金融时报:“苹果神教”的十年浮沉

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2022年03月24日

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“苹果神教”的十年浮沉

虽然新品信息早已泄露，但苹果的发布会还是吸引了全球的目光。2007年，在首款iPhone的发布会上，乔布斯向世界宣称苹果“重新发明了手机”，十年后的今天，iPhone所代表的意义已经远远超出一部手机，成了让人们爱恨交加的流行文化符号。苹果是怎样培养出了如同教徒般虔诚的果粉群体？

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

crude[kruːd] adj.简陋的，天然的

cortical['kɔːtɪkl] adj.皮层的，皮质的

synapse['saɪnæps] n.突触

raving['reɪvɪŋ] n.胡说，疯话

pomp[pɒmp] n.壮丽，盛观

smite [smaɪt] vt.重击，迷住

drooling[smaɪt]v.流口水，胡说

rampant['ræmpənt] adj.猖獗的，蔓延的

colossal[kə'lɒsl] adj.巨大的，异常的

bicker['bɪkə(r)] vi.斗嘴，闪烁

The addictive, divisive iPhone is a fitting tribute to Steve Jobs(786 words)

By Philip Delves Broughton

Larry Page, the chief executive of Alphabet, is said to use a “toothbrush test” before approving any acquisition. If a product is something you will use once or twice a day and if it will make your life better, he will sign the cheque. If not, he won’t. Alphabet’s Google, of course, clears this bar with yards to spare. And, as for Apple’s iPhone, they devour the attention of users, who check them dozens of times a day.

In museums of the future, the iPhone will mark the step in human evolution towards the time when we all have chips in our skulls, augmenting our brains with all the knowledge and capacities of artificial intelligence. It will mark the crude phase when we slid our fingers around a glass screen and listened through wireless headphones, en route to surfing the digital world with a snap of a cortical synapse.

I know there are those who will say these are the ravings of a starry-eyed Apple “fanboy”. Because this is what happens when a product becomes so popular and so divisive: with Apple, just as with Taylor Swift or Justin Bieber, you become either a fanboy or a “hater”. The reactions are cultish. This doesn’t happen with, say, the Toyota Camry or Hewlett-Packard printers.

With a word to Siri, it is easy enough to find Steve Jobs’ presentation of the iPhone in 2007. There he is in his absolute pomp, before his pancreatic cancer and its treatments did their worst. Jobs can be the object of an unhealthy fetishisation. But if you’re the least bit smitten by the history of business, that iPhone launch is Napoleon at Austerlitz or Churchill during the Battle of Britain.

On January 9 2007, Jobs told his drooling audience: “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along.” It would be three revolutionary products in one: an iPod, a phone and an internet communications device. “Today Apple is going to reinvent the phone,” he said. “Here it is.” And on the screen came a picture of an early iPod with a rotary dial stuck to the front. Later he put up a slide showing the size of the mobile market in 2006. If all Apple could do was sell 1 per cent of the 1bn phones then sold a year, he said, it could build from there.

And, indeed, it has. More than 1bn phones have been sold, with gross margins estimated to be about 40 per cent. The iPhone is the main force in Apple’s total revenue and earnings: in the year to September 2016, the company generated profits of about $45.5bn on sales of $216bn. To put this in context, in their most recent reported full-year earnings, JPMorgan Chase made $24.4bn on sales of $96.6bn; Walmart, $14.7bn from $482bn.

That 2007 launch was the birth of an earnings monster, the likes of which the world has never seen. More or Less, a statistics programme on BBC Radio 4, recently tested the proposition that the iPhone is the most profitable product in history. After considering the history of pepper, opium and tulip bulbs, and more modern challengers such as Coca-Cola, Pfizer’s Viagra and Microsoft Office, it concluded that, yes, it probably is. The iPhone generates as much profit in two weeks as Viagra does in a year.

Apple is a less likeable company today than it was. Rampant success and colossal success does that. But its achievements over the decade since the iPhone was born are astounding. In what is supposed to be an age of infinite choice, it has become for many the only choice — the gateway to every form of entertainment, information and communication.

For the most part, the company has retained its discipline, constraining its product line. People will bicker about the Apple Watch — though I’m noticing more and more of them on people I never expected — and the labyrinthine Apple Music service. But Apple has emphatically not become Sony or HP, dragged down by poor margins on products and services. In a world where 10-year corporate strategies are rewritten every six months, Apple has rarely deviated from the path established by Jobs.

Smartphones have their critics. They have made us more distractible, stimulating the very worst of our monkey minds. But it’s not chocolate’s fault if we can’t stop eating it. And it’s certainly not Jobs’ fault that he made a product so compelling we can’t tear ourselves away.

Next week, we can get back to the Apple-bashing, the worries about its innovation pipeline and whether or not its new spaceship-like Cupertino headquarters mark a new beginning or a hubristic end. But this week it’s worth a pause for the man in the black turtleneck and what he wrought. Every business should be so lucky — or so good.

请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：

1.The “toothbrush test” in the first paragraph indicates ____.

A. An iPhone is more useful than a toothbrush in our daily life.

B. Most technical products are irrelevant to our everyday life.

C. A frequently used and beneficial product is worth buying.

D. People can assess the value of a product by a toothbrash.

答案(1)

2.Why does the author mention Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber in the third paragraph?

A. To give an example of starry-eyed fanboys in popular culture.

B. To analyze a type of fetishisation created by popular figures.

C. To explain people's extremely divisive attitude towards iPhone.

D. To illustrate the special cultural influence iPhone brings us.