Still Learning from Apple
As I was tracking the Apple tech conference yesterday – yes, I’m just that much of an Apple fan/geek – and noticed I was increasingly nonplussed – we all new about the bigger iPhone and had heard for months about the coming Apple Watch – I began to wonder just how longer we’ll care about Apple’s announcements. Perhaps, I thought, Apple’s day in the sun is over and we’re becoming as jaded to their innovations – okay, so they don’t really innovate as much as they take existing platforms to a higher and more beautiful level – as we are to innovations and evolutions in other industries.
But then I found myself thinking about the Apple Watch. I’m sure I won’t get one, I thought, I haven’t worn a watch for a decade. And besides, it’s expensive. And more than that, who needs a little computer on your wrist, especially when it mostly duplicates some of the functions of the phone you must carry with you.
But still, I found myself musing, if I did get a watch, which one would I get….
And then I realized that a huge element of Apple’s success is in its showmanship. (I don’t know if there is a gender-neutral form of that term but would be glad to know of one.) I mean, what they’re really good at is piquing your interest, even if you normally wouldn’t be interested. They’re good, that is, at making every little announcement seem like a really big deal. In fact, they are so known for that achievement that their chief rival, Samsung, tries to take on Apple’s preeminence in this respect by running commercials featuring their tag line, “The next big thing is already here.” As in, “you don’t have to wait for Apple, we’ve already got something really cool.” But of course by trying to persuade us that what they’ve got is cooler than Apple, they only reinforce the idea that Apple defines cool.
Apple clearly has great tech engineers and fantastic design people and they’ve honed their abilities to reliably take relatively novel technologies to a new level of functionality and aesthetic elegance. But they’re also really, really good at making us expect that anything they do is sensational.
So here’s the thing. How many of our congregations give anywhere near this level of focused energy to making a big deal of the things we do. Things like retelling the most amazing story in history. Things like bringing together people from across the generations. Things like being one of the few institutions where you can differ from each other in terms of nationality, political viewpoint, age and experience yet still share in common something that goes deeper than any of those differences. Things like reaching out in compassion and service to extend God’s love to all people.
You know what I mean? We’ve got a story to tell, People. And if we could think about how to invite people to imagine what a big deal it is, how it improves their lives and the world, and how it invites them into something bigger than themselves – all of which Apple does at least once a year when it introduces new products – I think we’d be moving in the right direction.
PS: The title of this post references a post I adapted and commented on by Guy Kawasaki and called it “10 Things Churches Can Learn from the Apple Store.” It ended up being the most viewed post on the site in the first two years of the blog
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