My favorite bit of yesterday’s 2011 WWDC keynote happened during Phil Schiller’s segment on Apple’s forthcoming Mac OS X Lion update, which can be viewed at timecode 27:30 in the now available video stream. In making the case for Lion’s new peer-to-peer file sharing feature AirDrop, Schiller argued that it represents a marked improvement over good old ”sneaker net,” that reliable but unsophisticated method of copying files to a USB thumb drive and walking them across the room to a colleague. This was the image projected on the screen behind him:

The only purpose of this picture was to illustrate that USB thumb drives are inefficient, undesirable and obsolete, that these drives are an inferior solution to the one Apple was introducing just then. And yet they didn’t choose a stock image to make this point, but rather a beautifully executed illustration in the Apple style, with every detail exquisitely accounted for, including the little ring at the end. They put real work into it. Only Apple would go through the trouble of rendering the objects of its disdain so well.

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