Beauty kills innovation.
Image credit: Apple
The most innovative company in the world just released its new invention: the color palette.
No, without any intention of being dramatically sarcastic, this is another awkward truth. Apple keeps upgrading its products by changing the colors. Year after year, you can see how their top managers announce new colors for the same headphones, iPhones, iPads, and so on. But, did they just run out of ideas? Or is a different color enough for us to keep buying the same products from their catalog?
Apple recently upgraded its AirPods Max with new colors and a 10-year-old USB-C connector. With the slogan “The ultimate over-ear personal listening experience, now in fresh new colors”, Apple announces one of the most anticipated upgrades of the year—yes, with a couple of new-to-them colors.
On one hand, they did, in fact, revolutionize the market with the new “adaptive hearing aid” for the AirPods Pro. But on the other hand, they updated the color palette for their more premium option. My question is, why? Why is this the one and only new and refreshed option for the AirPods Max, a product that costs $549? And the answer is… drumroll… their customers don’t need a hearing aid; they want new colors.
The relationship between how we look with a pair of chunky headphones on our heads is more important than sound quality, connection speed, a better Siri, or whatever else they can come up with from the lab to the shelf. Our ears haven’t evolved that much in the past 10 years, but our concept of beauty in the last 100 years has. Nobody was asking for better sound quality—they wanted something that looks better and shinier on their ears.
We are basic creatures, and Apple knows this perfectly well. Some critics were expecting a big leap at the event, but the public wasn’t. I’ve seen people trying this headset in stores like there’s no tomorrow. They really like the look of the AirPods Max. We expect Apple to innovate endlessly, but in the end, we’re the ones who can’t keep up. A shiny mirror is enough for them to make us pay a premium price for an old product.
Image credit: Apple
We aren’t pushing our favorite brands hard enough to come up with new ideas. And this isn’t just my opinion—the revenue numbers from Apple keep growing in almost every sector, quarter after quarter.
My final conclusion? We’re trying to fly because we’re bored of running. But deep down, we haven’t changed, and we can’t change as fast as we’d like to. The AirPods Max are excellent headphones, and that’s enough for us to buy them. The new colors? Just another excuse to convince us to pay the price of an ecosystem that knows us better than we know ourselves.