The Importance Of Enthusiasm In Any Product
A video took the web by storm today entitled “Incredible, amazing, awesome Apple.” Basically, it boils down Apple's latest event into a series of superlatives. It's a funny video because Apple really does have a pattern of using these types …
Context & Ripple Effects
TechCrunch is riffing on a mashup video that stitches Apple's own keynote vocabulary — 'incredible, amazing, awesome' — into a single running gag, and the joke only lands because the delivery system behind it is deliberate: back in January 2009 the corpus profiled the anonymous engineer behind Apple's event videos, framing the polish as engineered craft rather than accidental exuberance.
The timing sharpens the piece: the video spread the same week Apple's confirmed Google Voice rejection drew an FCC inquiry, even as the company opened an App Store Resource Center for registered iPhone developers and NPD reported Snow Leopard's first-two-weeks sales far exceeding the last two Mac OS launches. Superlative-heavy stagecraft sitting alongside regulator attention and developer friction is exactly the tension the satire pokes at.
First-order effects
- Apple enters its fall hardware window — with a Wedge Partners prediction, unconfirmed, of redesigned iMacs and MacBooks within weeks — knowing its signature enthusiastic register is now recognizable enough to be parodied in real time.
- The same audience seeing the 'awesome' montage is reading coverage of the FCC inquiry into the App Store, so Apple's marketing voice and its gatekeeping conduct are being judged in the same news cycle.
Second-order effects
- Competitors copying the Apple keynote template inherit its parody risk: once superlatives read as a house style, imitation invites the same ridicule without the sales record — NPD's Snow Leopard numbers — that gives Apple's claims cover.
- For developers watching the Resource Center launch land next to the Flickup keyword-rejection episode, the gap between keynote warmth and review-process strictness becomes a bargaining chip in how they pitch Apple for leniency.
Third-order effects
- If launch events keep functioning as products themselves, the industry drifts toward either demonstrable proof on stage or self-aware humor — because audiences systematically discount adjectives they've heard mocked, and the Google Voice episode shows marketing claims and platform conduct eventually get reconciled by regulators, not rhetoricians.
The trend: Product launches are becoming theater whose language gets independently audited — by parodists, the press, and increasingly the FCC.