by Abe Sauer
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Last week, I looked at the grotesque dominance of Apple product placement in TV and film. Now let's take a look at the most noteworthy Apple product placements of all time.
Short Circuit
Though not onscreen for long, the Apple Macintosh placement in Short Circuit may be the computer's first ever onscreen un-boxing. Today this placement is more important from a historic perspective.
Except, perhaps, to Mac users. Apple's fans had a fun time toying with new Windows users by explaining that many of the new features Microsoft was advertising in its new flagship OS were also.
- MacOS Big Sur includes some of the biggest changes in design and Safari in years. The design copies iOS but keeps certain UI elements unique.
- Find Platformer games for macOS like The Soulstream Expansive, Tiny Quest, A Short Hike, Project Blue, TowerFall 8-Player on itch.io, the indie game hosting marketplace.
My Mom's New Boyfriend / Law Abiding Citizen
Largely unseen and mediocre films-but with unforgettable Apple placements. These films are simply random examples of both the pervasiveness of Apple product placement and how that placement is so often situationally preposterous: a bank of Macs in an FBI office? A city's district attorney team working with Macbooks?
Rush Limbaugh
When Rush talked up Apple and the Mac OS X on his show, is wasn't a paid plug. Limbaugh said: 'I'm sorry you Windows people, but you might as well be back in the Stone Age here.' He even posted a direct link to Apple's Mac OS X Tiger page on RushLimbaugh.com, apparently for free. Rush then gave away personalized 'Rush' iPods as a marketing tool. Finally, in an interview with Newsbusters.org in 2008, Rush said of his iPhone, 'I love it. My life has changed.' Yes, Apple fanboys, Rush is one of you.
Imagine That
More than just the glowing Apple logo on the backside of a laptop, an extended scene in 2009's Imagine That Maze of maize mac os. features a father and daughter bonding over the shared excitement of playing with the Mac operating system feature Photo Booth. While most Apple product placement is just product prop, this was a true system promotion.
Blade: Trinity
When the iPod was on the cusp of becoming a mass market darling, Jessica Biel's vampire slayer sexed up the white earbuds for the boobie-obsessed Maxim mainstream who, until then, still largely saw the device as an exclusive accessory of music-snobs and gadget dorks. Demonstrating just how much a splash the iPod made in the Trinity film is this 2004 Jessica Biel interview with Movie Web:
You didn't get free iPods for the movie?
Jessica Biel: No. Apple/Mac didn't give us anything. They were really stingy.
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So it wasn't intentional product placement?
Jessica Biel: I don't know, but David said the other day people think we must be getting so much free stuff but we didn't get anything.
How many people have asked you the iPod question today?
Jessica Biel: I think three.
Sex and the City
The total value of the exposure Apple got from this series is incalculable. Apple's role as the diary of diarist Carrie Bradshaw is the most influential Apple product placement of all time and probably one of the ten most influential product placements of all time period. When addressing product placement, the media relies heavily on the E.T. / Reese's Pieces example, but it should really reference this instead. On the aspirational path from Boondocks, Nebraska to Manhattan, wannabe Bradshaws everywhere saw a Macbook as a first stop. In their glamorshots, the likes of Julia Allison and Meghan McCain ape Carrie's Macbook poses. Of course, today, old Sex and the City Apple placements are noteworthy in that they demonstrate how Apple realized the advertising potential and flipped its logo 'upside down.'
Wall-E
The non-Apple placement that launched a thousand articles. Wall-E is surprising only for the amount of attention Apple received despite how little the brand's products appear. Wall-E cemented the design aesthetic of shiny, clean and white-and in the process was called the ultimate subconscious Apple product placement.
Wild Hogs
Exemplary of how Apple product placement can go too far. Dumb movie. Dumb attempt to capitalize on the 'cult of Apple' for a joke. But unforgettable and perfect for getting the online Apple community buzzing-and demonstrating Apple's transition to a desperate and aging Baby Boomer brand.
NBC
From the A.M. (Regis and Kelly) to prime time (Parks and Recreation, The Office, 30 Rock) to late night (Late Night with Jimmy Fallon), there is no comprehensive, reinforcing Apple commercial like a full Thursday spent watching NBC. And more than any of its colleagues, 30 Rock's Apple love is beyond the pale, from the glut of desktops and laptops in almost every episode to the repeated use of the iPhone in the plot. The show is watched by cultural elites and those who want to be them (see also: Sex and the City) and reinforces their belief that Apple-just like snarky, absurdist sarcasm-is cool.
Legally Blonde
Released during Apple's push of its sherbet line, Elle Woods' Mac is particularly notable in that whole swaths of the film demonstrate her using it. There's even a scene with her standing in line in the store, her soon-to-be-unboxed iBook in her arms. But even more important is that many of these Apple placement scenes came at the expense of the Apple's PC peers, leaving the black monolithic borg machines, and their owners, looking dowdy by comparison.
'Appetite'
Usher's song, with the lyrics 'My Mac is in my backpack / I'm surfing on the sites / I'm chatting, this ain't cheating / Just telling myself a lie,' were a new medium for Apple placement. While hardly a placement that will move product, Mac's inclusion here demonstrates that in the entertainment world, there is no other computer brand, and everyone is a follower. Just try imagining Usher rhyming 'Dell.'
Zoolander
Another key placement during Apple's berry Mac period. While garishly designed by Apple's modern sleek standards, these early Macs were perfect for product placements because their fluorescence screamed out at the audience, often upstaging the actors themselves. Additionally, the spastic design of the iMac perfectly fit Zoolander's absurdist world of in-the-face fashion.
Twilight
Products involved in the Twilight saga of films basically get a window to print their own money. There are whole sites dedicated to scrutinizing the brand and source of every product appearing in the films. When Billabong's 'Hannah' jacket was spotted on the Bella character during the New Moon filming, it caused a run on stocks and the $60 jacket soon showed up on eBay, going for many times its retail price. And alongside Edward's Volvo, no product is more associated with a Twilight character than Bella's Macbook and iPod.
Abe Sauer writes the annual Product Placement Awards at Brandcameo.
The Awl, 2009-2018
Jared Kushner Sells Girl Scout Cookies
Holding On
The Awl Stories You Never Saw
Bears, Britain, Bunga-Bunga: Bye
New York City, January 30, 2018
Steely Dan, 'Everything Must Go'
New York City, January 29, 2018
TidBITS readers likely know that macOS is based on Unix and that opening the Terminal enables them to interact with files, folders, and apps at the command line. For the majority of Mac users, the command line is largely a curiosity that goes unexplored. On the other end of the spectrum are those who are fluent in Unix-like operating systems and spend more time at the command line than they do in graphical apps. Many of us fall somewhere in the middle, aware of the command line's power but more comfortable in native Mac apps. That's certainly true of me—I can use grep at the command line if necessary, but I'll rely on BBEdit instead if at all possible.
If you're like me, perhaps the most important point to be made about the command line is that it's seldom an either/or question. Most of the time, when I drop to the command line to do something, it's because it would be difficult or impossible to accomplish the task using the Finder, BBEdit, or any other native Mac app. That's not to say that there isn't a vast amount of overlap. Just as you know how to traverse the filesystem in the Finder by double-clicking folders and opening files, you need to know those basics at the command line as well.
Two books, Joe Kissell's just-updated Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal ($14.99 from Take Control Books) and Armin Briegel's new macOS Terminal and Shell ($19.99 on Apple Books), promise to help you become more capable at the command line, whether you're just starting out or would benefit from admin-level chops.
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(Full disclosure: Joe originally wrote Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal when Tonya and I owned Take Control Books, and I had significant input into its development. However, we sold Take Control to Joe in May 2017 and no longer have any financial interest in the book or the company. And, although I don't know Armin Briegel well, we periodically see each other at conferences, and many years ago at MacTech, he graciously wrote an AppleScript for me that I continue to use to populate my calendar with Monday events for each numbered TidBITS issue.)
Unsurprisingly, both books cover much of the same ground at the start. It's that overlap problem—everyone needs to understand the basics of working in Terminal, entering commands, navigating the filesystem, reading the man pages, and so on. After that, the books diverge a bit.
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Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal
Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal takes the high road, with Joe Kissell employing his friendly, practical style to explain how to create shell scripts to automate tasks (complete with variables, user input, conditional statements, loops, and math), control other Macs via ssh, get started with key Unix techniques like piping and redirection, use grep to search for text patterns in files, and install new command-line software with package managers. Alpine crawler mac os.
For many Mac users unaccustomed to the command line, the hardest part is realizing what it can do. If you don't understand its power, you're unlikely even to think of it when faced with a problem. To help short-circuit that learning process, Joe includes 64 'recipes' that give you real-world solutions that often require tying multiple commands together. I'm especially fond of the ones that operate under the hood, such as the recipe that helps you figure out why a volume won't eject (some app is using it, but which one?) or dealing with files that won't delete when you empty the Trash. I was also particularly pleased to learn about the textutil command that converts text documents between various common formats. It's easy to imagine a situation where you need to convert a folder full of Word documents to HTML (or vice versa), and doing it one-by-one would be mind-numbing.
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macOS Terminal and Shell
Where Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal is aimed at everyday Mac users, Armin Briegel has drawn on his experience as a system administrator to write macOS Terminal and Shell for sysadmins, developers, scientists, and 'pro' users who need more flexibility than is always available in the Finder and with other native Mac apps.
That accounts for the book's more extensive coverage of managing users (with sysadminctl) and groups (with dseditgroup), a topic that's often of great interest to sysadmins, if not regular people who are the only users of their Macs. Armin even explains how to make a hidden user account, which sysadmins often do so they can have an admin-level account on employee Macs for troubleshooting and repair without it cluttering up the login window or other aspects of the Mac interface. Similarly, Armin goes into detail on the various link types, special file attributes, and macOS permissions that are most likely to be of use to admins and developers.
The other place where macOS Terminal and Shell shines is in the way it exposes all the ways you can configure both the Terminal app and your shell to personalize how they work. For instance, I had never realized you could select a command in Terminal and choose Help > Open man Page for Selection (or Control-click a selection and choose Open man Page) to open a new window—automatically styled with a yellow background so it stands out—displaying the man page for whatever you selected. There are sections explaining scrolling back through output with marks (handy when the output spans multiple screens), keyboard navigation within commands, using Option to select rectangular selections, and much more. My favorite new tip is that Terminal lets me create a window group that opens tabs to the remote servers I need to access frequently.
An Aside about Apple's Books App
Although I'm painfully biased, having collaborated on the Take Control design language, I vastly prefer reading the PDF version of Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal in Preview to the mediocre user experience of paging through macOS Terminal and Shell in Apple's Books app. (Like all Take Control books, Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal is also available in EPUB for Books and Mobipocket for Kindle, for situations where reflowable text is helpful.)
To be fair, my criticisms of reading in Apple's books app are entirely out of Armin Briegel's hands, and I understand better than anyone the difficulty of publishing in multiple formats. Nevertheless, I do find Books frustrating in comparison to reading a well-produced PDF in Preview in a few key ways:
- The short line length of the Books standard two-column format doesn't lend itself to technical documentation, particularly a book like macOS Terminal and Shell that has to show a lot of command-line output. It's best to shrink the window to where it switches to a single column.
- You can display the table of contents in Books with a button click or a keyboard shortcut (Command-T), but there's no way to leave it on screen, as with Preview's sidebar, which makes establishing your location and context within the book difficult.
- Similarly, Preview puts its search results in the sidebar and leaves them there for reference, whereas Books displays them in a popover that disappears as soon as you click one.
On the plus side for Books, Armin Briegel includes a number of very short videos that illustrate certain capabilities—such as dragging files and folders from the Finder into Terminal—better than static screenshots could. Unless something has changed in the past few years, embedding videos in a PDF wasn't a nut we were ever able to crack satisfactorily, and it's a good reason why macOS Terminal and Shell sticks with Books.
But I don't mean to focus too hard on the reading experience between the two titles because you should pick the book that's most appropriate for your needs. If you just want to learn more about using Terminal and the command line for your own purposes, Joe Kissell's Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal is the most appropriate first step. It's a skim across the surface of a deep lake. In contrast, Armin Briegel's macOS Terminal and Shell dives deeper, with a focus on imparting the sort of command-line expertise that a Mac admin or developer would need in their daily work. You won't go wrong with either one.
