I am an Apple user. This means I have an Apple laptop, an Apple phone, and recently I bought myself an iPad. In the eyes of a certain group of people, this means I’m a rich person paying for broken but overpriced shiny things, someone who joined the Cult of Steve, in short, an Apple fanboy. These people are sometimes friends (always reassuring that they don’t mean this in any personal way), often strangers.
The thing is, Apple could actually do with some proper criticism. But this anti-fanboyism is preventing exactly that.
The standard playbook
Whenever someone writes a blog post about Apple, whenever some media outlet publishes a report about Apple, these “Apple haters” immediately comment on it, with their two standard “arguments” (or variants thereof):
- Apple products are broken and overpriced
- Anyone who buys Apple products is a member of the Cult of Steve
Then they often point out how other companies products offer more functionality for less money. Anyone who disagrees is immediately labled as a “Cult of Steve” member.
Anybody pointing out actual stuff that Apple does wrong is shouted down as Apple fanboy.
Apple is not perfect
Far from it. There’s a lot of things they should improve. For one, their response to security problems in their software is nothing short of laughable, sometimes allowing serious security problems to linger far too long. Their AppStore politics could do with much more transparency, instead of the seemingly arbitrary approval process. Their puritan stance on things like pornography is something I simply do not understand or have any sympathy for. Apple’s marketing department seems to have fallen in love with the word “magic”, and I’m expecting Steve Jobs to wear a wizard’s hat next time he’s on stage. And the way the iPhone handles notifications is ridiculous compared to Android phones.
But anybody who points out anything like this with well thought-out criticism will be immediately vilified and drowned out by the anti-fanboy crowd (as well as the actual fanboys).
(Old) Media loves this
They know they can easily get lots of hits by publishing anything Apple related, and by pointing out anything that may or may not be a problem. The anti-fanboys will be sure to arrive.
Case in point
The “Antennagate” problem was blown way out of proportion. Not only does the iPhone 4 as well as pretty much all mobile phones have this problem (I can even reproduce it on my iPhone 3G to a degree), but did you know that the Nexus One exhibits this problem in an even worse way? But nobody apparently cared enough about it, because the Nexus One was produced by Google, not Apple.
And the reporting done on the iPhone “Antennagate” and the loud cries of the anti-fanboys prevent another, actual problem from getting any attention: The proximity sensor in the iPhone 4 sometimes fails to detect when you’re holding the phone to your ear, and doesn’t switch off the screen, resulting in your cheek pressing buttons. If this problem was even mentioned in any news reports, it never got more than a few lines.
Still
There’s a reason I buy Apple products instead of anything else: Theirs are less shit than the others. And nobody but Apple seems to have grasped the fact that design is something integral to the whole, y’know, designing process of a product, and not something you can tack on as an afterthought.
But they still have a lot of problems, and they should be called out on them. But that’s not really happening right now.
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