says that Jobs’s keynotes were the product of CEO John Sculley: “A marketing expert, he envisioned the product announcements as ‘news theater,’ a show put on for the press. The idea was to stage an event that the media would treat as news, generating headlines for whatever product was introduced. News stories, of course, are the most valuable advertising there is.” Sculley thought that entertaining a crowd should be the priority, so product demos should be “like staging a performance,” he wrote in his autobiography, Odyssey. “The way to motivate people is to get them interested in your product, to entertain them, and to turn your product into an incredibly important event.”

  Combining exciting new technologies with theater has become a uniquely American art form, and Apple has perfected it. It taps directly into what the historian David Nye calls “the American technological sublime”—the awe people feel at witnessing an impressive new leap in technology. Although America is a diverse nation, fragmented in religious belief and cultural values, its citizens have long found common ground, Nye argues, in the uniting power of an impressive new technological feat. The Hoover Dam, the lightbulb, the atomic bomb. We find solidarity in the language of areligious, asexual progress.

  And it works. You feel it at the civic center as tech executives walk onstage brandishing the latest world-changing gadget. And the secrecy generated beforehand, the sense that you’re being allowed a peek under the hood is—undeniably—a little bit thrilling.

  But as gadget-review editor Mark Spoonauer reminds me, “There are journalists who actually try to stay away from the ‘reality distortion field,’ because what you don’t want to do is get caught up in the excitement. Because you have to be objective.”

  It’s just really hard to do after Apple delivers you the sublime.

  After the presentation, which con
cluded with a performance by the Australian pop singer Sia, who stood motionless in a giant wig and sang her hits while a kid bounced around and did cartwheels, the press is funneled into a room, stage right, that resembles a miniature version of an Apple Store—a month into the future, when the products just announced onstage will be available. We all get our first shot at handling, swiping, and snapping photos with the iPhone 7. I tried on the new AirPods—the new wireless earbuds, which, in my head, I could not refrain from thinking of as Airbuds—and piped in some Apple-sanctioned tunes.

  Bloggers and news crews were angled everywhere, filming stand-ups in front of the products, rattling off first reactions. Others were jotting down notes. There must have been a hundred blog posts filed from the premises that hour. More people kept cycling in, and the room seemed increasingly crowded. There were lots of people taking photos of the iPhones with their iPhones, and people like me, using their iPhones to take photos of the people taking photos of iPhones with their iPhones.

  It was a curious simulacrum; an Apple Store turned into a showroom, a showroom of a showroom. The space designed into synonymity with modern retail done up as a celebrity. This is what these products would look like out in the wild. And so they would.

  Weeks later, on the day the iPhone 7 was slated to launch at retail stores around the nation, I set out to see the results of that marketing machinery in action. I made my pilgrimage to one of the first Apple Stores. This location in the Glendale Galleria outside of Los Angeles, along with the store in Tysons Corner Center in Virginia, were the first to open, on May 19, 2001. I was meeting a friend, Jona Bechtolt, a die-hard Apple fan—he’s even got the Apple logo tattooed on his leg—who was planning on upgrading to a 7 that day. I wanted to see if crowds still turned out in droves, if those famous lines would stretch on, nearly ten years after the 2007 iPhone inspired the first queues to became media sensations.

  Short answer: Yep.

  The line stretched out across the entryway, through the central corridor, and around the corner here on the second story of this indoor mall. It certainly wasn’t the size of the epic, block-long lines of yore; I counted forty people. Still, that was a lot for an iPhone model that a lot of the press had written off as a nonessential upgrade.

  As soon as I walked up, I heard the sound of three-quarter-hearted, corporate-colored cheering. The doors had just opened, and, as is customary for Apple Stores on launch day, the employees line up and applaud the customers who were dedicated enough to show up hours early, or even spend the night. A handful had.

  “I do it every year,” a man named John said with a smile, and almost a shrug. The crowd was a mix of die-hard enthusiasts who still enjoyed the ritual of waiting outside overnight to be among the first to own the latest iPhone even if it wasn’t necessary, and mini-entrepreneurs who planned on buying the maximum allotted number and reselling them to friends and on eBay while supply was still constrained and the phones were in high demand, hoping, as in years past, that phones would sell out for a couple weeks. “I’m gonna buy eight, sell two to my friends, and do eBay for the rest,” one woman told me. “I take a little on top.”

  This year, the jet-black phone (a new color) and the 7 Plus (the larger model with a new dual camera) both sold out early. “Selling out” is part of the dance. The first iPhone was “sold out” for the first couple months after it went on sale in 2007, and we’ll never know if that was due to a legitimate supply shortage. That does seem plausible, given the rush involved in getting it out. But for later models, Apple’s finely tuned supply-chain and its sway over suppliers means that most scarcity in subsequent launches is plausibly artificially generated by Apple.

  “It’s not just design, it’s just not the iPhone, it’s not just the marketing,” Bill Buxton says. It’s also about maintaining supply-chain flexibility and inflating demand by creating the impression of scarcity. It’s about making the iPhone feel “like the Cabbage Patch doll, everybody is running out to get one and buying them because they were afraid that they were going to be out of stock and they needed to give one to somebody for Christmas. I do not know a single person, I challenge you to find a single person, who despite that feeding frenzy could not find one.” Which is a good point. We know now that Apple’s suppliers can manufacture half a million phones in a day and ship them to the U.S. in another one. Believing that the most anticipated new color of the new model has sold out requires a suspension of disbelief.

  “It’s completely manufactured by one of the most brilliant marketing teams,” Buxton says. “They designed the production, supply chain, and everything. So with the greatest tradition of Spinal Tap, if needed, they could turn the volume up to eleven to meet demand.”

  Anyway, I was surprised—in 2016, I hadn’t expected to find anyone camped out or willing to wait in line for hours, given the tenor of the conversation around the iPhone 7, which hadn’t generated as much excitement as previous models. But there they were, spending the better part of a day outside an Apple Store.

  There are worse places to be. Apple’s immaculately designed product hubs are the envy of retail stores around the world. Intended, it is said, to resemble the long wooden tables used in Jony Ive’s Industrial Design Lab, with considerable input from Jobs, who holds a patent on the glass staircases, Apple Stores began opening in the early aughts. Initially opposed by the board, they’ve proven to be a sales behemoth.

  In 2015, they were the most profitable per square foot of any retail operation in the nation by a massive margin; the stores pulled in $5,546 per square foot. With two-thirds of all Apple revenues generated by iPhones, that’s a lot of hocked handsets.

  And the Geniuses and Specialists doing the hocking make up a large number Apple’s employees. Across 265 U.S. stores, Apple says it has thirty thousand retail employees. As of 2015, that was nearly half of the company’s total U.S. workforce. Given the high volume of sales and the immense success of the retail spaces, these are some of the most productive retail workers in the nation.

  In 2011, the Apple analyst Horace Dediu broke down the numbers in an attempt to calculate just how productive. He found that, on average, each employee at a U.S. Apple Store generated $481,000 in 2010 and was on track to do roughly the same in 2011. That’s nearly four times as much as employees made for JC Penney, he noted. Average employees served six customers an hour and generated about $278 per hour.

  Apple retail employees made from nine to fifteen dollars an hour and received no commission for those sales. While that’s well above the minimum wage, the company’s skyward profits put the relatively low wages into stark contrast. Apple had no trouble attracting employees; the iPod and then the iPhone had made Apple popular among precisely the young-skewing set that was ideal for the company, enough so that it would attract criticism for resembling a cult. But it was developing a retention problem, due in part to the low-end, commission-free wages.

  As a 2012 New York Times headline put it, “Apple’s Retail Army, Long on Loyalty but Short on Pay.” Health benefits were available only to full-time employees, and the advancement structure was arcane. Tensions began to rise inside the perpetually optimistic-beaming company.

  The retail stores were designed to be beautifully stark tech sanctums, places that would inspire a little awe in consumers and cast Apple products as the tools of the future. And the enthusiastic Geniuses and Specialists were tireless Apple ambassadors, instrumental in extending its message to consumers, in creating an environment where consumers would be thrilled to participate in that future and buy new iPhones. They also had to educate new Apple gadget owners, diagnose problems with existing products, fix them if possible, and tend to the more mundane demands of retail. It’s hard work, in other words. And behind the scenes, there is a human cost to the carefully constructed retail ritual.

  One employee, a part-time Specialist at Apple’s flagship San Francisco store, decided to make a stand.

  “As much as we helped Apple to be a really cool place to come in and
shop for things, we wanted it to be a fun and enjoyable place to work,” Cory Moll tells me. “And it was becoming less of that.” Moll had been working for Apple since 2007; he started at the Madison store in Wisconsin, where he was from. In 2010, he transferred to the flagship Apple Store in downtown San Francisco. He’s a die-hard Apple fan; he tells me he can’t wait to get the iPhone 7 and is considering jet-black but was worried it’d scuff up.

  And he sighs, just thinking aloud about the incoming rush (we spoke the week before the 7 was set to hit stores). “That’s going to be a whole lot of crazy, happy fun. I miss being a part of that,” he says. “Launch days—iPhones are always the biggest. Any Mac updates, people come in for that. But the iPhone was where it’s at.”

  But after being at Apple for a few years, and working at its flagship San Francisco store, he began to see some systemic problems.

  “Pay was an issue,” he says. “Compared to other companies in other regions, for as long as we’d been there, only seeing raises of one, two, three percent, that’s a small number.” And it didn’t seem to reflect the employees’ expertise and skill set, the familiarity with the products, with Apple culture, the salesmanship. “We all had developed a strong skill set and knowledge base,” he says, so “making twelve dollars an hour on top of not having any benefits, that’s kind of saying, ‘Hey, you’re working for one of the top companies in the world, and you’re barely making minimum wage, and if you get sick, well, screw you.’”

  There was no mechanism to discuss promotions, and management would schedule part-time workers to do full-time weeks without offering them the status change that would let them qualify for benefits. When Moll or his co-workers asked about the longer hours, management would simply cut them. Moll alleges that practices like that could be violating labor law, by misclassifying workers.