This past year, I decided to put a little bit of cleverness into my costume. Ironically, this one really didn’t take me a long time to come up with.
This year for Hallowe’en I decided to dress up as the CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs. Dressing as him was actually pretty easy. All I did was bring out a black sweater with a turtleneck-ish neck line, wear sneakers and blue jeans, grow out my beard a bit, wear glasses (already done) and make up a sign to wear around my neck to make it easy for people to see who I was:
Compare to the real one:
To make it clear to people who I was, I had to add a sign around my neck. Steve Jobs has come out recently speaking against Google Android (competing with the iPhone) saying that the iPhone is superior because it is a closed platform. Quite frankly, given that Android phones are selling like hot cakes and could potentially cut in to iPhone sales, it comes as no surprise that Jobs would make this claim.
In addition, the iPad and iPhone has no Flash support, which is software from Adobe. Flash is the software that makes a lot of different web pages look really nice and pretty. The reason that Apple won’t support it (ie, render it in the Safari browser on mobile devices) is because it is buggy and prone to crashes. Apple and Jobs are pretty big on preserving a great user experience and when Flash crashes on the iPhone or iPad, people think that it is Apple’s fault. It’s not but that is the perception. To counter this, Apple alleviates this possibility by doing their own YouTube app on the iPad and iPhone and not supporting Flash. Jobs has also publically criticized Adobe Flash because of this and it has led to a bit of a war of words between the two organizations.
So, in order to make it clear about who I was supposed to be, I wore a sign around my neck indicating that I was against Flash:
If you flipped the sign around, it was clear that I was against Google Android:
This was a rather geeky costume and you had to know the inside story behind this, but the whole point of it was to be clever instead of obvious. I call it “The Thinking Man’s Costume.”