Would you buy a laptop from Jennifer Aniston? Inside Apple’s product placement machine

Ted Lasso, the sweetest guy on television, is trying to sell you stuff. In one episode of the eponymous comedy series about a feel-good football manager, Apple products feature 36 times. Ted talks on his iPhone, natters over FaceTime, sends emails with his MacBook Air. He doesn’t quite prostrate himself before an effigy of the late Steve Jobs but you get the idea.

Much the same experience is served up by Apple TV+’s other big hit, The Morning Show, which returns Friday for a second season. Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon spend enormous chunks of their screen time with iPhones clamped to their ears or whispering sweet-nothings to their MacBooks.

The show is ostensibly about behind-the-scenes back-stabbing on American breakfast TV. Yet at a more fundamental level it’s a celebration of shiny and expensive kit – all brought to you by the corporation that invented luxury minimalism.

As often as not these products appear in what experts call the “fifth quadrant”: the square bang in the centre of the screen that is usually the focus of viewer attention. And not that anyone needs to be told this, but all of that Ted Talk on the iPhone confirms Lasso as the hero. Apple doesn’t allow villains to be shown using its products. As Knives Out director Rian Johnson revealed several years, ago if you see a character in an Apple show speaking into a non-branded phone, you can take it they’re the villain.

This actually happens in season one of The Morning Show, in which Billy Crudup’s unsavoury father is depicted using an Android-type device. What a monster.

So ferocious is Apple’s product placement it steamrolls on even when the actual products are out of sight. Whenever someone on The Morning Show receives a text or email, they are alerted via that tell-tale iOS notification. The effect is truly relentless: a Wall Street Journal analysis of Apple TV+ content found that, over 74 episodes of hits such as Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, Trying and Defending Jacob, 300 iPhones, 120 MacBooks, and 40 pairs of AirPods were shown.

Apple’s orgy of product placement will strike some as excessive. When the company got into the TV “content” game several years ago, many in the industry heralded it as a quantum leap for home entertainment. In fact, it’s been quantum leap for Apple hawking its wares.

Not that it's really reinventing the i-wheel. Crowbarring brands into films and television is as old as the medium itself. The Lumière Brothers plugged Sunlight Soap in their silent movies. And the term “soap opera’ obviously comes from the soap brands that constantly featured in early serial dramas.

Apple has, however, always taken the digital biscuit. Its products have popped up prominently in everything from Sex and the City to Mission: Impossible (a PowerMac laptop had a starring role in the first film).

Yet especially since launching its own streaming service, the company that once hired Ridley Scott to make an ad inspired by 1984 has gone full Orwellian. In one episode of M. Night Shyamalan thriller Servant, for instance, we see a character using Apple’s FaceTime software to conduct two simultaneous conversations via iPad and through the Apple TV app. It’s like being inside Steve Jobs’ brain with no escape hatch.

That Apple TV+ would be as much about product as entertainment was made clear early on. Hollywood executives summoned to Apple’s Cupertino HQ quickly discovered that the House of Jobs was charting its own course – and had its own value system.

Apple, the suits were surprised to learn, was vague about release dates and marketing campaigns – the sort of things over which Tinsel Town traditionally obsesses. It was, though, incredibly specific about how often, and in what context, Apple products appeared on screen.

“People involved… said Apple executives had expressed squeamishness when it comes to the portrayal of technology in the shows,” went a report in the New York Times. “How exactly are you using that iPhone?, Or that Mac laptop?”

Apple has at least been consistent. The saturation of product placement across its original programming on Apple TV+ is extraordinary. Ted Lasso is drowning in Apple kit. In one storyline, Ted finalises his divorce by scanning the legal documents using his iPhone. And in a single four second scene of The Morning Show, nine Apple products are shown. In the first episode of the series, there are 31 shots of Apple devices – including nine of the company’s logo.

This is of course Apple’s prerogative. The corporation is reportedly pumping $15 million per episode into The Morning Show. And so it might reasonably reserve the right to showcase all the gadgets it wants.

Apple could also point out that it is hardly alone. Netflix’s recent gender-swap remake of Nineties teen comedy She’s All That – now, He’s All That – includes, for instance, placements for fast food and soft drink brands. As well as clothing websites, make-up brands and (non-Apple) computers.

A Netflix product placement is worth a lot more to corporations than a wink from Apple TV+. That’s because of the vast difference of scale in the subscriber bases. Apple TV + may work with high-profile stars such as Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon, but its user numbers in the United States are estimated at just 40 million – including the many Apple customers who receive a year’s free sign-up when buying a new phone or laptop.

Netflix, by contrast, has 209 million paid subscribers. And the value of a Netflix plug can be extraordinary. A cameo in season three of Strangers Things was worth over $15 million in advertising spend to the 100 brands that featured on screen, it was estimated.

If there is a difference between Apple and Netflix it is the former’s sheer insatiability. No matter what else happens on screen, the brand must be showcased. “New Coke”, Coca Cola’s disastrous attempt at reviving its fortunes in the mid-Eighties, features prominently in Stranger Things 3. Yet this merely adds to the Spielbergian charm. In Ted Lasso, by contrast, the endless sales pitch encoded within the DNA of the script is in conflict with the show’s air of everyman optimism.

Put that down to Silicon Valley culture. Apple and peers such as Google and Facebook didn’t get where they are today by taking a softly softly approach or by asking permission at every turn.

That philosophy has been transposed wholesale and shamelessly to streaming. When the Apple comedy Mythic Quest filmed a lockdown episode, characters dialled in via FaceTime wearing Apple earbuds (apart from a villain whose headphones were concealed beneath her hair). Not even the vintage space race saga For All Mankind is exempt – a recent instalment set in the late Seventies featured the venerable Apple II computer.

Are there any limits to Apple’s campaign to turn streaming into a quasi-opaque shop window? Well, advance reports suggest there won't be any iPhones or MacBooks in its adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels, set 50,000 years hence (around the time the next Game of Thrones novel comes out). Nonetheless, in the trailers the expensive sci-fi sets have a suspiciously blank, minimalist sheen – like Apple Stores in the far future. In space they may not be able to hear you scream. But if you listen carefully you can tell that they’re still trying to subliminally flog you Apple gear.