what bugs me about Apple?
Jan 27 2010
This whole Max iPad hype phenomenon is nothing new. After all, MacWorld is nothing new, and it’s been killing the Twitters practically since there were the Twitters. I was working a block from MacWorld 2008, and people in my office, not to mention on the street, went kind of nuts after they announced the then-mesmerizing MacBook Air, which time has revealed to be more like a thin silver turd, but with worse battery life.
The MacWorld keynote always makes a big splash. You can set your watch by it, not to mention the stock market. And even the MacWorld-uninitiated have been dealing with iPhone hype every summer since 2007.
This is all to say that if Apple was going to annoy me, they’ve had ample opportunity well before this iPad thing. But for me, Apple’s hype machine remained a faint noise in the background until my new job in 2007 assigned me a MacBook Pro as a work laptop. Since I’m a longtime Linux user, the Mac OS took some getting used to, but soon I actually started enjoying it. And when I drunkenly dunked my precious Nokia N95 in the anti-hangover water by my bedstand in June of ‘08, I ended up replacing it with a 3G iPhone, which I used for over a year.
I enjoyed it. I got myself a bunch of apps just like everyone else. But about six months ago, the Apple/Google rivalry began over the Google Voice iPhone app.
That did me in. I couldn’t help feeling that Apple was abusing its power as a market influencer, once again moving us away from openness and interoperability. Nobody said this better than Fake Steve Jobs. I got really mad and cancelled my iPhone contract (and my AT&T landline), sold the 3G on Craigslist, sold my MacBook Pro, sold my Apple stock.
It felt really good.
But while I’d realized what annoyed me about Apple’s product policies, I still hadn’t put my finger on why Apple’s hype machine bugged me so much. After all, it’s just a bunch of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It doesn’t move me or the people I respect to buy their products.
But with today’s iPad keynote, I finally realized why. After all, tablets are nothing new. Unlike the iPhone, the iPad is hardly a market breakthrough. Tablets? E-book readers? That’s so three years ago. Movies on the go? Wait, doesn’t everybody’s laptop do that now? Last time I was on a plane, it sure seemed like it.
No, what bugs me about Apple is that they’ve figured out how to cater to that particular thing I hate about Americans: tell them [this is good] in the right way, and it becomes true. In the last couple of years, Apple has transformed itself from an innovator of never-before-seen hardware and groundbreaking UIs into a gently smiling, well-connected uncle you see at the family reunion who explains that the groundbreaking tech of the last year is now mainstream enough to buy.
I’m hardly an HP or Amazon apologist. But I hate it when true innovators don’t get their due. I even feel bad for Larry Ellison and his premature invention of the NC. Apple knocked it out of the parck when they invented the iPhone. But what have they done for us lately? Right now, it seems we’re doing a lot more for them.
