Confession: I Pre-ordered My iPad And Breguet Made Me Do It
I’m a sucker. It’s true. As much you guys think we rail against Apple, we’re like abused puppies, slinking back to our master’s hard ankles, shivering and awaiting praise. Why did I pre-order the iPad? Well, first I’m a gadget blogger. Second there is no certainty that mother Apple will grace us with an early review unit so I want to hedge our bets. Third? I want to see where computing is headed.
Bear with me here. Apple is not the bringer of fire to a benighted world. Far from it. In my recent writing I’ve been struck by a few parallels with Steve Jobs to Abraham Louis Breguet, a French watchmaker who lived in the 18th century. He was a mechanical genius, to be sure, but he was also a salesman. While the rest of the benighted world was sloshing around in an admixture of feces and mud in the streets of Paris and telling the time by whether the pikemen were stabbing them for being out after curfew, Breguet was selling watches that would not be out of place on the wrist (had they had straps) of a whale in Las Vegas. He invented secret anti-counterfeiting measures but made them part of the allure and not part of a DRM scheme. He designed elegant and beautiful watches in an age of rococo designs but wasn’t above creating a “subscription” watch for the masses who wanted to own a piece of the good life without paying an exorbitant sum of money. Other watchmakers were making commodities and following Breguet’s lead. That’s what’s happening here.
