Apple

As you know by now, Steve Jobs has passed away. I say this with confidence, although it is perhaps a little shortsighted; like (I suspect) so many others in the community of the tech-oriented internet, the news that he’d died seemed to instantly transmit itself into my consciousness. My barrier between in person and digital interfaces really is that thin.

I wrote on Twitter that Steve Jobs had a vision of the world that made me believe passion can exist and be cherished within business. That’s really what I understood about him, from an outside perspective: that he was passionate, that he was fanatical, and that he was successful. Immensely so.

Rest in peace, Steve.

My first job out of college was as a Mac Specialist at the Apple Store in Soho. What I remember most about that job was the company’s brand, the way it permeated every surface and every decision and every piece of corporate culture that touched its employees. That job is really where I cut my teeth on the idea of branding, that companies have stories and characters the way that people do, that those stories can be shaped, and that the process and impact of doing so is completely fascinating.

Last night I did a consultation with Zac’s new company on developing language to communicate their brand identity. I put the founders in a circle and made them talk about values, and themselves. And it was fun, incredibly fun. So fun that this morning I started researching if there is a way to get a graduate degree in branding. Because that’s how my mind works: if it’s fun it could be a career, and if it’s a career then someone is teaching how to do it. I realize this doesn’t always hold up, but there you go.

It’s hard to separate Steve Jobs from Apple, so intricately is he linked to the Apple brand. Thankfully it’s not as hard to separate my genuine sadness and sympathy for his family from the anger I’m currently dealing with in regards to the newest Apple release. Someone who made an immense impact upon my world and circles has died, and that is sad. And Apple has released Siri, their new voice-activated “personal assistant” program, and the way they handled the product’s branding fills me with frustration.

My issue with Siri, in brief, is that apparently no one on the Apple branding team stopped to think that it might be a wee bit problematic to release a personal assistant application with a female name, and to advertise it exclusively with a female voice. Skimming the Twitter chatter during the release quickly confirmed for me that while Apple may not be explicitly gendering the product as female, its users will. Yes, this is precisely what we need: the institutionalized sexism of human-to-human interactions duplicated in human-to-robot interactions.

This is a great example of a time when my first thought is that I’m angry, and my second thought is that I may be overreacting. Maybe I am being a crazy feminist, my contradictory brain says. Maybe it’s not such a big deal. Maybe it was too expensive to release multiple voices. Maybe they just weren’t thinking.

And then I’m angry again, because I know the Apple brand, and I can tell that they think about details obsessively, and that they do everything consciously. So I have to assume that a group of creatives sat around a table and came up with this product, language and branding concept. In addition, I have to assume that someone along the way probably said, “Hey, do you think this might be sexist?” and that someone at Apple with the authority to approve branding decisions responded with “No.” Or maybe, “A little bit, but that’s really not the point.” Or even, “I think that may be overly sensitive.”

That makes me angry, Apple. The reality is that I am a woman, and I am a lover of Apple products, and the very first thing I thought as I watched the coverage of the release of Siri was that it was a shitty move to make the application implicitly female-gendered. Not that it was cool, or shiny, or that I wanted to get my hands on it right this very instant; no. I thought, “I hope people hold off for a little while before they start making terrible secretary jokes.”

I expected better, Apple. Branding fail.