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Surprising Stripes
Oct. 11th, 2017 06:41 pmThe small shopping mall in my neighbourhood, trending downwards for years even before Target moved in to close down two years later, is scheduled to be demolished and replaced by a self-storage facility, squeezed out of existence by changes in retail. (There are promises the grocery store attached is going to stay open as a standalone building, anyway.) Just about all of the handful of stores left open when I saw that in the newspaper this spring have cleared out, but one of the cell phone stores that were the last new developments is still open, its future location not quite ready yet. One day, I decided I'd look in it on my way to the grocery store to see if it had iPhone 8s on display, and if those phones had iOS 11 running on them. Knowing that new revision of the operating system would mean having to give up some of my oldest games did add just a little bit of reluctance towards upgrading.
On seeing the new phones did have the new operating system, I looked into their "Settings" to see what backgrounds were available; every major revision does seem to mean just about everything there being replaced. As I looked down the list of thumbnails, some rainbow stripes caught my attention. Then, I realised the colours weren't "ROY G. BIV," but rather "green-yellow-orange-red-purple-blue," the order of the stripes in the Apple Computer logo of the 1980s. After that, upgrading my iPod Touch just as a beginning was much on my mind. I was at least a little conscious this had some element of "being influenced by emotions," but "clinging to a different past out of concern" might be being influenced by emotions too.
I did wonder a bit how many other people would make the connection I had, it having been almost twenty years since the stripes were phased out around the time of the very first iMacs. There was the ambiguous thought that at least some of the people who'd used Apple IIs as particular machines with six-colour logos must have clung to their embitterment over the impression that platform hadn't been eked along as long as it could have and found philosophical objections with the Apple products that followed. Still, I can remember a "Macintosh thirtieth anniversary" tribute and a commercial about putting stickers on MacBook Airs that had alluded to the six-colour logo before. I can suppose the next revision of the operating system will take out those backgrounds (I know you can keep an "obsolete" background, but only so long as you don't change it to anything else), but even this much is a small but interesting bit of history returned.
( A small bit of evidence )
On seeing the new phones did have the new operating system, I looked into their "Settings" to see what backgrounds were available; every major revision does seem to mean just about everything there being replaced. As I looked down the list of thumbnails, some rainbow stripes caught my attention. Then, I realised the colours weren't "ROY G. BIV," but rather "green-yellow-orange-red-purple-blue," the order of the stripes in the Apple Computer logo of the 1980s. After that, upgrading my iPod Touch just as a beginning was much on my mind. I was at least a little conscious this had some element of "being influenced by emotions," but "clinging to a different past out of concern" might be being influenced by emotions too.
I did wonder a bit how many other people would make the connection I had, it having been almost twenty years since the stripes were phased out around the time of the very first iMacs. There was the ambiguous thought that at least some of the people who'd used Apple IIs as particular machines with six-colour logos must have clung to their embitterment over the impression that platform hadn't been eked along as long as it could have and found philosophical objections with the Apple products that followed. Still, I can remember a "Macintosh thirtieth anniversary" tribute and a commercial about putting stickers on MacBook Airs that had alluded to the six-colour logo before. I can suppose the next revision of the operating system will take out those backgrounds (I know you can keep an "obsolete" background, but only so long as you don't change it to anything else), but even this much is a small but interesting bit of history returned.
( A small bit of evidence )