AppleDuds acquired in hostile-but-polite takeover

This is a tumultuous time in the news business. Legendary papers are failing, and news services are being gobbled up by media conglomerates. AppleDuds is not immune to this trend. As you may have heard, last week we were acquired with only slight hostility by an international media company based in northeastern Canada. Well-known in the publishing industry as “The Shady Lady,” the Mountebank Company is publisher of 18 news sites, including flimflamworld.com, deceitanddeception.com and scoopertino.com.

Effective immediately, AppleDuds.com will become a part of Scoopertino.com. Be assured that our complete lack of integrity will be maintained, and we will never be forced to accept reality.

Please join us at our new home at Scoopertino.com.

Blinded By Love

Recently, a couple walked into NY’s Fifth Avenue Apple Store, priest in tow, and got married on the spot. While most saw wackiness, one up-and-comer in the Apple retail group saw dollar signs. After all, weddings draw guests, and the numbers prove that three out of every ten Apple Store guests make a purchase. So it was that Apple reached out to churches, synagogues and mosques to find Mac-loving clergymen to staff the Genius Bar. During a one-week test at the Apple Store in Alpharetta, GA, that ever-bustling counter was re-christened Genius Bar + Love. The sign-up procedure was revised so customers could schedule appointments online for repairs, weddings or if need be, both. In the end, it was proven that the love-enhanced Genius Bar could indeed generate more store traffic — but the rice was simply too difficult to remove from the keyboards. Another dubious experiment concluded. Sharing the love at apple.com >

Burlap Fifth Avenue

By all reports, the Apple Stores are setting records around the world. But as the global economy reeled in early 2009, someone pressed the Uh-Oh button in Apple’s Retail group. Rich People, traditionally second only to Very Rich People as frequent Apple buyers, had slipped to the #3 spot, well below Moderately Rich People. In a hurriedly called meeting, Apple’s head of Retail, Ron Johnson, ruled that Apple should downscale some of its more ostentatious stores. The super-cool Apple Store Fifth Avenue was earmarked for a makeover. Sticking to Apple’s impossibly high standards, Ron conducted a global search for exactly the right material, and finally settled on a specially-made, large-weave variant of burlap manufactured only in Guatamala. Happily, the idea never got past the “artist’s conception” stage, as the economy began to recover and Rich People came to their senses. But there’s a warehouse outside of Cupertino currently housing 10,415 square yards of Guatamalan burlap. Buy some burlap >

Chasing The Beatles

Everyone wishes the Beatles would bring their music to iTunes. Nobody more than Steve Jobs, who has lived The Beatles since high school. He’s been known to unveil new products at board meetings with a devilish grin and a little a-capella “You say you want a revolution, well you know, we all want to change the world…” He’s tried everything in the book to lure The Beatles, but nothing more outlandish than the stunt he pulled in 2008. Believing it would be the highest possible compliment to The Beatles to mix his favorite Beatles tunes with his own vocal stylings, Steve booked himself into a famous Bay Area studio. There, he tortured the staff for 45 days, 32 of which were spent on I Am The Walrus alone. The sound engineer recalls the feeling of dread when Steve walked in on day #1, greeting all with an uncomfortably happy “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.” Needless to say, it didn’t go well. In the end, Steve emerged with a very expensive party favor and the lads from Liverpool remained as elusive as ever. Yoko is perplexed >

Pope Rock

The iPod Silhouette campaign is one of Apple’s greatest advertising moments. But for one week in October 2006, it nearly crashed and burned. At a time when the campaign was in need of “freshening,” Steve Jobs sent a four-word message to his marketing group: Get me the Pope. At first, it was believed he was simply asking for a personal audience. But it soon became clear that Steve had woken up with Pope Benedict XVI on his mind, and, frighteningly, had imagined him as part of the iPod campaign. A feeler was sent out, but the Pope expressed polite regrets. That didn’t stop Steve from having a specially designed PopePod sent to the reluctant Pontiff as an offering, but still no interest. Two staffers were ultimately let go as a result of their inability to seduce the Pope. Tempers flare inside Apple >

The Connery Fiasco

It was just two weeks before iMac’s first Christmas in 1998 when slowing holiday sales rang the alarm at Apple. Steve Jobs, known to be enamored of James Bond (he’d originally wanted to sub-brand the new computer “Mac 007”), instructed his agency to begin work on a Sean Connery ad — even though the Connery contract had not yet been signed. Talks ultimately stalled and Apple was left holding this beauty. Due to a miscommunication, it actually ran once in a local Milwaukee newspaper. Sean’s letter to Steve >

Power Mac G4 Trapezoid

It was in 2000 that Apple decided to wedge a new model between the consumer iMac and the high-end Mac Pro. Apple’s chief designer Jony Ive, speaking recently at a British design college, revealed that the Power Mac G4 Cube was not Apple’s first choice. “The cube is actually a cold design by nature, with its angular, stand-offish shape,” he said. “I had long wondered why no computer maker had ever experimented with the warmer trapezoid form. Visually it’s more inviting, almost like a ‘cup’ — something you fill with computery goodness, then savor sip by sip. It’s quite elegant.” Alluring as the shape might have been, manufacturing issues forced Apple to take the more expected cube approach. Jony laments, “The Power Mac G4 Cube was one of our biggest failures, and that’s a painful memory. I have no doubt we’d all be happily working on trapezoids today, had it not been for an ill-equipped factory in Shanghai.”

Wink Different

Apple’s famous Think different campaign was actually a “fix” to a very unusual problem. It started a month earlier when Phil Schiller sprang his Wink different concept on an obviously weary marketing group. He argued that at this low point in Apple history, Mac owners were few in number — almost a secret society — who often exchanged knowing winks at social events and technology conferences. He believed Apple customers would take a celebrity’s wink as a personal invitation to “join the club.” Never mind that most of the celebrities were dead. Still, Steve Jobs ate it up. The agency jumped into action retouching a number of Wink different ads with varying degrees of success. Only when the celebrities’ estates promised to litigate vigorously at even the slightest hint of a wink did Steve press the agency for an alternate solution. The pressure was beyond intense, with a print deadline only three days away. “Think, people,” he exhorted them, “think!” It was then that the light bulb went off. The rest is history.

Beatnik Lisa

Lisa was an entirely new idea in computing. No one had ever seen anything like it — so the advertising posed a tremendous challenge to the agency. Before the Kevin Costner commercial, before any of the Lisa ads we’ve seen, ad legend Lee Clow reached into his own beatnik past to create this masterpiece. “This ad has to speak the language of our customers,” Clow told his creative team, “and our customers are really hip to this trip.” Unfortunately, Steve Jobs was not. In fact, those who were present describe the battle over this ad as all-out war. It was Steve the hippie vs. Lee the beatnik. Two totally incompatible philosophies. Guess who won. Clow’s beatnik history >

Running Out Of Cats

Mac OS X has always had fun names. Following the first version in 2001 (code-named Cheetah), we’ve seen Jaguar, Panther, Tiger and Leopard. But what next? It turned out to be a real challenge, even for a company as creative as Apple. An emergency internal meeting concluded that, due to the depletion of available feline names, only four options remained: (1) Go with the “not really new, but new enough” variant, Snow Leopard, (2) invent a new cat name, (3) switch species or (4) go with this cute little kitty. Always under pressure, Apple’s internal graphics group tried to read the tea leaves and get ahead of the game. They finished the packaging above, but thankfully they guessed wrong. Some have criticized “Snow Leopard” as being a bit woosie for an operating system like Mac OS X. They have no idea how close we came to a name significantly less manly.