A rotten Apple?
Marco Arment, Tumblr’s CTO, creator of Instapaper, and a well-regarded developer, has upset the Apple cart by mentioning in his personal blog what many of us having been thinking for some time now: the brand has been too focused on marketing for too long, to the detriment of its products. His almost immediate repentance after realizing the magnitude of the reactions cannot hide the great truth: he has touched a point that many users had previously thought before.
Marco’s comments were immediately picked up on Twitter by a large number of highly influential tech commentators, sparking a debate about Apple’s declining standards. Some, like former Apple employee Daniel Jalkut, have written on the subject, discussing the extent to which hardware and software whose operating standards were once significantly better than the competition and that were based on a certain culture about how things were done, appear to have become, under the leadership of a management more focused on marketing than the pursuit of excellence, quite simply a “normal” brand, and one that may well encounter difficulties in maintaining its high profitability.
Not that everybody agrees: some say that while Marco Arment might be right and that Apple’s products have declined in quality, the problem isn’t the company’s emphasis on marketing. Then there are those who say that while Apple might have its problems, they’re nothing compared to those its competitors are having to deal with.
I switched to Apple in 2002, and I have to say that while I’m not fanboy, compared to the PCs I had been using until then, what they said about “it just works” was certainly true. That said, there are some Apple products that I have passed on. Now, more than a decade later, I use some programs in their older versions because the newer ones aren’t up to scratch in my opinion and I wait to update operating systems until there is virtually no alternative, simply because I do not trust the “advantages” of the more recent versions. The most recent Apple computer I bought, a MacBook Pro Retina, is one of the worst I have ever owned: among its less appealing traits is a tendency to ghost, which is really shameful, particularly at the prices Apple charge. These are problems that when reported to Apple receive replies the subtitles to which read: “Come on! Your machine is more than a year old, what do you expect?” This is not exactly the response one expects after spending enough money to buy a decent second-hand car, and when the problem is quite clearly to do with the manufacture and choice of components of said computer.
As for the software, there are any number of testimonies out there about the steady decline in quality, so much so that even people in design, who have always been Apple’s standard bearers, are falling out of love with the brand.
At the same time, Marco Arment’s complaints come a little late: the consumer electronics seasons around the world are closed, and people have bought their computers and other devices for the year. He could have done a lot more damage to Apple had he chosen to raise this issue a month ago, say.
That said, in the longer term, if Apple doesn’t do something about what seems to be an increasingly widespread perception, it could find itself facing a backlash from an until-now loyal consumer base. Hell hath no fury…
(En español, aquí)
