Courage? Apple’s silly headphone man should be dropped in a warzone

Apple, the phone and gadget company, has unveiled a new phone this week. It’s the 6, or the 7, or is it 8? I don’t care. It’s a phone and its unveiling should not be news. Dominic Frisby writing for Reaction rightly pointed out that the smartphone is a thing of wonder, a useful invention, but he did not linger on the launch itself. To do so would be advertising.

At said launch, Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller made a fool of himself when describing why the firm was changing the headphone jack, presumably to force people into buying more Apple products. No, said Schiller, that didn’t come into it: “The reason to move on: courage. The courage to move on and do something new that betters all of us.”

That is an incredibly stupid and grandiose statement. There has been a great deal of real courage in American history and for a tech executive to present himself in such a way suggests yet again that these people have become so immersed in their own silly preoccuptations that they are now on a different planet.

Here are three examples of real American courage:

1) The D-Day landings, when along with British and Commonwealth troops, American troops began the liberation of Western Europe. As many as 2449 Americans are estimated to have made the ultimate sacrifice on D-Day.

2) In December 1955 a black American Rosa Parks refused the order from a bus driver in Montgomery, Alabama, to get to the back of the bus. Her bravery boosted the civil rights movement and she became a heroine of the struggle against segregation.

3) On the day of 9/11, 343 firefighters, 60 police officers and eight paramedics died when the Twin Towers collapsed. They died trying to help others. They had courage.

Designing new headphones and altering a jack to make money do not count as courage. Schiller and his team should be flown to a warzone and left there until they discover the meaning of the word.