Apple Releases ‘I’m not remarkable’ short film

Apple on Tuesday released a new film, called I’m Not Remarkable (embedded below).

The short film, brought to life by the same creative team behind another Apple accessibility film in 2022’s The Greatest, is a music video of sorts for the song “I’m Not Remarkable” by Kittyy & The Class. As the film is from Apple and thus partly a vehicle for product marketing, the film shows off things like iPhone and Apple Watch running accessibility features such as VoiceOver on iOS and AssistiveTouch on watchOS, respectively. Additionally, Apple has a new webpage which complements the video.

Messaging-wise, I’m Not Remarkable is, in fact, rather remarkable as it pushes back on long-held societal stereotypes about people with disabilities. It puts forth the idea that those in the disability community—yours truly included—are first and foremost human beings like anyone else who happen to use (Apple’s) technology to access a world unbuilt for us. We’re just people trying to live our lives like everyone else on this planet.

Moreover, a cogent argument could be made, again, that Apple’s accessibility software is technically remarkable unto itself. Armchair analysts and Wall Street types love to flog the company for a perceived lack of innovation, especially lately regarding artificial intelligence, but the reality is a big driver of Apple innovation lies in accessibility. It’s truly an incubator of innovation, what with features like the iPadOS pointer and Apple Intelligence’s Type to Siri tracing its origins back to ostensibly esoteric, niche assistive technologies. In both cases, they were “handed off” internally by the Accessibility group to the wider OS team so to be further massaged for more mainstream use cases.