I’ve gone to my fair share of Apple product events, and today I realized that they can all be divided into three kinds. Sometimes, you get all three, but generally you get only one or two at the same time.
The first kind of event is the Cosmetic Event. This is when Apple redesigns an existing product, as when it moved from iPhone 3GS to iPhone 4, or the refresh of the MacBook Air line. If you’re at one of these kinds of events, you can be pretty certain that you will also encounter a Plumbing Event.
Plumbing Events involve upgrades to the inner workings of a device — more powerful processors, better displays, faster responses. The last kind of event is a Feature Event, which doesn’t really happen on its own, but occurs when Apple shows off something new, like Siri, its voice-control feature. Major updates to operating systems are also Feature Events, as they usually include some new application or widget that is clever and discussion-worthy.
So what did we have today? Well, like the unveiling of the iPhone 4S last year, this was not a Cosmetic Event. Given the company’s sales successes with new products that look like the old one, it seems clear that upgrading a device’s looks isn’t a priority right now.
Apple would most likely rebut that with a proclamation of aesthetic rigor: “We redesign things when they need to be redesigned.” And that may well be true—needless redesigning does not conform to Apple’s minimalist, Dieter-Rams-inspired design. If the sales figures went in a different direction, dipping when new products come out because they look like the old ones, that kind of change might become more urgent, but consumers’ continued appetite for Apple products means that isn’t the case today.
No, what we saw today was a Plumbing Event. One where the guts of the iPad were upgraded, but the case was left intact. And the thing about Plumbing Events is, like most things regarding infrastructure, they are the least glamorous, but also the most important. If you have faster processors and sharper displays and more robust data connections, you can engender a feature event—stuff no one’s even thought up yet. You just need to give Apple and third-party app developers time to play around with the new hardware.
That’s why those third-party developers Apple trots out to show off apps that take advantage of the new gear are always less than thrilling—they haven’t really had time to figure out what a faster processor and a 4G network means. Their improvements are incremental: faster rendering, smoother motion, that kind of a thing. But what I’m interested in is what some developer is going to come up with six months from now, once he or she has had time to play around with that speedy A5X chip and an LTE network.
Because while a new design is nice to gaze upon and hold, it’s what my mom always said about looks: It’s what’s on the inside that counts.