Doubt about the strength of Apple has always existed. It has its fair share of haters, who perhaps outnumber the army of Apple acolytes: are you a Mac or a PC? But murmurs of discontent from some of Apple’s own fans have been getting slightly louder, as product releases are responded to rounds of puzzled faces rather than the usual slack-jawed awe.
Over the last couple of weeks there’s been a growing sense of unease around Apple. The iPod Nano release was greeted largely with frowns – it’s created an enormous form gap between itself and the iPod classic and iPod touch.
Then there’s the Apple iTunes logo redesign – one designer in advertising,
Joshua Kopac, emailed Jobs saying that the logo sucked, Jobs replied in typically curt fashion. Lots of people agreed with Kopac, and quickly the logo had spawned a lot of internet ranting, plus its own spoof Twitter feed.
And then there was Ping. One commenter said Ping stood for “Ping Is No Good”, because of its lack of integration with social networking and the rest of your music collection, plus its heavy limitations on genres, suggestions, and its poor reach into the music that’s out there.
Apple TV was called “underwhelming” by analysts too, and while the reaction to Apple TV wasn’t quite as negative as it was to Ping, it was still distinctly lukewarm, and was miles away from the iPhone or iPad launches of the last year or two.
We could trace it back to Antennagate, to the furore over the difficulty Apple’s latest phone had in making phonecalls. Apple could have survived this, had it dealt with the ensuing drama better: fewer Steve Jobs missives, or less pointing of the finger, and of course, a more explicit admonition of guilt and subsequent apology. But if Antennagate was the start, then when’s the end?
With Google priming new features all the time, and full scale Google Music and TV consumer launches on the way, it seems we’re getting closer and closer to an all out war.
What do you think is happening here? Is Apple on the back foot, or are we all just watching too closely? Let us know in the comments.
