Max Read’s ‘A Literary History of Fake Texts in Apple’s Marketing Materials’

Wednesday, 13 August 2025

Max Read, two years ago, “A Literary History of Fake Texts in Apple’s Marketing Materials”:

I’m talking about the mocked-up texts and emails Apple puts together to demonstrate new messaging features in its operating-system updates, presumably written by some well-paid professionals in Apple’s marketing department. These eerily cheery, aggressively punctuated messages suggest an alternate dimension in which polite, good-natured, rigorously diverse groups of friends and coworkers use Apple products exactly how they are designed to be used, without complaint or error. [...]

If there is still mystery in Apple events, it is located here, in the uncanny fictional world suggested in these images: Who are these people? And what is wrong with them that they text like this?

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.

I’ve been sitting on this one since shortly after Read published it, and came upon it again today in my pile of I-should-post-about-this-but-I-have-a-lot-I-need-to-say-about-it links. Now — just under four weeks away from Apple’s expected keynote for the iPhones 17 and new Apple Watches — seems as good a time as ever to finally link to it. It really is a lot of fun, and Read seemingly found every marketing screenshot of Messages or Mail from 2011–2023 that he could.

But re-reading it today, I realize why I sat on it. There’s a cynicism to the whole thing that grates. Read is disdainful of everything about these messages — their cheerful tone, professional-grade photography, even their attentive punctuation. But of course they’re not realistic. Of course every person in every chat “use[s] Apple products exactly how they are designed to be used, without complaint or error.” Of course everyone is always happy and friendly and having a good time. Of course the groups are always diverse.¹ What other kinds of fictional people are going to be portrayed by Apple in their marketing screenshots? Ugly unhappy illiterates who take bad photos and never go anywhere? It’d be really weird if Apple’s fake texts for keynotes were anything other than idyllic — if the photos kinda sucked, if words were misspelled and entirely lowercase, if punctuation were omitted.

So of course the fake texts in Apple marketing are, upon consideration, obviously phony. What I’ve long thought interesting is just how much effort Apple clearly puts into them. They’re good phony. Pitch-perfect for Apple’s Designed-in-California brand. A lot of work goes into the fake trips and parties portrayed and described in these threads, and it shows. But they’re not so interesting as to distract from the keynote. Imagine if a screenshot flew by with a Messages thread between colleagues gossiping about someone getting fired for expense account fraud, or about an extramarital affair. The purpose of these fake texts is the opposite of the supposed intention of the Liquid Glass design language: it’s fake content meant to put the emphasis on the real software. They’re actually worth the deep dive Max Read produced to document them. They’re genuinely interesting for what they are — but somehow Read can’t bring himself to say that, despite taking the time to document them. The withering cynicism of his tone is at odds with the fact that he took the time to document their history so thoroughly.

Searching the DF archive for Read’s name, I came up with one hit, and it explains his overly-cynical schtick. Read was editor-in-chief at Gawker, before Peter Thiel and his puppet Hulk Hogan (RIP) sued them out of business in 2016. And when I previously mentioned Read (in 2020), it was because he was one of two ex-Gawkerites who sold a show to Apple TV+ called Scraper² about a thinly-veiled fictional version of Gawker, but which show was nixed, after several episodes had already been filmed, supposedly by Tim Cook himself, out of his personal loathing for Gawker. To be clear, I’m not suggesting Read took an overly snarky attitude to describing Apple’s fake-text literary history because Cook pulled the plug on Scrapers. I’m saying that Gawker was infused by the sort of attitude that holds all marketing in contempt. I, of course, firmly believe that many subjects are worthy of withering scorn. But the Gawker attitude was that no subject was worthy of anything but withering scorn. I never could abide that, and there’s something like it undergirding this otherwise splendid piece from Read. It’s like an otherwise delightful cocktail with one distinctive unpleasant ingredient, which ingredient was added, deliberately, to imbue the libation with an aftertaste of spite.