By Dan Moren
January 31, 2023 2:05 PM PT
The Back Page: M2, Brute?
It wouldn’t be the release of a brand new Apple product without the release of a brand new -gate to go along with it. Unlike power adapters and headphones, the company continues to bundle in controversy with every single purchase. (At least this time, it’s environmentally-friendly renewable controversy, since we already went through SSD-gate with the M2 MacBook Air last summer.)
Why does the company keep committing these unforced errors? For a trillion dollar corporation, it seems like there should be somebody whose job it is to make sure all the iMacs are dotted and all the AirTags are crossed. Which leaves only one possible conclusion.
They’re doing it on purpose.
Yes, there may not be someone in charge of stopping these gaffes, but after exhaustive investigative work, my sources have exclusively confirmed that there is somebody in charge of making them.
And their name is Erin. Or maybe Aaron. It was hard to hear over the iPhone I was holding wrong.
Yes, Erin/Aaron is the mastermind behind all of Apple’s most famous -gates of the past two decades. Mousegate: The Lightning connector that plugs into the bottom of the Apple Magic Mouse? Their handiwork. Camgate: The Apple Studio Display’s lackluster webcam? All them. Mapsgate: The launch of Apple Maps? They went to town on that sucker.
The real question, of course, is why. Why was such a position ever created, and why does it persist to this very day? Surely Apple would prefer if its products were not being actively sabotaged from the inside out.
Ah, but therein lies the galaxy-brain rationale behind it all. By baking in its own controversies, Apple is doing its customers a favor.
Yes, I said it. A favor.
Nobody wants to spend all their time looking for the flaw in the expensive iPhone they just bought, or thinking “Oh… this MacBook is just too good, there must be something wrong with it.”
But if you tell them up front what the stupid tradeoffs are going to be, you engage that good old cognitive dissonance reduction that says “Oh, sure, this iPhone might bend if it’s in my pocket [Bendgate], but it still feels like the future!” Because, frankly, everybody talks about slow read/write SSD speeds, but nobody ever does anything about it.
Now, thanks to Erin/Aaron, you just don’t have to worry about mights and maybes. The other shoe is pre-dropped for you. You’re welcome.
It might sound counterintuitive, but you can’t argue with success. Sure, people might have complained about keyboards (Butterflygate) and outdated video-out protocols (HDMIgate) and surprisingly talkative processors (Hiss-gate), but Apple has still sold products hand over fist despite the OMG major flaws inherent in each of them.
Plus, and perhaps most importantly of all, this has kept Aaron/Erin in a job for twenty years. And you don’t want to see what would happen if they were unleashed on the rest of the world.
Just think Twitter, but bigger. With more flames.
So when the Apple AR/VR headset eventually comes out and inevitably has a clunky battery pack that you need to stick in a pocket, don’t get mad. Just sit back, nod knowingly, and say, “Nice one, Erin/Aaron. Keep up the good—er… bad?—work.”
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
