from Hacker News

A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials

by lysozyme on 9/17/23, 4:26 PM with 136 comments

by Nition on 9/17/23, 9:50 PM
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.
by tptacek on 9/17/23, 6:32 PM
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!
by kazinator on 9/17/23, 9:31 PM
> 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.
by yjftsjthsd-h on 9/17/23, 4:44 PM
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.
by tardibear on 9/17/23, 4:34 PM
The title of the linked page is "A literary history of fake texts in Apple's marketing materials".
by twic on 9/17/23, 4:58 PM
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!".
by DHPersonal on 9/20/23, 4:26 PM
The direct and incredibly interconnected aspect of Apple’s marketing is incredibly interesting and alluring to me. I often find their presentations brewing a sense of loss or maybe envy because the people in their universe buying their products seem to have friends who care very specifically about each other and who are very involved with the interesting lives of the small friend group. The products Apple sells seem to offer up the chance to have relationships like those, even though in practice I can’t find anyone who wants to invest that fully into the very specific Apple method of social networking.
by 4oo4 on 9/17/23, 10:10 PM
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.
by Almondsetat on 9/17/23, 5:55 PM
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
by abruzzi on 9/17/23, 5:50 PM
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?
by sdwr on 9/17/23, 4:49 PM
> 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.
by xwdv on 9/17/23, 6:43 PM
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.
by in3d on 9/17/23, 7:57 PM
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.
by dools on 9/20/23, 1:28 PM
Whenever someone starts using Apple as an example of how we can all do better at marketing our startups I cringe.
And yet I obviously have so much to learn.
When tasked with creating a fake conversation for my own telecommunications app BenkoPhone whose primary point of difference is the ability to send and receive picture messages, I created a conversation that goes like this[0]:
[Contact Name: My Colleague]
Inbound message: [PHOTO OF KITTEN] Check out this cute kitten!
Outbound reply: That’s adorable now GET BACK TO WORK!!
Now I’m rethinking my whole strategy.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/au/app/benkophone/id1588846472
by CharlesW on 9/17/23, 4:40 PM
I'm surprised the author missed the most obvious weirdness: Every message ends with a punctuation mark.
by corbezzoli on 9/17/23, 5:07 PM
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.
by araes on 9/17/23, 11:15 PM
The article's funny, and kind of surreal read considering a dimension fading away while all the characters become cartoons and the landscape becomes vague. Have similar thoughts occasionally.
However, also creepy. Not sure if its the way humans have always written, that ChatAI got too good too fast, or that they all secretly had them all for years (Multiple massive AI releases in a year???, "had em all in a box in the back")
The 2nd image (with pair of images) on the Sharing Photos subsection [1] literally looks like StableDiffusion++. Somebody wrote two prompts, that had something like "Male with frizzy hair next to girl in pink shirt with glasses with brick building behind" and then it didn't care whether it was the same male in both, or what skin color.
Most text also seems weirdly similar to: Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra [2]
[1] https://maxread.substack.com/i/137044198/sharing-photographs...
[2] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03442.pdf
by hnburnsy on 9/17/23, 11:21 PM
Note that it is typically 9:41 AM or 10:09 AM [Watch] in the Apple Dimension.
by nxobject on 9/25/23, 6:58 AM
...even if the corpus is small, I think it's time to start training an LLM on these chats. I need to ask these aliens from Dimension Apple: what are their deepest thoughts and desires? Why do they do nothing by go on trips every weekend? Why are they the way they are?
by mannyv on 9/20/23, 5:24 PM
One really hilarious thing only Apple could do is have a ruling relationship of their fake people in messages/emails. Like "oh, baby is born", then "first day at school" a few years later, "diagnosed with cancer," etc.
It's a shame they didn't do this, especially for Johnny Appleseed. Or maybe they tried and got shot down.
by mproud on 9/20/23, 1:33 PM
The people who make these marketing materials often use people’s names they know of, and sometimes employ inside jokes, or more common ones even.
Apple had a page for an iOS release one year explaining new calendar features. On the page I saw a calendar event for name of a guy I personally knew who worked at Apple! It was a dentist appointment at 2:30.
by neilv on 9/17/23, 11:13 PM
Someone should go find earlier examples of this genre, in ads for consumer online services, as early as the 1980s.
by Apocryphon on 9/18/23, 4:14 AM
I still want to play the isometric CRPG featured in the page for UICollectionView:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uicollection...
by stephc_int13 on 9/20/23, 12:55 PM
As a rule of thumb, the apparent politeness of the language is inversely proportional to the potential violence of the culture it comes from.
by ikerrin1 on 9/20/23, 1:22 PM
Could the boss asking for photos be passive aggressively asking for proof to show why the people aren’t at work?
by EdwardDiego on 9/17/23, 8:21 PM
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.
by jl6 on 9/17/23, 6:51 PM
It’s even funnier if you’ve heard of John Bishop.
by throwawaaarrgh on 9/20/23, 1:38 PM
If you think about it, irony is often mean and disingenuous. I could see a dimension where irony is socially unacceptable, like cursing at children and old people. Or cursing in general.
by xg15 on 9/17/23, 8:25 PM
See also: Every Amazon commercial.
by lxgr on 9/17/23, 6:53 PM
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...
by derefr on 9/17/23, 7:20 PM
> 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.