Apple Suck-Up Watch
IT'S NOT JUST A NEW KIND OF CELL PHONE, IT'S A CULTURAL WATERSHED! — iPhone — The press corps' love for all things Apple routinely swells and bursts in a dewy explosion whenever the company readies a new gizmo for sale. Like the Detroit automakers of yore …
Context & Ripple Effects
With the iPhone shipping on June 29, Slate has opened a running critique of how the technology press covers Apple, arguing that reporters hail each new device as a cultural watershed before a single unit is sold. The piece lands amid confirmed signs of a counter-current: scepticism about the launch was already growing in the days before this column ran.
The backdrop is a crowded Apple news cycle — an exclusive AT&T deal amid Verizon rivalry, YouTube confirmed for both the iPhone and [[/concepts#fashionized-computing|Apple TV]], and a separate antitrust confrontation with European regulators over iTunes pricing. That volume of coverage is exactly what makes the charge of press favoritism testable rather than merely rhetorical.
First-order effects
- Tech journalists covering the June 29 launch now face a named critique of their framing, raising the reputational cost of uncritical pre-launch praise.
- Apple gets the free amplification the column describes, while AT&T's exclusivity rides the same wave of launch coverage against rival Verizon.
Second-order effects
- Documented scepticism about the launch gives other outlets a ready-made contrarian angle, splitting coverage between hype and doubt and shaping reader expectations before reviews exist.
- Competitors like Verizon benefit from any backlash narrative, since skepticism about the phone's reception softens the halo effect around the AT&T exclusive.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, tracking press deference to Apple becomes a recurring beat of its own, forcing outlets to police their own launch coverage as audiences grow more media-literate about hype cycles.
The trend: Consumer-electronics launches are becoming media events whose hype cycles attract a parallel industry of press self-criticism.