Max Read offers a history of fake Apple texts, 2011-2023—the chats to be found in the company's ads and marketing materials. Anodyne yet featureful, this "rigidly orthographically correct banter" mirrors the Apple weltanshauung in an image of its ideal consumers.
A proper literary study of fake Apple texts has yet to be undertaken, but with the help of the Wayback Machine, we can sift through more than a decade's work of marketing materials to identify certain trends and themes. For the sake of precision, let's begin our survey in 2011, with the launch of iMessage in iOS 5. Here, so far as I can tell, is the first-ever fake Apple iMessage conversation:
Read's gallery/collection of these texts appears to be exhaustive.
I'm fascinated by the one name that appears twice across different product presenations. Imagine if they had introduced a kid character and kept it going instead of having new imaginary users in each. Imagine the fandom that would erupt around this character as soon as the pattern was observed, at first ironic and then viscerally earnest. The humor, the growing fiction. The implied family and friends. The rites of school and career, of courting, marriage and parenthood. The restraint and control Apple maintains for decades, never letting the character escape the medium of marketing mockups. And then the character makes no appearance on some announcement and everyone is alarmed and upset, and wheover the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing is in 2073 just says "yeah, heart attack. Sad."
