As he lay dying on his deathbed – surely, the best place to be lying if you are, indeed, dying – Steve Jobs beckoned Tim Cook over for one, final piece of sound business advice.
“Remember the Shoe Event Horizon.”
Then, he pegged it, leaving Tim to wonder if he’d misheard.
For those of a certain age and comedy sci-fi bent, the Shoe Event Horizon is one of the more… prescient bits of economic foreshadowing. A stagnant, declining world inevitably turns towards consumerism and ‘retail therapy’, wherein we buy things we don’t really need but which give us some momentary sensory pleasure to distract us from our travails, rather than actually trying to fix them.
The one course of action being obviously much easier than the other.
It is into this world that the latest iPhone launches itself. The battery is slightly better. The cameras also, and arranged slightly differently. Nothing earth-shatteringly new at all.
And yet, people rush out to replaced their outmoded, outdated iPhone 12s because guess what? The iPhone 13 comes in different colours! Instead of last year’s appallingly stone-age white we now have Starlight. Pacific Blue has been replaced with Sierra Blue. Purple and green are so 2020.
What’s even stranger is that these same people then also rush out to buy a case, so that you pretty much can’t see the colour anyway.
While Douglas Adams might have created the Shoe Event Horizon as parody rather than prediction, it does go to show how the need to create value for a company depends on creating desire for that company’s products. A minor tweak here and there, change the colours slightly and you’re done.
Apple (and Samsung for that matter) could quite easily have held off for one year and launched something spectacular in 2022 but where’s the profit… er, I mean fun, in that?