Apple vs Apple

Another thing I wrote quite a while ago. Just putting it up..


Apple vs. Apple

How the company must change itself if it wants to succeed


Apple have been pushing hard these past few years for a paradigm shift, and with the introduction of the iPhone and iTV at San Francisco this January, seem poised to finally establish it. Sales on the iTunes store have reached 2 billion songs, there are more iPods around than all its competitors combined, and customers eagerly anticipate the release of Leopard, their new operating system.

The competition looks like it could not be more beleaguered. Microsoft have been attacked many times these past few months, for everything from the tepidity of their MP3 player, the Zune, to the considerable security issues in Vista, their brand-new operating system. They have been accused of lack of foresight, of plagiarism, of heavy-handed manipulation of smaller companies, and of plain laziness. Detractors assert that Microsoft has lost whatever attraction it might have had, both as a company and as an entity; they are clunky, unimaginative, and boring, much like their products.

Conditions are ripe for a change, and Apple, with its current reputation and credibility, appears to be the agent that can bring about this change. After all, who better than the inventors of the iPod to rejuvenate the phthisic computer industry?

Not quite, or at least not yet. Apple has its own failings that may vitiate whatever momentum it has gained in the recent past, failings that are representative of Apple's attitude as a whole. These are not issues that can be glossed over at a moment's notice, or dismissed as irrelevant; as Apple begins to sell more products, they will obtrude upon its progress significantly.

Among these issues, the most pertinent is one of cost. A Macbook (Apple's bestselling laptop brand) is today almost twice as expensive as a Windows machine with the same hardware configuration, while not offering much more in terms of reliability or support; their customer service packages are uniformly unaffordable; and even relatively mundane products such as mices and earphones are pricey beyond reason. High costs scare away prospective buyers with little money to spend, and performance-conscious ones as well.

Also, while Apple's operating systems don't seem to be crippled by viruses and spyware in the same way that Microsoft's are, there is nothing inherently more secure about them. Kevin Finisterre, founder of a computer security firm called Digital Munition, became a celebrity of sorts in the computer world when he claimed that he would expose one security flaw in Tiger (the most recent avatar of Apple's many operating systems) every day in January 2007 -- and succeeded. It is only a matter of time, he says, before viruses are written for the Mac. Meanwhile, customers are lulled into a false sense of security by Apple's glib dismissals of viruses on their websites and in their advertisements ("114,000 viruses? Not on a Mac.").

Which brings us to their ad campaign. Apple have always been acutely aware of their giant competitor, and have used confrontational strategies in most of their ads to bring about awareness of their own products. Now, however, they seem to have stepped up the self-congratulatory feel a notch, with their new Mac-PC ads, which feature an aging, obese and cynical man as a metaphor for Microsoft while depicting Apple as a hip twenty-something youth, derogatorily commiserative in conversations with his counterpart. Though somewhat funny, these ads have polarized opinions of the Mac community in the past few months. Apple have always possessed an understated presumptuousness in their mien, but these ads have transformed that understatement into something much more overt and mean-spirited; at best, this is a miscalculation.

Apple have a significant advantage over Microsoft, entering the year; whether they emerge from it triumphantly or indifferently is only for them to decide.

Fantasy &c

Here's something I wrote long ago, but didn't complete. It makes for fair reading.


Fantasy novels have never been far from me. I started out with Tolkien, reading The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and, of course, The Lord of the Rings in quick succession over a period of a few weeks during which I didn't step out of the house or use more than three-word sentences to communicate with anyone. Near the end of Rings, I remember being confronted with the bleak certainty that the book would be over, and being overcome with emotion at the thought; I also remember the subtle dread that I felt the next day, the dread of facing a world now shorn of whatever wonder it possessed previously. I declared to my mother that day, with all the zeal of the convert, that I didn't care about Hinduism anymore, and that my religion was the religion of Tolkien.

These feelings were always close to the surface. Although I read indiscriminately, I kept returning to fantasy novels with the sort of regularity that indicated that I was hooked . First it was the Robert Jordan series, which seemed like the next logical step after Tolkien -- books one and two intrigued me, but I realized after book three that it was not going to be anywhere close to Tolkien, and put it down. (I suppose people will tell you that Tolkien is the best introduction to fantasy that you can ever get, but I disagree; I think one must start modestly, with such pedestrian fare as The Wheel of Time series, and progress, by degrees, to epics like The Silmarillion or Rings. Doing it the other way around is bound to lead to an anti-climactic experience).

After Robert Jordan, I picked up Stephen King's The Dark Tower series. This with some reluctance,because I didn't want to have the same opinion of King as I did of Jordan, being a long time fan. I knew what it felt like to be let down by an author's works -- in 2002 (or so) I remember actively loathing Michael Crichton's shameless attempt to further his views on global warming in his novel, A State of Fear. Was this the same person who had written such redoubtable science fiction as Jurassic Park, and The Andromeda Strain? Was this the same guy whose books I had read over and over again as a science-fiction crazed teenager? It was like losing an old friend.

But King did not disappoint at all. Quite the contrary: Dark Tower was a complete departure from anything I had ever read before, in fantasy or otherwise. The protagonists were as real as you or I, and as fragile; you always got the feeling that it wouldn't take much to kill them. Enemies were many, and in many different forms, and apparently a lot more resilient than our heroes. There were strangers introduced arbitrarily, strangers whose function was not clear. And the world itself was more than sufficiently fantastic to provide a dynamic all its own. The combination led to the development of an almost unbearable tension, a tension, that, if I was a movie reviewer, would call "edge-of-the-seat", and "exhilarating". At the risk of blaspheming, I would say that Dark Tower was more interesting and more nuanced than Rings, and (to me, at least) more entertaining.

Of course, most fantasy aficionados would chuckle mildly at this, and pat me indulgently on the back. Indeed, one of my good friends, who is an F.A if I ever knew one, told me that he and his online friends get together and have little fantasy appreciation sessions where they bash (among others) Stephen King and his fantastic creations.

I can't sympathize with this point of view, but (to an extent) I empathize. When you become a connoisseur of a genre like fantasy, nothing but the very best will do, and sometimes not even that. I react in much the same way when I watch an bad movie, or read a badly written book. There is always a tendency to be as exclusive as your tastes will provide, and once you have elevated yourself, there is no coming back down.

Or is there? A fantasy writer called Scott Bakker, in this interview, provides a fresh viewpoint on criticism. He holds that there are as many readers eager for new material as there are ones who find comfort in familiarity. Expounding, he also says that the solution is not to provide two different kinds of fiction for each of these groups (which, according to him, defeats the point), but to try and incorporate both familiarity and originality in the same work.

A little background on Mr. Bakker - he's actually Dr. Bakker, having obtained his doctoral degree in philosophy from Vanderbilt University, and after twenty years of tooling around with his fantastic characters, has now built a house (three houses, to be precise) of words around them. His "high" fantasy trilogy is entitled The Prince of Nothing, and consists of the books The Darkness That Comes Before, The Warrior Prophet, and The Thousandfold Thought.

When I found out about this guy about two days ago, I was struck by an impulse to purchase his books. Here, I thought, was a person who knew what he was doing. A PhD in philosophy meant that he could probably contextualize, and very well at that, and the articulation of his thoughts (in the interview) convinced me that I would do well to put money in his pocket. Two days later (today),I bought The Darkness That Comes Before.

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And so ended that particular train of thought. I thought publishing this would be vaguely relevant because it is now some five months later, and in that time I've tried reading Darkness three times, and failed thrice -- the writing is uncompromisingly underwhelming. I guess the interview promised too much.

The Sea, by John Banville

Just finished reading The Sea, by John Banville -- not a dry eye in the house, to be sure. The prose is unfettered and pithy, the scenes are startling in their proximity, and the characters, though uniformly detestable, are real. A book that will stay with me for a long time.

I just want to say something about the book here -- it is apparently very verbose. I say 'apparently' because I didn't find it verbose at all; that is to say, I found it verbose, but not in a pejorative way. To quote just one example of what others in the internet community object to, I will reproduce these (my favorite) lines from the book --

The consultant's name was Mr Todd. This can only be considered a joke in bad taste on the part of polyglot fate. It could have been worse. There is a name De'Ath, with that fancy medial capital and apotropaic apostrophe which fool no one.

In order to appreciate these lines, it is of course necessary to know the meaning of words like 'apotropaic', and 'polyglot'; it would also be useful to know that 'Tod' is a German verb that means 'to record the death of'.

Of course, all this is beyond the average blogger, who, while railing at the Booker Prize committee for having made such a deplorable decision in the summer of 2005, decides to call it the "worst Booker Prize winning novel ever", a designation that seems to me particularly misguided, especially since it is incumbent -- some would say -- upon art appreciation people in general and novel reviewers in particular not to pass all-encompassing judgments. In any case, I can speak for (at least) myself when I say that it is one of the most rewarding novels that I have ever read.

PS: Just realized that Books of the Year is filling up nearly as quickly as Books I've Read; apparently I have a tendency to be inclusive rather than exclusive in my decision-making process. In any event, I can say with no lack of generality that all the books I've read this year have been at least moderately good, with most in the very good category, and as such I recommend all of them.