The bad news first: You can’t buy it. The good news is that, if you’re a fan of the Apple TV Plus series Severance, the online Apple Store has a new Easter egg for a show full of them: the Lumon Terminal Pro. The fictional computer is featured at the top of Mac shop pages and has its own landing page.
While there are no details about what hardware comprises the computer terminal, ostensibly made by Lumon, the cult-like company from the show, the page features a spoiler warning and a link to an 11-minute behind-the-scenes video from the show.
The series just concluded its second season on the company’s streaming service and has been renewed for a third. In the video on the Lumon Terminal Pro page, series co-creator Ben Stiller discusses how three editors turned 83 terabytes of footage into the Severance season two finale.
The finale’s marching band scene is broken down into video components, and elements from the season’s seventh episode, a major visual departure on Severance, are detailed. A third segment in the video discusses how music is critical to the series’ tone.
Of course, it’s all a promo: Using a fictional, dated computer terminal from a series that Apple makes (as part of its $1 billion annual spending on Apple TV Plus content) to sell modern Apple hardware for people including video editors and music composers.
Crossing the streams
Dr. Andy Tsay, a professor of business and analytics at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University, says that Apple is uniquely positioned to pull off a crossover like this that doesn’t feel “ham-fisted” in the way it can when other hardware manufacturers attempt product placement (or reverse product placement, as in this case).
“I certainly think it’s a good idea,” Tsay said, “It’s kind of an idiosyncratic combination of circumstances, a combination of conditions, where you’ve got this company that sells this iconic hardware that happens to have a TV studio that makes these shows that target a particular type of customer.”
Tsay said that what Apple is doing with its Apple TV Plus service, spending billions to produce content some will consume on its devices, has been done before. It goes back to the days of General Electric making content for radios and TVs that the company also sold to customers.
“The idea of Apple creating the ecosystem to drive the hardware is not a new idea,” he said. “They’ve just executed it brilliantly, and they’ve managed to do it in an industry where other competitors don’t have the profit margins to create a slush fund to do this.”
He said Apple TV Plus is just one step toward Apple’s long-term goal of building its service businesses.
“It’s an even higher-margin business than making hardware,” Tsay says, even if Apple TV Plus subscriptions aren’t yet subsidizing what the company spends on content.
As for the Lumon Pro Terminal itself, Tsay says he’s a fan. He imagines it’s the kind of machine Apple co-founder Steve Jobs “at the peak of his powers” would have designed in his iMac candy color phase, “if he could have gone back and redesigned the Apple IIe.”
