notes.husk.org/likes images.

That new iPhone is great, in my opinion, but Apple’s marketing is falling apart. The copy, site, and photos for the new iPhone range from mediocre to awful. Apple has never been as flawless in marketing as people claim, but this goofy 1980s/1990s-style prose is insane! The page looks and reads like an old text-heavy magazine ad (via):

Look at how long that header is! It’s insane, this guy’s header:

iPhone 5 is made with a level of precision you’d expect from a finely crafted watch — not a smartphone.

So bad. The rhythm of that is vintage marketing; the CEO of my former company had a fondness for that meter, for that hoary old ad feel. It sucks, however; it is the husk of a dead style of rhetoric, the echo of cliché ads, cliché ad-men, and a cliché America which informed the style and tone of those marketing promises, and even their rhythm, and which no longer exists. Thus: this bad old ad copy reminds us of stock footage, old news broadcasts, the way clothes used to be cut, dated palettes.

Out of charity, I won’t dwell on how completely absurd it is that Apple wants to convey the build-quility of this device by comparing it to something —"a finely crafted watch"— which very few people own, which is a symbol typically of wealth and status, and which, above all, this very class of device has mostly obviated. They might as well compare it to the fit and finish of a telegraph.

Anyway: the entire iPhone 5 site is like that. Look at the Apple homepage! While failing, thanks to the rotation, to make iPhone looks impressively thin, it stills turns it enough that the page looks weirdly empty. And on the iPhone site itself, the main image, of two phones at a slight, mirroring angle, completely sucks.

Last thing: NO ONE MENTIONED THIS ON THEIR BLOG THAT I SAW AND THAT IS HOW YOU KNOW GRUBER ET ALIA ARE PHONING IT IN BECAUSE LOOK AT GREG JOSWIAK’S SHIRT I MEAN JOBS LET SCHILLER WEAR THOSE HAWAIIAN SHIRTS SO WHO KNOWS BUT IT’S TOUGH TO IMAGINE THIS BROWN VINYL-STRIPES THING GOING OUT IN THE PIPING DAYS OF JOLLY-OLD, INNIT?