From 1994 until 2004, the sitcom Friends was a pop culture phenomenon. But according to Rachel Green actress Jennifer Aniston one thing would stop the show from working today: the iPhone.
“If Friends was created today, you would have a coffee shop full of people that were just staring into iPhones,” Aniston told Arianna Huffington on Wednesday’s episode of iHeartRadio’s Thrive Global Podcast. “There would be no actual episodes or conversations.”
Being there for you when the rain starts to pour? Apparently there’s no app for that.
iBe there for you
If you want to suddenly feel very old (because, hey, everyone likes being reminded of their own mortality, right?), back when Friends debuted in 1994, the Apple press would have been busy talking about Apple’s PowerBook 150 laptop, the company’s first truly affordable PowerBook, as well as its plans to license out the Mac OS to third-party manufacturers.
Steve Jobs, meanwhile, would still be running NeXT, and not yet a billionaire due to the fact that Pixar hadn’t yet made a splash with Toy Story and subsequently been taken public.
By the time Friends went off the air in 2004, Apple fans would have been saving up their money to buy one of the swanky new iMac G5, its distinctive all-in-one white plastic iMac that looked like the world’s biggest iPod. While there wasn’t yet an iPhone, Apple was already dipping its to into the burgeoning smartphone market by teaming with Motorola to release the ROKR E1, the grandfather of the iPhone and the first Apple-sanctioned cellphone to run iTunes.
Now whether no Friends episodes due to the iPhone would have been better or worse than what we got depends on whether you’re a fan of the show.
Interestingly, Seinfeld — a.k.a. the other sitcom which defined the 1990s — went out of its way to embrace Apple technology, although it was off the air long before the iPhone debuted.
For the record, while Friends may have been no fan of the iPhone, its cast had no problems shilling Windows 95 back in the day. Sadly this didn’t lead to endless Central Perk conversations about the Blue Screen of Death:
Source: Thrive Global Podcast
Via: MTV
