These vacant and showy baubles are unworthy of Apple's lineage
I'm a bit of an ol' codger now, but one of the advantages of packing on the years, is that you can moan about modern stuff shamelessly and with abandon. So today I'm going to lift my gaze from the morning telly, put down the brandy, adjust my blanket, and wag my crooked finger at the latest gorgeous-looking product from Apple: the Airpods Max over-ear headphones.
You see a long time ago (41 years), in a land far far away (apartheid-era South Africa), began an adventure that was to be lasting. This tech Methuselah came across what was then, in that sanctions-riddled realm cut off from the civilised world, a treasure of considerable rarity: an Apple II computer.
My uncle Philippe Jaques, an eminent ENT specialist in Johannesburg (who would, to his credit, spend most of the latter years of his career treating black gold miners, the air pressure from whose daily trips 4km down into the earth would cause damage to their ears), had imported the machine from America, and I had the opportunity as a young ten-year old to have fairly regular access to it when I visited my cousins in the quietly sunny and leafy suburb of Sandton. What a wondrous machine this was! The sloping keyboard, the dual disk drives, the colour, yes colour monitor. Perhaps what sticks most in my memory is the sheer quality of the thing - the plastics were thick and lustrous, an off-grey beige which would later be copied by IBM for its providential 8088 PC, and the rainbow apple logo had a sci-fi inspired font (the 70s were a golden age for graphic design). Like Bender it sported the legendary Motorola 6502. Most importantly it did stuff I could only dream of. Stuff I had only seen in movies. It looked to me like the work of extra-terrestrial aesthetic and technical talent and passion. My Apple adventure had begun.
And certainly nor did it end there. By 1991 I had a degree in computer science and was writing about tech as a journalist for Systems Publishers in Johannesburg. This medium-sized firm was run by the visionary Terry Murphy and his brilliant son Niall (founder of The Cloud - your friendly pub wifi, amongst many other startups), who were part of a small tech nomenclatura in the South Africa, and ran the artistic and layout side of the publishing business on several, you guessed it, ultra-expensive Macintosh IIs with huge resolution CRT screens, running QuarkXpress. This firm was way ahead of its competition in layout and design, and that was largely thanks to the quality of the equipment, far in advance of what anything a mere PC could muster. I spent many a long night using these futuristic and inspiring machines to produce our pages, ensuring that the gruff printing men who ran our Heidelberg Press (24/7 because capital outlay and high interest rates), got their Linotype positives on time.
Apple would then lose its way for about a decade as the finance people took over from Steve Jobs (take note, Intel, Boeing), but that didn't stop me from being one of the only students on INSEAD campus in 1996 to rock a Mac - everyone else choosing PCs. But Steve Jobs came back and fired off a string of imaginative products in the early 2000s, and when the first iMac came out sporting an Intel chip, I bought three of them on launch day (my family got spoiled).
Since the meteoric rise of the iPhone, I'll admit to having taken a step back from Apple. The tech snob that I am doesn't like being part of an amorphous crowd, and I am today a haughty power-user of Ubuntu Linux on that other legendary machine, the IBM (now Lenovo) Thinkpad, a satisfyingly industrial no-nonsense device. However that doesn't stop me from admiring the company's incredible portfolio of risk-taking products, both old, and recent. Until now.
These headphones don't do any risk taking. They don't advance the sonic state of the art. They don't change the interface (ipod-style). They don't do anything that hasn't been done before. All they do, is apply the luxury-goods play book to an otherwise entirely forgettable product. A sorry attempt just to cash in.
And I use the term "risk-taking", because it verily describes almost every product line that Apple has launched in the past 40 years. Every category Apple has entered was with a product that could easily have failed, because it was risky. Risky, but brilliantly executed. This product is just execution. No risk. No inspiration.
There's even something slightly discomfiting even about the sheer aesthetic perfection of the things. The sense that an army expensive talent has spent man-decades honing every aspect of its "look", from the new age pastel shades of the flawlessly anodised aluminium, to the glide-smooth movement of the stainless steel band slider, right down to the shape of the earcups, reminiscent of some famous scandinavian roundabout I remember seeing but can't find. It's almost too much. There's something of a missing soul.
Actually maybe it's that they're too Scandinavian. Too clean? Neo-Bang-and-Olufsen and we all know how cringeworthy that fallen brand's Blair-era products now look.
Or perhaps it's the influence of all those French guys Tim Cook and Jony Ive surrounded themselves with (with apologies to my French mother) when they launched the Apple Watch (did you know that the most valuable company in Europe, by far, is that execrable luxury products glutton, LVMH?). France was historically the Apple Mac's biggest non-US market and the country has had historical influence on the company. Maybe Apple has gone full-Hermès.
Malgré M1, this product represents the fading of Apple's tech soul, a sellout to luxury consumerism. Anybody who's been through the dreary sameness of every frigid steel-and-glass airport labyrinth on earth, inevitably lined with miles of the same crass gold plated duty free "luxury retail outlets", or indeed, anybody who has been to the entire city of Dubai, knows what I'm talking about. Is that what Apple is now? That's what these headphones are....
Lest anybody think this is a rant against current times, or the wealthy, a lamentation for some mythical ancien regime, let me assure you - I admire most of Apple's recent products. The Apple watch was not only beautiful, but was a technical marvel, and still is (a 4g phone in a watch?! Now where's my flying car?). It was also risky. Ditto the latest in Airpods. I've never had a problem with Apple, or anyone, charging large amounts of money for inspired things. If I had the means, I'd be bidding for fine art and antiques.
But with these headphones, Apple has lost something. Beyerdynamic's DT100 and their successors, or even David Clark headsets with their whiff of Vietnam and the early days of aviation (pity they don't make music devices), have much more cred. That poncey "influencers" will be all over these Apple Headphones in their sorry Instagram exhibitions, should be all you need to know. Come on Apple. More M1, less Headphone.
Now where was that brandy?