Apple Plays “Beat the Clock” With Product Images
(Images courtesy of Technologizer.com)Ever wonder how Apple chooses the time of day that appears during their product demos? We didn’t either, until somebody pointed it out to us in a recent blog.Technologizer has all the details on Apple’s choice of time when presenting its new products -- for instance, the iPad was displayed with 9:41 am on the display, while last year’s iPhone 3GS showed 9:42 am. It turns out that Apple’s own Scott Forstall was the one who spilled the beans to Secret Lab developer Jon Manning during a recent visit to the Palo Alto Apple Store.“We design the keynotes so that the big reveal of the product happens around 40 minutes into the presentation,” Forstall explained to Manning. “When the big image of the product appears on screen, we want the time shown to be close to the actual time on the audience’s watches. But we know we won’t hit 40 minutes exactly… for the iPhone, we made it 42 minutes. It turned out we were pretty accurate with that estimate, so for the iPad, we made it 41 minutes. And there you are -- the secret of the magic time.”Of course, life is never that simple -- when the original iPhone debuted at Macworld Expo in January, 2007, the iconic device did indeed read 9:41 am (as seen in the now-legendary image above). Unfortunately, the keynote got off to a bit of a slow start and didn’t kick off until 9:14 am, which means that Apple CEO Steve Jobs did the big unveiling at 9:54 am -- although we don’t that anyone noticed, since they were blinded by the allure of the future of smartphones at that point.Or maybe 9:41 am (or 9:42 am) doesn’t really mean anything at all: At last Thursday’s iPhone OS 4.0 event, an image of the iPad running the Netflix app again showed 9:41 am, even though it was already 10:17 am in Cupertino, since the event didn’t start until 10 am. Maybe just a case of some lazy Photoshop work?While the portable devices may favor somewhere around 9:41 am, the Mac stock photos seem to prefer 10:50 am on a Monday, which we figure is about the time that most folks are just settling into their workday after trying to shake a case of the Mondays for the first hour and 50 minutes. You know, kind of like we are right now…
http://www.maclife.com/article/news/apple_plays_%E2%80%9Cbeat_clock%E2%80%9D_product_images
