You have to hand it to Apple. When it comes to marketing their products, they are the masters. Even when they produce something that is just marginally better than their previous products and may even be copying what others have already done, they manage to create a media buzz that results in people waiting in line for days to get the new product or paying others to do so, as if there is some special cachet to owning something just a few days before others do.
We see this over and over again, most recently with its release of the iPhone 6. What is so special about it that has warranted all this attention? This absurd hyping of Apple products is ripe for parody and The Onion has dutifully obliged with its comparison analysis of the iPhone 6 and a competitor, the Samsung Galaxy S5.
Charlie Brooker also has some fun with it:
Apple also unveiled the all-new bigger iPhone 6, and the all-new even bigger-than-that iPhone 6 Plus, which is the size of the Isle of Man and aimed at people who literally have deep pockets. By releasing two differently sized rectangles, which in turn differ from its previous range of differently sized rectangles, Apple has selfishly exhausted the global supply of differently sized rectangles. From now on, all rectangles, no matter what context they appear in, will have to be the same size. Wars will be fought to decide which dimension becomes the standard. And when mankind finally settles on a compromise, Apple is going to start on ovals.
I am a user of Apple products, owning a MacBook Air, an iPad, and an iPhone. But I tend to use things until they die before thinking of getting another one so my products are now many years old. My phone is an iPhone 3GS that came out in 2009 and was handed down to me by my daughter some years ago that seems to be working just fine and I see no pressing reason to upgrade, and my iPad2 is the version that came out in 2011 before the ‘retina display’ versions.
Mano, you Luddite! It’s because of people like you that ISIS will win!
(For the record, my phone is a Samsung flip-phone that doesn’t even have Bluetooth, but it fits in my pocket so easily I can even forget I have it, and I can go a week without charging.)
I still use a Nokia brick from 2004. It still has full function and has never needed repair. The phrase ‘don’t fix it if it ain’t broke’ applies well here.
I’ve known many Apple fans in my day. To be honest, their ‘zeal’ for all things Apple has provided me much insight into how a cult works.
Until the last couple of weeks I’ve owned an iPhone 3Gs but really wanted to upgrade. Given that I was fairly locked into the Apple ecosystem, as I have an iPad, my wife has an iPhone 5, and we use iTunes to manage our music, I did want to get an iPhone 6 or 6 plus. However, before the last several years (pretty much since Jobs left) where I could say Apple products “Just work” it’s gotten to the point that with every iOS upgrade and each new phone version SOMETHING goes wrong. For the 6 plus it’s that the thickness is so small that the phones are actually bending in pockets and apparently the iOS 8 upgrade caused people to lose connection to their carrier. Now this would be fine…but Apple prices their products at a premium…and after looking at a Galaxy S5, the same size as an iPhone 6 plus and costing about $300 less…I just couldn’t justify the higher price.
Dean,
I have noticed the same thing. It used to be that Apple products used to work right out of the box and seamlessly integrate with the older devices and updates were smooth. It is no longer the case. They still have the design and packaging chops but the quality control seems to have gone way down.
I still follow the rule “never buy the first version of anything from Apple” and it has worked very well for me except for if I wanted to be the “cutting edge” guy with 15 minutes of basking in the envy of the small handful of people who care. With a product like an iPhone or nearly any other compact design you can almost be certain that the 1st generation will have battery life problems, or adhesive failures, or (in this case) structural weaknesses. It’s the 1.2 release or the 1.3 release that more or less addresses everything that was wrong with the first version.
By the way have you noticed how neatly Apple product releases and the inevitable flaws in the products map to the Kubler-Ross stages of grief?