Apple went into chapter 11 at precisely 9:23 a.m. Today. ‘We would have thrown in the towel Sooner but we couldn’t be bothered getting out of bed to file the papers,’ Apple’s brand new CEO Broderick Crawford told Gadgets-R-Us in an exclusive interview on Chinese industrial lethargy, lacking ideas and the future of Apple.
‘Well, nobody likes Mondays, do they?’ Broderick continued, ‘And to make things worse, our Chinese manufacturing partners were sulking because they reckoned the Hang Seng was about to roll over and die, rendering 90% of Asian stock as useful as a seven stone linebacker.’
‘Anyway, chapter 11 will at least give us a breathing space to think of what we’re going to do next. The bottom line is that we ran out of ideas and now we’ve run out of greenbacks.’
The Chinese won’t play ball
The shock revelation that a lethal combination of Chinese lethargy and the cratering of entrepreneurial zeal at Apple has knocked the computer world sideways — and then some.
Broderick picks up the story: ‘I guess it started with the iPad Pro. We told the Chinese we wanted a million units by Thursday week. They just thrust a palm in our face and said “Talk to the hand!”‘. We told them we were serious. That the iPad Pro was the most innovative device since the invention of the cheese grater. They’re reply? “Whatever!”.’
‘So the Chinese have to take some of the blame for our fall from on high. Since the Chinese economy floated off down the Yangtze River on a fortune cookie, oriental get-up-and-go appears to have got up and gone. In a nutshell, we have run out of ideas for stuff and the Chinese have run out of the desire to build it. The new iPad Pro was the straw that busted the dromedary’s hump. That’s for sure.’
How could this even happen? The company which started with Wozniak building the world’s first home computer in a garage using a Value Pack of Walmart bobby pins, a suitcase full of youthful exuberance and a hockey-puck sized lump of silicon, shouldn’t go bust. Should it?
The Zapple
Broderick accepts that he was holding the responsibility stick when the company collapsed. ‘I hold up my hands. Some of our recent products have fallen squarely into the ‘bummer’ category. We thought we were on a winner with the Zapple — a taser detection device that notified people who had just been tasered … that they’d just been tasered. By projecting an alert onto the lenses of their spectacles. Within minutes of being blasted off their feet with a taser weapon, victims could tell how many volts, to six decimal places, had been used to fry their cerebral cortex.’
Was this to be Apple’s saviour? Broderick explains why the answer to this question is a resounding ‘No!’
‘Some techno-smartass in a product review group in Moose Jaw, felt compelled to say that your average taser blast was likely to send you and your spectacles at half the speed of sound, over the rooftops into an adjacent Zip Code, thereby rendering our hi-tech information on voltage too late to be useful. And it was goodnight Gracie to that idea.’
The RetroScribbler Infinity i-Stick
‘Our last chance was to bring forward the launch our latest killer product — still on the test bench at the time — The RetroScribbler Infinity i-Stick, this was a device so Zen, so minimalist it had no moving parts and was completely technology-free. The kicker? We wouldn’t have needed the Chinese to make it for us. We could have made it ourselves!’
‘The device had two ends — one sharp, the other blunt. You wrote with the sharp end and — here’s the really smart thing — the other end was multi-functional. You could chew it, stick it in your ear, scratch the back of your head with it, irritate the shit out of people by tap-tap-tapping it repeatedly on any hard surface. Heck, you could drum out a Sailor’s Hornpipe with it if you were that way inclined.’
‘Design-wise, the RetroScribbler Infinity i-Stick is a ‘stick within a stick’ — a cylinder of graphite sheathed in a cylinder of wood. It’s sheer genius. We’d even planned a range of Grip-Enhancer add-ons in pastel colours at $50 a pop and a rubber tip that fitted snugly on the blunt end which provided an ‘undo’ function. It was to have been functionally equivalent to an eraser but cost $80 more.’
So what went wrong? Why hasn’t the public seen the RetroScribbler in Apple stores? An ashen-faced Broderick explained: ‘The boys on the forty-eighth floor didn’t like it. They said that what we’d done was re-invent the pencil! The chutzpah of these non-creatives!’
Broderick turned sheepish. ‘They didn’t like our slogan either’:
Wanna impress the girls? Get some wood!
The RetroScribbler Infinity i-Stick — it’s ‘write’ for you!’
Author: Wallace Runnymede
