This has nothing to do with the iPhone or Apple fans or the intelligence of the people interviewed. Give them any product and tell them it's the new version and ask what they think while pointing a camera at them. Then do the same experiment without a camera and see what they say.
As with Jay walking skits, they only show you the "funny" parts and not someone who is not intimidated by a camera and a filming crew to say their honest opinion.
This is a skit on a comedy show. It shouldn't be representative of anything except that.
But I suppose that's my problem with it. All too often these days shows like Leno, Kimmel, and to a lesser extent Conan have made these skits that blur the line between fact and parody.
If you think back to the heyday of SNL, they did parody and satire. But their satire was done with caricature characters, and absurdly ridiculous "documentary" style films that left no doubt that, while there was a satirical edge, they understood that reality was something short of their skits.
These types of films create an illusion that everyone you talk to on the street is stupid. In this case stupid enough to believe that the phone they're being shown is different from the one in their pocket. And they do it with editing, a technique that is unfair to the real world, and diminishes the comic value of the skit, in my opinion. The fact of the matter is likely that 90% of the people they approached either had no interest in participating, knew that the phone was the same one they were carrying, or at the very least said it looked the same.
What they broadcast was the edited version, and to me it's the equivalent of someone using iPhoto to completely alter a photo of a sunset, then representing that it really looked like that when they took the picture.
It was mildly amusing, but not hilarious, because the editing takes away any connection to reality, while implying that it is real.
At least the old Candid Camera show let us see one or two people who didn't fall for the joke. That means that the producers of that show felt secure enough at least to poke fun at themselves just as much as the people they were trying to pull the pranks on.
This new flavor of mocumentary comedy doesn't do that. Instead it seems to imply something is true, and thus worthy of satire and ridicule, while using the power of the edit to quash any chance of the viewer knowing otherwise.
