Apple prison break, circa 1984 (video)

Selling iPhones with a dystopian vibe.

Published December 29, 2018, 8:05am ET · 1 min read

9to5Mac‘s Zac Hall, picking up the dystopian vibe:

Apple has shared an interesting new ad promoting the colorful iPhone XR called Color Flood. The minute-long video mostly portrays a rather odd totalitarian society (or possibly a prison break?) where people are running through the streets in basic uniforms only distinguished by color.

Cue the video:

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8LJXcQhD0k&w=840&h=473]

My take: This is Apple’s marketing department, feeling the grip of the bear market. Or maybe this is what it feels like to work, open-office style, in a donut the size of the Pentagon. For what it’s worth, I’ve learned that these are mostly traceurs (and a handful of traceuses) practicing parkour, a martial art developed in France in the late 1980s. The music is Cosmo Sheldrake’s “Come Along.” I don’t recognize the city.

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Steven M. Peters
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