Apple. It seems like they are the darling of the technology world. Just this week, they announced the iPad — the next thing that will revolutionize our world. Apple is a very divisive company. People either love them or hate them. The lovers are passionate and evangelical. The haters are passionate and focused.
Until recently, I was a hater. I have been on the PC platform since my first PC in 1984, with one 5.25 floppy drive, since I couldn’t afford the 5 MB (yes MB) hard drive. My resolve broke down when I saw the iPhone. Here finally was a phone that I could use as a single device for all my needs. The fact that it could sync with Outlook and keep all my music and run apps was (pardon the pun) beautiful music to me. So last June, when the iPhone 3GS was announced, I overcame my trepidation and bought the phone. I really love the phone. It is easy to use, rock solid, has the huge App Store and just works well. Yes, of course, there are things that I wish it could do, like multi-tasking and more detailed profile settings, but in general I am pleased with my iPhone purchase. I am still not on the Mac bandwagon. That is going to take a whole lot more magic.
The Apple store is another great story. I love the Apple store. Everyone in the store is enabled to make a your customer experience the best. Want to buy something? Any Apple employee can make a sale — no waiting on line; heck they will even email a receipt to you. The Genius bar is terrific for solving problems. You get the feeling that everything that they do is focused on you. I can’t think of another retail environment that makes me feel like that, with the possible exception of Disney (topic for another blog post).
But, while Apple can make you feel like the smartest consumer ever for choosing to work with their products and their people, it seems to me that in their own way, they also treat you like the stupidest consumer. How can that be? Well, they severely limit the types of applications that developers can offer. Somebody reasonably smart can write a solid profile manager for the App Store, but Apple won’t allow it because it violates what they think should be available. How about a way to automatically expand text typed into an input field — something like tyvm should be able to be automatically expanded to Thank you very much? Both of these features are standard on the competing Blackberry platform, but even if someone wanted to write these applications, Apple would not allow them.
It gets worse. Say you lost your iPhone charger. How much would you expect Apple to charge you to replace it? Remember that the 8 GB iPhone can be bought for $99. According to Apple website, they want $29.00 for the replacement. 30% of the purchase price for a power charger? That is crazy. Yes, I know that you can find a third party charger almost anywhere for $10 or $15, but what does Apple take us for? Here is an even worse case. The iPhone allows you to store movies for remote watching. No problem, unless you want to plug your iPhone into your home television so that you can watch on the big screen. Then you can buy the video cables from Apple for $49. Too rich for your blood? OK, find some third party cables and buy them for $10. I did. When I hooked them up, the picture showed up on my tv for about 2 seconds then went blank. I got a message that said that since I wasn’t using the approved Apple cables, they had disabled the video output. Remember that I did get a picture for a short bit, so it isn’t a technical issue. Ouch. Starting to make me feel like less of that smartest consumer ever.
They have continued these policies with the iPad. What a wonderful media player. But no HDMI output. Too bad that you will need a (you guessed it) proprietary plug to get video output. Well, I am sure that it must have a USB output. All real devices have a USB output. Um, not so much with the iPad. The answer is that it will be available with an accessory kit. I have heard that Apple believes that they want to serve the non-technical crowd and don’t want to make things too complicated for that marketplace. Well, it seems to me that the PC marketplace hasn’t done too badly by giving people options. If only someone could develop a “gorgeous” device that was open to be customized to our needs.
I guess that my experience has shown that it is possible to be in the middle on the topic of Apple. I love the customer service and I love the device. I just wish that the company had the foresight to help me make this my device, at a reasonable cost. Then I could confidently move into the ranks of the lovers.