July 19, 2009How long can Apple keep getting away with it?

It says something that I wasn’t even surprised when I read this tidbit of news: iTunes blocks rival smartphones. Essentially someone’s come along with a third party product that rivals the iPhone, that has plug-and-play capacity with iTunes. And Apple have blocked it.

“Oh, we don’t test third party applications or hardware, so if they stop working, that’s not our problem,” Apple cry. It strikes me as pretty obvious that this is deliberate.

As a Mac user for almost all of this decade, I’ll just come right out and say this. Apple have been in a steady decline the last few years. My old iBook G4 was built like a tank. The two year old MacBook I’m writing this on is full of holes. Literally. The flimsy casing is cracked, the dual core processor whines like a mosquito buzzing about your head, and the fans sometimes growl like they’re about to give in.

Apple have come a long way since their 1984 advert pitching them as the plucky underdog taking on the bland masses.

Unfortunately news like today’s is just the latest in a long line of disappointments from Apple. If people want to use a product that isn’t the iPhone with iTunes, let them. It’s better to lose a few sales to another product than lose a lot of sales when your brand’s goodwill evaporates.

Apple are no longer the plucky underdog. They’re just another faceless corporation grubbing for your money. They’ve become the epitome of style over substance, of branding a lifestyle that’s shiny and white but hollow inside. The iPhone is the apogee of this. It’s nowhere near as useful as a Blackberry. Yet still people buy it in droves, despite the fact that until the latest version, the iPhone didn’t even have a cut-and-paste function!

How is this possible? I saw an advert on the TV exclaiming the wonders of the new “cut and paste” iPhone and I couldn’t believe the bare-faced-cheek, marketing something so simple as an innovation. Heck, my seven year old Palm Treo could cut and paste. And the battery lasted longer than a few hours, too.

I happen to like OS X. I’d pick it any day over Windows Vista. This, for me, is the only reason I’m still buying Apple. But I’m doing it grudgingly. Yes, you have my money. But you no longer have my goodwill. The second a better product comes along, say, the new Google Operating System or even Windows 7, if it turns out to be any good, I’m gone.

Right now Apple strikes me as a lesson in how to have everything and throw it all away. Short term profit at the sacrifice of the values that put them where they are in the first place.

Think different? Right now, Apple’s managers aren’t thinking at all.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 2:04 pm and is filed under Blog, Branding, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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