Macworld begins tomorrow, and the blogosphere is buzzing about the potential contents of Steve Jobs’ keynote, which last year gave us the announcement of iPhone - arguably one of the biggest unveilings in tech in all of 2007.
The big buzz this year is about a product being called MacBook Air, which is allegedly a small, ultraportable laptop, perhaps with WiMax capability and other cool stuff. Support for this rumor has come from all the typical places: spyshots (likely Photoshopped), logs from Adium (likely fake), and, especially, photographs of some of the banners now adorning San Francisco’s Moscone Center that read “2008. There’s something in the air.”
Now, I don’t have any inside information, but I can tell you that the chances this computer (if it exists) will be called MacBook Air are really slim.
My justification for this assertion: the very slogan that people claim supports the name actually totally eliminates it as a possibility, unless Apple’s graphic design people fell asleep and didn’t realize that they were putting the name of a product inside a banner designed to act as a teaser for the product announcements. There is no way this would fly. For branding purposes, this is a total no-no. You can’t use a non-proper-noun (air) to suggest a proper noun (Air). Just wrong. What kind of teaser is that?
Could you imagine such idiocy for any other product? It’s just unbelievably stupid - even if set beautifully in Myriad Pro Light (Myriad being my second-favorite typeface after Helvetica).
Hmm...I wonder what Apple is announcing this year. Maybe something called MacBook iPhone? The banner seems to support this hypothesis, see, because it says iPhone.
We’ll see tomorrow at noon EST. If there is indeed a MacBook Air, I’ll eat my shorts.
And then I’ll buy one.
14 January 2008
MacBook Air? Spare Me.
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4 comments:
haha. you've got some explaining to do now. And eat your shorts. I want to see that.
Well, I stand by my assertion that the chances it'd be called Air were really slim. By which, of course, I meant that the machine itself would be slim. This is to say that well, uh, I was mistaken.
But boy if that thing doesn't look freaking awesome, I don't know what does.
I'll post the video of the short-eating on YouTube tonight.
Kevin,
Though you mis-called this one, I respect your willingness to think and then put your thoughts out there.
Would you expand a bit on why you feel it is a "no-no" to have alluded to the product name in the teaser? I would like to hear more of your thinking...
Look forward—as I know we all do—to the YouTube vid!
Gerry, thanks for your comment. I can't always be right, and I'm cool with that.
Even though the MacBook Air looks awesome (and I don't hate the name like some other bloggers), I think making the teaser so explicit wasn't the best move. I'll go more in detail in a later post maybe, because it'd be interesting but basically I think it's problematic because it dilutes the 'Air' brand by using it as a non-proper noun. The slogan used was great as a general teaser of the vastly wireless direction of all of Apple's announcements (TV, movie rentals, etc) but doesn't work when applied to the Air. Asking the question, "What is in the air?" leads to possible answers of music, movies, tv, email, backup, etc. But somehow 'a computer - a floating computer is in the air' doesn't work.
Blah blah blah. :) It looks amazing. No complaints here, and I am probably not qualified to school Apple's marketers and PR team. Clearly they seem to know what they're doing.
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