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.