Posts Tagged: apple arrogance

apple / observatory / technology — 4 Comments
3
Aug 10

Agitated over arrogance

Didn’t realize I’d strike such a nerve with my recent post about Apple’s arrogance. The flood of comments gave my database a pretty good workout.

I thought a number of responses were comment-worthy in themselves. A few of my faves:

No one forces you to purchase an iPod, iMac, iPhone or iPad if you don’t want one … Purchasing one means you understand some of the constraints and some of the liberties inherent in the device. — Steve516
Right you are, Steve. We all get that Apple exerts more control than other technology companies. We also get that for most people, the result is a more satisfying, liberating experience. Lapel-pin versions of this comment should be distributed far and wide.

In 2008, Steve said iPhone don’t need multitasking and video chat. In 2010, these are main features. All fan boys just followed him 2008, just said hey why do you need multitasking in iPhone. — Vijay
Score one for the anti-Apples. Steve Jobs does have a history of dismissing an idea, only to embrace it later. “Nobody wants to watch movies on an iPod” is a famous one. And yes, many Apple enthusiasts blindly follow. (One day we must learn to speak without getting the script from Cupertino first.) However fun it may be to talk about the sheepish flock, it has nothing to do with the merits of Apple products. So this complaint falls under the category of “I hate Apple users” rather than “I hate Apple products.” Argument dismissed.

What is undeniable is that Apple evokes strong emotion. In my experience there are very few people who have a neutral standing on Apple’s methods and products. And that is part of their success. If you try to please everyone you produce policies and products which evoke no strong emotion, no attachment. — Haight Moar
 Bingo. Both of these points capture the essence of Apple. Apple ignites passion, be it love or hate. It’s a level of public interest that is incredibly rare, and almost impossible to achieve by calculation. I’ll go out on a limb here and say you probably reacted differently to iPhone 4 than you did to the Microsoft Kin. Apple is open about the fact that they don’t try to please everyone — they try to please themselves, believing that what gets them fired up will get customers fired up too. It might sound cocky, but it produces better products than a focus group.

Hack your phones until they scream. Nobody cares. Just leave mine alone. It works fine. You can draw a moustache on the Mona Lisa, but that wouldn’t improve it. — Notablogger
 Just as Antennagate is a far bigger deal for tech bloggers than it is for customers, so is the notion that Apple is manically restrictive. Customers fall in love with a beautiful device that does amazing things, period. It’s hard to convince people they’re being deprived when they’re staring at a library of 225,000 apps.

[Edited for English] The lens in your observatory is of colored glass, rather than a pure glass lens. It shows everything painted in some color, say red, and u see everything as reddish. You cannot see the truth. And worse, sometimes your observatory becomes blind! — kabeer
Damn, you caught me red-handed. There I go seeing things through that annoying lens of my own experience. Surely things would be simpler if I could suppress my time working with executive teams at Apple, Dell, Intel, IBM, Compaq and others, or those long days toiling on both PCs and Macs. Maybe then the truth would be revealed!

Just because a business practice makes stock prices go up does not mean it is the best practice. There is far more involved in the thriving of the human race than profit-making. — Barry
Very true, Barry. But you direct your criticism at the wrong company. Any self-respecting Apple detractor will laugh at the notion, but Apple does have a different philosophy about profit. They’re guided by the belief that if they focus on making great products, profit will naturally result. Most companies find it impossible to move profit down a notch in the priority list.

What do you haters want? … You want us to admit Apple isn’t perfect? I admit, they screw up sometimes. — Vent
Yep, Apple has made mistakes. Some have been whoppers. But if you live in fear of making a mistake, you’ll never do anything great. Most companies are so constrained by processes set up to prevent failure, and so unwilling to accept risk, they rarely create world-changing products.

There is barely anything new – Just bringing everyday technology to the unaware masses. So yea, I kinda agree that they’re a sales company, not really a leading tech place. — Raghav
 How many times have we heard this one before. How simple it is to do what Apple does. They don’t invent anything, they just—

Hey, wait a second. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before. If Apple can make billions of dollars simply by bringing everyday technology to the unaware, why don’t we just start a company and do the same thing? How hard can that be? We’ll be rich! Who’s with me?

observatory / strategy / technology — 105 Comments
22
Jul 10

The ever-arrogant Apple

Following the Antennagate news conference, certain critics quickly concluded that Apple was acting like its usual arrogant self.

I couldn’t agree more.

How dare Apple think they can make this problem go away with a free case that makes the problem go away. They need to suffer more than that.

This company was practically founded on arrogance. Imagine, two guys in a garage thinking they could out-compute companies like IBM and HP. In later years, they’d tell us to abandon the standard PC interface and use some silly mouse to control our computers. With smug superiority, they’d cut out the floppy disk we’d come to love. Errgh.

If only we thought to stop them then.

Because it wasn’t long after that Apple — a company without any real consumer electronics experience — had the gall to build the music player that Sony or some better-qualified company should have built. This self-appointed savior of the music business somehow seduced the record companies with an online music store that forces us all to go along with “their vision” of how music should be sold.

With iPhone, Apple took its arrogance to an extreme. They marched right into a market owned by big, successful global companies like Motorola and Nokia, believing they could “school them” by reimagining the smartphone. How self-important can a company get?

Then came iPad, where Apple’s arrogantly arrogant take on arrogance was laid bare for all to see. This is pure Apple, telling us they can do what Microsoft and others had failed to do for a decade before. Overnight, they create a new category and expect us to follow their vision for the future of computing? And suck us into making even more purchases at the iTunes Store?

It’s gotten to the point where Apple doesn’t even try to disguise their arrogance. They’re a company that creates devices other companies should have created, follows standards only when it pleases them, shuns research to create only the products they’d like to use themselves  — and then won’t even let outsiders tamper with the platforms they’ve created!

Look what they’ve done to poor Adobe, yanking away their right to spend more than three years figuring out how to run Flash on mobile devices. Look what they’ve done to the world’s developers, telling them to write specifically for iPhone rather than just port over apps designed for less capable phones. Compounding their sin, they have the unrelenting gall to insist that apps meet some basic standards for quality and reliability. With their “our way or the highway” attitude, Apple takes choice away from customers, forcing them to settle for a library of only 225,000 apps.

In my mind, Apple is just another in a long list of companies who make the mistake of following their own vision — like Porsche or Nike. Whatever happened to just fitting in?

Obviously, Apple’s excessive arrogance will be their downfall. Never mind that their market share has been so rapidly increasing for so long in so many categories. Or that Apple’s business model produces vastly more profit than those of other technology companies. Chalk that up to good fortune.

One day all the sheep under Steve Jobs’ spell will wake up and demand that Apple act more like other technology companies. Then at last iPhones can be more like Droids, Macs can be more like PCs and Apple can enjoy the PC makers’ perennial sense of economic doom. Apple shareholders will finally be able to rejoice in an investment that avoids such dizzying heights.

That’s the way it oughta be.