I admit it. I left one cult to join another. That’s right, much to the displeasure of one particular friend, who hates Apple like Dawkins hates religion, I love all things Mac and most things Apple.
Today is the closest Macophiles get to Christmas in our cult. Steve Jobs delivers a keynote speech (more popularly known as the “stevenote“) at 10am PST, today, the first day of the WWDC - a developers’ event in which Jobs typically announces several products, including at least one magical new product which Macophiles know as “One More Thing”.
We speculate, but we just don’t know. We think it might be a 3G iPhone with more memory, GPS and location aware software, delivered to Regent Street in padlocked-until-Monday boxes, but we really have no idea.
What I know is this: Whatever I hear in the stevenote, I will probably want it with an intensity of desire that isn’t matched by that for any other product. It is marketing genius and doesn’t happen by accident.
You mightn’t be aware of the excitement these events generate. Hundreds of thousands of people, possibly millions, conspire to bring down Twitter and other services that struggle to deliver blow-by-blow accounts from the hall in which Jobs delivers his stevenote. Queues form outside Apple stores days before the event. Speculation reaches fever pitch. It’s amazing.
This kind of fervour isn’t reserved for WWDC either. In a show of commitment that makes queues for new game consoles look no more impressive than the disgruntled throng of teenagers outside an Indian “two schoolchildren at a time” corner shop, I was staggered recently to see a queue that encircled the entire block outside the Apple Store in Regent Street for the release of Apple’s OS X Leopard release. It was the longest London queue I’d ever seen. The only time I’d seen more people stand in line for the same thing was when over a million of us walked through London against the war in Iraq that the Crusader Blair had already committed to going into on behalf of his master George Bush.
It is one of life’s continuing ironies that the country that shoots up copies of the Qur’an, gangrapes Muslim girls whilst torching their families and defends apartheid whilst shouting “democracy” Orwell-style can also inspire such love and passion. That’s empire for you.
Go Steve! You know your customers. And you know that practically anything you announce tonight, I will crave beyond reason.
