How Steve Jobs and Apple turned technology into a religion

Decades after Apple’s founding, we’ve grown used to referring to lovers of the company’s products as a “cult.” The devotion of customers to Apple products has long been the envy of competitors for its fanatical fervor.

It turns out that the religious intensity with which people follow the company is not entirely by accident. In a new book, “Appletopia,” author Brett Robinson examines the way that Steve Jobs drew on religious metaphors and iconography to elevate his products specifically, and technology more generally, into a kind of religion.

“The creative rhetoric around Apple’s technology has favored religious metaphors,” Robinson said in an interview. “Some of it is conscious on Apple’s part. Some of it is unconscious.”

Robinson is a visiting professor of marketing in the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame. The book grew out his dissertation and a course he taught on religion, technology and marketing.

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