It’s often repeated that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. A homologous maxim applies to success: success makes one cocky and runaway success makes one an arrogant jackass. Although a tree does not a forest make but a case in point are the rich 1% who maintain that all of their success is down to their genius and hard work. The slaves they employ have nothing to do with it! After all slaves wouldn’t be slaves if they weren’t inferior.
So where does Apple come in here? Yes, that Apple. I have been a fan since my first iPod (touch wheel, remember them) when it replaced a useless Sony MP3 player. A few years later my (then new) boyfriend gifted me a MacBook Pro for my birthday. This replaced a Windows PC that crashed as often as Dreamliner 787s get grounded. Touch wood, in five years the MacBook has not crashed once. I’m typing on it.
But my affair with Apple has had its frustrations: one iPod had a faulty clock from Day One and while I had a phone and a wristwatch to tell the time the songs I listened to had the wrong time stamp. So I’d listen to a song today and it would say Last Played June 2010. The song right after that could have a Last Played date of November 2010 and the one after August 2011. Talk about Time Shifting! Since I use Last Played to organise playlists this was a very big issue.
The next problem was a 2nd generation iPod shuffle which I resurrected from the beyond when I got fed up with the iPod (itself recently brought back to life after the headphone jack on my iPhone 3GS packed up). The first thing I noticed was that the songs I played would not have an updated Last Played but the ones updated would not have been played at all!!! How hard can it be to have a functioning clock on an Apple product? I’m not a techie but if Americans are incapable of designing a functioning clock the Japanese and Swiss have been doing it for decades, why not borrow the technology?
A couple of weeks ago I went out and got myself a 4th generation iPod shuffle. It only cost forty British pounds and surely all iPod problems would have been fixed? This is 2012 for crying out loud and Samsung are throwing dust in Apple’s face! The first two weeks were great but for the last couple of days Voice Over has been interrupting songs when I’m on the treadmill and songs are skipping all over the place. Was it me? Was it my particular product? Moreover my headphones remote would stop working and I’d have to use the controls on the shuffle. I went online as I do to look for a solution and, ahem, loads and loads and loads of people have been having problems and still Apple will not fix Voice Over.
I don’t mind paying a premium for a better product but it had better be better. Reading the comments on several forums I have come to the conclusion that the folks at Apple have their noses in the cloud and are totally deaf to the howls from Planet Ground below. They are busy folks at Cupertino; busy drinking their own Kool Aid and cashing their share options.
What made Apple great (I think) was the total focus on product, product, product. It seems now the priority is selling and meeting their numbers every financial quarter. Product and customers be damned. Now one might think this state of affairs has arisen since Steve Jobs passed away but, ahem again, problems with Voice Over go back to at least 2009/10. One day the ground will shift – some say it has shifted and that Apple has lost its magic. I was in a meeting today (credit analysis) and one manager was emphatic that Apple products were useless compared to Samsung (“so much better”). I don’t want to get into the turf war between IOS and Android or Apple and Samsung but at this rate the cocky jackasses at Cupertino will wake up to find half their customers have gone over to the other side and the door back to them slammed shut.
If the problem is faulty software, fix it NOW! if the problem is faulty production, fix it NOW! Charge us a premium please but only for products that rock and are bustproof. Kool Aid is for losers. The question is: will the stupendously wealthy Tim Cook give a finger fuck? Jobs must be turning in his grave.
d3mola 