The unhealthy information first: You’ll be able to’t purchase it. The excellent news is that should you’re a fan of the Apple TV Plus sequence Severance, the web Apple Retailer has a brand new Easter egg for a present stuffed with them: the Lumon Terminal Professional. The fictional pc is featured on the high of Mac store pages and has its personal touchdown web page.
Whereas there isn’t any particulars about what {hardware} contains the pc terminal, ostensibly made by Lumon, the cult-like firm from the present, the web page incorporates a spoiler warning and a hyperlink to an 11-minute behind-the-scenes video from the present.
The sequence simply concluded its second season on the corporate’s streaming service and has been renewed for a 3rd. Within the video on the Lumon Terminal Professional web page, sequence co-creator Ben Stiller discusses how three editors turned 83 terabytes of footage into the Severance season two finale.
The finale’s marching band scene is damaged down when it comes to video parts, and components from the season’s seventh episode, a significant visible departure on Severance, are detailed. A 3rd section within the video discusses how music is important to the tone of the sequence.
After all, it is all a promo: Utilizing a fictional, dated pc terminal from a sequence that Apple makes (as a part of its $1 billion a 12 months spending on Apple TV Plus content material) to promote fashionable Apple {hardware} for folks together with video editors and music composers.
Crossing the Streams
Dr. Andy Tsay, a professor of enterprise and analytics on the Leavey College of Enterprise at Santa Clara College, says that Apple is uniquely positioned to drag off a crossover like this that does not really feel “ham-fisted” in the way in which it will possibly when different {hardware} producers try product placement (or reverse product placement, as on this case).
“I definitely suppose it is a good suggestion,” Tsay mentioned, “It is sort of an idiosyncratic mixture of circumstances, a mix of circumstances, the place you’ve got bought this firm that sells this iconic {hardware} that occurs to have a TV studio that makes these exhibits that focus on a selected sort of buyer.”
Tsay mentioned that what Apple is doing with its Apple TV Plus service, spending billions to supply content material some will eat on its units have been carried out earlier than. It goes again to the times of Basic Electrical making content material for radios and TVs the corporate additionally offered to clients.
“The thought of Apple creating the ecosystem to drive the {hardware} isn’t a brand new thought,” he mentioned. “They’ve simply executed it brilliantly, they usually’ve managed to do it in an business the place different rivals haven’t got the revenue margins to create a slush fund to do that.”
Apple TV Plus, he mentioned, is only one push on Apple’s long-term purpose of constructing its service companies.
“It is a good higher-margin enterprise than making {hardware},” Tsay says, even when Apple TV Plus subscriptions aren’t but subsidizing what the corporate spends on content material.
As for the Lumon Professional Terminal itself, Tsay says he is a fan. He imagines it is the sort of machine Apple co-founder Steve Jobs “on the peak of his powers” would have designed in his iMac sweet shade part, “if he may have gone again and redesigned the Apple IIe.”