Steve Jobs' Bad Apple

My first IT job was as a 'User Support Coordinator' with the University of Houston wherein I was the chief desktop support guy for the university's Development division. That was the early days of Apple's System 7, and if you're not into talking about Apple products or their crappy quality, stop reading now and come back tomorrow. I'm considering something on homeless puppies and I'm sure you'll like that.

Anyway, that was my last committed link to the world of Apple products and justly so. I'd never turn down a Mac PowerBook Pro if it were given to me and I admire Apple's ability at taking the colors white and silver and building an entire marketing strategy around them using less-than-new technology, and less-than-brilliant college students. Still, who DOESN'T love looking at a Mac and all the fancy slick stuff it does? Who doesn't have or doesn't want an iPod? Yeah, old technology and there are better portable music players out there; but there's just something about those hip white strings hanging from your ears that give you an extra spring in your step, encouraging you to jam to Maroon 5 even when you're not entirely sure what a Maroon 5 is. But that's where it ends with me.

I'm a clinical phoneopath, needing and craving the latest cell phone gizmo and gadget. I had the Razor before anyone else did. Likewise with the Palm Treo. I've had the Chocolate and the LG phone that plays iTunes which even included the little spin wheel. I'm currently on the Blackberry Pearl with the Curve in my crosshairs but I refuse on principal, even if I could justify the expense of buying-in to the iPhone hysteria. As a matter of fact, any curiosity I may have had toward it is about as dead as AOL's legitimacy. So it's with a wicked since of satisfaction I read this story early today; 'Apple Cuts iPhone Prices Ahead of Holidays'. Holidays? I don't think so. They're cutting the price because people are staying away by the billions. Imagine, all those poor schmucks who stood in line or paid desperate college kids to wait in lines in order to be among the first for the over-hyped toy phone. To be fair, Apple has since apologized and offered a few bucks for anyone who has purchased an iPhone in the last month...But didn't it come out a bit before that? Apple's sincerity is as shallow as their quality assurance efforts.

At an eye appointment yesterday I noticed the physician's assistant fiddling with his very own iPhone. As I do with everyone I come across with one I asked "hey, how do you like that so far?" And like 100% of the other respondents in my little poll, he grimaced and said "I like it but its really hypersensitive, like SO fragile. It hangs-up sometimes and the network REALLY sucks. But that's AT&T's fault." Translation: "It sucks. It was a bad buy and a piece of technological excrement. Please don't laugh at me."

I don't really blame the sheep who went after it though. I had my own cravings, though they've since passed in the cooling-off period. While I love a lot of what Apple offers, I loathe both the company as a whole and its business model, or lack thereof. In an effort to bring his company back from confirmed death and keep share prices up, Steve Jobs has sacrificed the testing and certification process which accompanies products from microwavable TV dinners to space station robotics. Apple however doesn't invest much, if anything into such a process. Quality Assurance? Jobs never heard of it, and if Apple history is to repeat, then we'll continue to hear more stories on the evening news of complaints en masse over iPhones and iPods and iMacs and all the other iproducts it pushes out the doors of Cupertino, CA to the rapid-fire, quality-void assembly lines of Chinese factories and into the squirming fingers of the American consumer, who's cravings for trend-over-quality are alive, well and growing more ravenous by the day.

Posted by JD on September 7, 2007 9:07 AM