There is a Horse in the Apple Store

http://blog.frankchimero.com/post/1059696119/there-is-a-horse-in-the-apple-store

by blasdel • 16 years ago

338 112 16 years ago

blog.frankchimero.com

ugh2• 16 years ago

I know it’s not the topic of the submission but I would have very much liked to get an explanation. Is it maybe a guide horse? See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guide_horse

qq662• 16 years ago

Yes, this is the only way a pony would be allowed in the Apple Store, and probably why people are not going to pet it and stuff -- it's not nice to interfere with the behavior of a guide animal.

bonzoesc• 16 years ago

Eh, last time I was at the Apple Store in South Beach a few people had their non-guide dogs inside. A horse wouldn't have been too out of place.

cglee• 16 years ago

I believe pets are allowed in Apple stores. I've taken my dog several times.

Charuru4• 16 years ago

I know this is not the topic of submission here either, but I can't help but feel that picture in the wikipedia of the guide horse is horrible abuse. All those straps and chains, UGH. /shudders

ptomato2• 16 years ago

Doesn't appear to be significantly different then a normal horse harness. How do you consider it abusive in any way that, say, leashing a dog isn't? Or do you consider that abuse as well?

what• 16 years ago

At least they gave it running shoes, though it seems to have lost one somewhere.

qq662• 16 years ago

Blind people generally tend to be so doting on their guide animals that I'm sure the straps and chains are more than compensated by the shower of love he gets from his owner.

kyro• 16 years ago

I'd say the abuse is in the fact that Apple hasn't tailored their products to the horse market, leaving horses everywhere feeling unimportant and neglected.

philk2• 16 years ago

I'm not sure how being fitted with two entirely standard pieces of tack (a breastplate and a bridle) counts as horrible abuse.

naner2• 16 years ago

Yes it is an assistance animal[1]. It is kind of sad that the guy never figured it out. At least he didn't go and try to pet it or something.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/magazine/04Creatures-t.htm...

10ren4• 16 years ago

The psychosis assistance-parrot sounds farcical, but the explanation is utterly logical.

ugh2• 16 years ago

Ah, that’s were I read about guide horses! Thanks for the reminder. As soon as I saw the photo in the submission the term “guide horse” just popped into my mind but I couldn’t figure out why I knew that term. Now I know.

pbhjpbhj• 16 years ago

>Yes it is an assistance animal[1]. It is kind of sad that the guy never figured it out.

Are you sure. Why could it not be a pet? The image in the OP doesn't appear to show a harness (as in the NYTimes article) as is usual for an assistance animal. In my country assistance animals usually wear some high-vis in public too.

bnchdrff• 16 years ago

way off topic, but i can't resist:

> soon Cox College of Nursing and Health Sciences, where Rose was attending nursing school, refused Richard access, too. Stories started appearing about Rose and her monkey in the newspaper and on TV. “Suddenly,” she told me, “everyone knew I had a mental disorder.”

a monkey on one's back! idiom origin revealed!

kgo• 16 years ago

Who says he didn't?

A logical explanation doesn't change the analogy. I'm aware that S&M Gimps exist. If I went into an Apple Store where someone was being led around by a gimp, and no-one was paying attention, I'd still think that was unusual.

Not to mention that an aside explaining that helper horses exists detracts from the art of storytelling.

SteveC• 16 years ago

He did this

http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/4/2010/09/500x_p...

rokhayakebe• 16 years ago

Guide for? I hope not blindness since the guy seems to be looking at a computer.

albemuth• 16 years ago

real life scenario training perhaps?

jimminy• 16 years ago

You don't have to be completely blind, the person may just have a severe visual impairment, and thus can still see a monitor in 1-2ft in front of them.

10ren4• 16 years ago

I wouldn't have expected horses to be as intelligent as dogs. Probably because I have more experience with dogs. EDIT google's only giving me informal discussions: http://www.petqna.com/other/1014-1-other-petqna.html It seems while they are less intelligent than dogs, they can still give effective assistance.

Aside: I saw a guide dog on a sweltering day in peak summer last year in Melbourne. It was clearly very uncomfortable, licking its lips. But it was also clear there was no chance it would let down its owner. It was touching to see such faithfulness; now I often donate to the guide dogs.

chaosmachine• 16 years ago

Wow, I wasn't expecting an actual horse. I thought for sure this was some kind of Trojan Horse metaphor about Ping and the iTunes store...

ElbertF• 16 years ago

Yup, I was thinking an "elephant in the room" kind of thing.

alttab• 16 years ago

Displaced "viral marketing?"

faramarz• 16 years ago

Great narrative! The picture wouldn't have been the same without it.

This is probably explained by the Change blindness phenomenon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_blindness

blahedo• 16 years ago

THANK you for mentioning that there was a picture there. The page made so much more sense after I loaded it.

alexophile• 16 years ago

I really like the observations his niece makes, specifically “When I play hide and seek with my friends I have to hide, but if I don’t want to be seen by grown-ups I just have to be quiet.”

jlees• 16 years ago

Children are amazing. If you want to refocus your world, talk to one for half an hour.

Wait! Not like that, you'll get arrested.

CamperBob• 16 years ago

I didn't understand children when I was one, so I doubt I'd understand them now.

jacoblyles• 16 years ago

The interaction between children and adults in our culture is weird nowadays.

I was at the zoo with my girlfriend in the reptile section. A little boy was staring into the same tank that we were, his mom was maybe ten feet away. You know how reptiles are, they are always hiding behind some rock or branch or just blending in nefariously. So I ask the boy, "Do you see the snake?" It felt awkward to ignore another human being crowding around the glass with us and I figured I would give him a chance to feel good by showing off his superior reptile-spotting ability.

He seemed shocked that an adult he didn't know would talk to him. There's something weird about that being weird.

Splines2• 16 years ago

Probably a U.S. cultural thing. I find it weird talking to other parents' kids too (I'm a father of two), as you don't know how the other parents will handle it. I'd like to think there are places in this world that aren't so paranoid.

ErrantX• 16 years ago

It's terrible isn't it.

Because in the past you could have been a reptile enthusiast, and he might have been interested and maybe you could have taught him something.

Now everyone just looks at you weird.

sbaqai• 16 years ago

Great article. The author coins the term "tiny pony" to describe the tendency of becoming acclimated to certain exceptional things. ie: There's a pony in the apple store and no one seems to care. Because its always there..

Maybe its because we're so focused on ourselves? I still have a regular brick-type cell phone. So its a lot of fun for me to play with an iPhone or iPad whenever I'm at the store, or when my friends let me play with theirs. I always get an urge to buy one - it could totally make my life better (especially mobile internet).

But if I buy it, I know the magic will go away. It's particular exceptional-ness will become an expectation, and even a frustration when it doesn't work correctly. And after a certain period, I'd likely refer to it as just another brick-type object, compared with whatever relatively exceptional technology is out then.

Qz2• 16 years ago

I got an HTC Incredible which is about on par with an iPhone (in between the 3g and the 4g), and it still seems like magic when I use it.

bruceboughton• 16 years ago

I think this speaks more to your attitude than to the model and brand of phone.

famousactress• 16 years ago

That article brought me more enjoyment-per-paragraph than just about anything in a while. I do wish the photo was revealed somewhere in the middle of the post though. I shared it with my wife that way, and it really has a pretty profound affect to wonder if it's just a metaphor for the first half-dozen paragraphs.

plorkyeran• 16 years ago

Even with the photograph I thought it was just a metaphor until the end. I assumed he had just photoshopped the horse in to make the article more amusing.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

What I don't--- OMG PONIES!

In all seriousness, it may be a trained assistance pet for the blind.

_delirium3• 16 years ago

For me personally, some of the not-being-that-excited-ness is that I grew up reading sci-fi and cyberpunk, and basically always assumed these things were possible and likely, just a matter of implementation details. A device that can translate any language at a button-push? Sure, I heard about it when I was eight. A device you carry around that instantly connects to some sort of communication network? Yeah, I've probably read about a dozen takes on those. Etc.

Weirdly, actually having it doesn't seem to make a huge difference to me. The idea of something like a smartphone was pretty exciting when I read about it in the 1980s, and it was interesting to follow early PDA forays like the Newton. But now that they exist and work well, I haven't even gotten around to buying one yet; by the time reality caught up, it wasn't that exciting anymore.

10ren4• 16 years ago

> The instant gratification provided by being able to have almost any question answered immediately is a tiny pony.

Apart from reference questions (like dictionary meanings, map look up, programming syntax, wikipedia), we are an awfully long way from this.

nl• 16 years ago

Apart from reference questions (like dictionary meanings, map look up, programming syntax, wikipedia), we are an awfully long way from this.

I'm not clear what you mean, but it seems to me that we're pretty close to the point where most things that have an actual answer can be found by typing a question and clicking a button (using a search engine, with fall back to asking a question in a relevant forum)

If you are talking about more philosophical questions, then perhaps - but I think you can gain just as much enlightenment from the click of a button as you used to be able to from months of philosophy classes.

s3graham• 16 years ago

> For me personally, some of the not-being-that-excited-ness is that I grew up reading sci-fi and cyberpunk

I remember being 10? (12? not sure) and having my Mum tell me we had not, in fact, landed humans on any other planets. "Only" the moon. Seemed pretty lame.

danilocampos2• 16 years ago

I grew up with a ravenous appetite for science fiction too. In particular, I was fascinated by handheld computers.

Tricorders, PADDs, Al's Handlink, SELMA, they all drove my imagination nuts.

From my early Handspring visor to today's iPhone 4, real life handhelds have been exciting because they slake my childhood thirst for a piece of the future.

I'm a little sad, though. The first iPhone pretty much put all scifi handhelds to shame, and the iPhone 4 with FaceTime beats even the video communicator from Earth: Final Conflict. After playing with Epic Citadel and seeing the ridiculous graphical power in that tiny package, there's nothing left to thrill in me in the land of pocket computers. The depths of those childhood fantasies have been plumbed.

Ah well. We still have ocular implants with augmented reality HUD overlays and telescopic vision to look forward to!

_delirium3• 16 years ago

Hmm, I can see that on the technological front, but culturally to me it hasn't surpassed the imagined future. I might've read too much cyberpunk, but when I was a kid I really thought this kind of tech was going to totally change things... we were going to live in cyberspace now. Somehow, using smartphones to look up yelp reviews, traffic directions, and email doesn't seem like what I was hoping for. In some weird way, BBSs were more exciting and futuristic to me, creating an ASCII-based virtual world out of beeps on a telephone line between my computer and some random sysop's computer, and with a cultural ethos that this was a new world we could define. Maybe I'm jaded, but now the internet just feels like an extension of irl.

mechanical_fish• 16 years ago

Weirdly, actually having it doesn't seem to make a huge difference to me.

It does to me. But, then, I'm the bibliophile son of a librarian. So the new world manifests as a continuous series of oddnesses: I'm purging my book and map and magazine collection, and it is getting much smaller, and that is weird. The web changes the habits of a lifetime.

It is hard to perceive long-term changes, even when they are big.

piramida• 16 years ago

Technically, it is not a pony but a falabella horse which is a miniature horse originating from Latin America. I know that it is somewhat irrelevant :) But many people have them as pets.

lionhearted• 16 years ago

"Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy" -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

mattmaroon• 16 years ago

Classic bit. Also see http://comedians.jokes.com/patton-oswalt/videos/dvd---exclus...

roryokane• 16 years ago

When I read this post, I thought the whole thing was a just a weird metaphor. I saw the picture at the top, but since there was no explanation in the article of why the pony was in the store, I thought the author had simply photoshopped the pony in. It was only after seeing all these comments taking the claim so seriously that I realized the guy really had seen a pony in the Apple Store.

neilk• 16 years ago

I am in love with the title. "There is a horse in the Apple Store". I want it on t-shirts and cereal boxes and in graffiti on highway overpasses.

I am not even sure what it really means. I know it's purely literal, but it's almost poetic.

tel• 16 years ago

It's not purely literal, Frank Chimeri generalizes the experience to whenever something is naturally astonishing but somehow now impossible to notice.

The "tiny horse" effect!

aaronbrethorst• 16 years ago

Maybe I'm just drunk, having just been kicked out at bar time from the place around the corner[1], but this resonated with me: "When does the magic of a situation fade? When do we get acclimated to the exceptional?...We define a pattern, no matter how exceptional, and acclimate ourselves to it?"

I'm surrounded by exceptional situations every day and they just seem mundane. Tonight I congratulated a guy who just signed a record deal with Sub Pop Records. Earlier this week, I landed a development contract for an iOS app that I think will revolutionize its market come early next year. It goes on from there. These sorts of things seem normal to me now. At 15, I would've been, to quote the article, gobsmacked by my involvement—however tangential—in any of them.

Are human beings just so easily adaptable to their circumstances that they start missing the depth of these 'big' events after a while? What must it be like to be Bill Gates or Bono? "Had dinner with Queen Rania of Jordan and the food was middling to fair. My Gulfstream's flight to New York was delayed due to weather issues. What a joke. Don't they know I'm supposed to have coffee with Bill Clinton tomorrow morning to talk about his philanthropic efforts?"

Where's the magic? What does it take to surprise and delight us? Obviously not a pony.

[1] the haagen-dazs ice cream bar I'm chewing on right now doesn't hurt either: having a 24 hour supermarket across the street is the bomb. Get kicked out of the bar, go buy ice cream. Not a bad way to end a Friday night.

retube3• 16 years ago

There is a well-known corollary here with happiness. People think that if they are million- or billionaires, or have a super-fit girlfriend, or drive a ridiculous car or live in a massive house or whatever they'll be happy, or at least happier. However all studies have shown that rich people are not happier than poor(er) people. And more interesting is people that have suffered catastrophic accidents or contracted disabling diseases: on average these people are no less happy than anyone else.

zackattack4• 16 years ago

Your statement is just wrong. Angus Deaton at Princeton found "Each doubling of national income is associated with a near one unit increase in average life-satisfaction measured on an eleven point scale from 0 ('the worst possible life') to 10 ('the best possible life')". I'm all for deluding yourself with baseless platitudes to rationalize your lack of success, and then getting a Yeah! Yeah! rally of upvotes from people similarly situated, but please don't advance such falsity here.

protomyth• 16 years ago

Living with no money is sure to impede happiness. When lack of money puts you living in a place that has higher crime / lower life expectancy, I would imagine happiness suffers.

I am curious on the studies on how they measured. People on different places on the survival pyramid must have been a consideration.

zackattack4• 16 years ago

I think that ending every night out at the bar with ice cream would probably make it less exciting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habituation

greengarstudios• 16 years ago

This reminds me of the time I saw Steve Jobs in the Apple Store, Palo Alto. No one was looking at him, except me. Eventually, I walked up to him and said hello. Then, I showed him Whiteboard: Collaborative Drawing, the iPad app I developed, on the new iPad I had just bought.

To modify part of the article to fit my experience...

I asked one of the Apple Store employees: "Do you realize Steve Jobs is behind you?"He sighs at me and says, "Yes, he’s in here all the time."

scotth• 16 years ago

What did he think of your app?

DavidSJ• 16 years ago

But there are no children in the Apple Store, for the same reason you would not see a child in a jewelry store: things are small and fragile and expensive and shiny.

In my experience, there are usually quite a number of children in Apple Stores.

FraaJad• 16 years ago

Our local apple store even has kid accessible iMacs for them to play with. And there are always kids during "normal" hours.

ladon86• 16 years ago

In all this talk I think you guys might be missing the most remarkable thing of all.

There was a horse in the Apple store.

josefresco• 16 years ago

A whole thread about a mini horse and not one mention of Rob & Big? I miss Big Black.

moondowner• 16 years ago

I like how the author of the post explains his emotions and conclusions, it's like reading a mini drama :)

timf• 16 years ago

When the tiny pony is a negative thing, many call it Creeping Normalcy [1]. Sounds like the same phenonmenon to me: adjustments that come slowly enough do not get appreciated. Louis CK has a funny bit about it [2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creeping_normalcy

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk

nhebb• 16 years ago

A black president, whose father is from Kenya and mother is from Kansas, being elected President of the United States is a tiny pony.

When does the magic of a situation fade?

I guess that guy hasn't seen any poll numbers lately. It's still pretty cool that we elected a black president, but the magic faded a while ago.

marstall• 16 years ago

Also, in the hospital.

jeberle• 16 years ago

Had he been paying attention, he would have noticed there's also a man in a kilt.

philwelch3• 16 years ago

That's probably a "Utilikilt": http://www.utilikilts.com/

They're not that unusual--I've met at least two people who have one.

joshbert• 16 years ago

I loved the article. Like someone said above, it's like reading a mini-drama.

What really made it for me is how I can relate to it. I'm constantly taken back and think things like 'So many people are trying to take the world into new directions, myself included, and some are successful. The rest of the world gets the end results and we get accustomed to them so incredibly fast. Often times ignoring all the work done or the brilliance of the piece itself.'

Like, for example, I can literally work on my idea for a business, listen to virtually any record that has ever existed that I want to listen, watch any movie that I could possibly want to watch and thousands of other activities all in a single day and without leaving my house.

I could witness the huge developments that other people are making all around the globe and watch some of the most brilliant minds the world has, often the developers themselves, give feedback on said events. And yes, I'm talking about HN.

All in all, it's a great age to live. I'm only 20 and not particularly wealthy, but boy has the trip thus far been incredible.

albertzeyer2• 16 years ago

It reminds me on a passage in Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy by D.Adams. He basically says that people unconsciously ignore / blind out strange not-explainable things.

He also had a funny term for that but I forgot it...

edanm2• 16 years ago

Are you talking about "Somebody else's problem"? From the books: "An SEP [somebody else's problem] is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye."

Apparently, this term is now actually used in Psychology to describe actual phenomena, according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_elses_problem

albertzeyer2• 16 years ago

Ah thanks for linking it, that is what I meant. :)

Btw., your link was broken. Here is the correct one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somebody_Elses_Problem

TheAmazingIdiot• 16 years ago

Most interestingly, that is the heart of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis posited in linguistics.

The "strong" intrepretation was proven false by the fact that American Indians had no name for ships that sail the high seas. Yet, they still described them best in their own language. There are weaker ways to apply the theorem, but most efforts have went to Chomsky's universal grammar.

verisimilitude• 16 years ago

The picture on this post likely depicts a seeing eye horse: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guide_horse

Here's the advantage: both dogs and horses require years to train in this capacity. However, horses then live much longer than dogs, maximizing the value of the training time invested in them.

Plus, they're extremely cute.

Andrew_Quentin• 16 years ago

Off-Topic: Most stories about... cute animal pictures.

On-Topic: ...anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

Perhaps it is only me, but that things are amazing certainly does not gratify my intellectual curiosity. That things are amazing is a given.

WalterBright• 16 years ago

I grew up with airplanes being old hat. But still prickles run down my spine when I look at that old photo of the Wright Flyer's first flight. What an incredible achievement that was, and how long man had dreamed about flying!

There is a Horse in the Apple Store

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