The new Apple revealed itself in 2015

Quartz looks back at Apple's 2015.This year, CEO Tim Cook did a lot of interviews by Apple standards, from this month's "60 Minutes" episode to 20 minutes with BuzzFeed in the back seat of a Cadillac Escalade. He "crashed" a coding party - conveniently while a Mashable editor was in attendance - and "wrote a message" to CNBC's Jim Cramer. You might even say he likes the attention.Meanwhile, Jony Ive, Apple's chief design officer, participated in an FT profile and received the New Yorker treatment earlier this year, inviting a journalist into his Bentley. To the media, a "rare look inside Jony Ive's design lab" seems to be the prized new "rare look inside North Korea." (And similarly staged.)This PR campaign by Apple seems designed to make the company look more open and inviting, but in the end it just makes it all look fake and staged - which reflects incredibly badly on the media outlets participating in these PR events. For a company and accompanying fanbase riling so heavily against advertising, Apple sure does a lot of advertising thinly veiled as actual "reports" or "news stories".But hey, people eat it up, so I can't blame either the advertiser or the willing media participant.