antipopper

Here’s where I admit my bizarre spiral into consumer electronics addiction. My new iPod never leaves my person, and neither does my Sony Z1 camera.

A commodity appears at first sight, a very trivial thing and easily understood. It’s analysis shows that it is in reality, a very queer thing…
– Marx, Capital

Lena and I just had an almost religious consumer electronics experience. Walking down the road, she grips my arm suddenly. “Oh. My. God.” There is a new AppleCentre on the other side of the road. We enter, into a crystal wonderland of Quartz Extreme, Exposé and anodised aluminium. If it’s possible, Apple have reached a new plateau of visual fetishism with their new gear, to the point where they’re almost in the same league as prestige car manufacturers rather than in a niche with Sony. I don’t think this has been strictly true before, but the use of so much metal — even the latest aluminium PowerBooks’ keyboards have a metallic finish — has now reached a critical mass.

I wouldn’t underestimate this apparently superficial change in industrial design direction. My cousin’s girlfriend was once a colour consultant for Apple, and showed us how she chose the colours for the iMac when we visited them in San Francisco a few years ago: there were strange sculptures — tangled extrusions of coloured, translucent plastic — in her room, a telling trace of the industrial design process. Colourful plastic was a revival of the sexy-yet-populist “computer for the rest of us” ideology that Jobs had revived at Apple, but now the contradictions seem to have been erased — it’s now all BMW.