Steve Jobs needs to step aside
Today's iPad 2 announcement will come as no surprise to anyone who is even a small a fan of Apple. Apple seem to go from strength to strength, but despite their relentless rise in popularity and market share, I've long held reservations about Apple's treatment of consumers. Steve Job's appearance to announce the iPad 2 was apparently more surprising given his recent ill health, than the iPad itself.
The media appears to have dwelt more on this fact than any other, but I'm yet to find any comments that discuss the subtler issue here: namely that Steve Jobs is more important than his products. As consumers isn't that a rather odd balance?
Apple have traded on upward mobility and trendiness for as long as I can remember. Owning an Apple product is seen to improve your life. Not necessarily in a actually purposeful way, but in a self-consciously status-aware way that is cleverly hinted at in all Apple's adverts: Hipsters on Vespers carrying their iPads to their wine-bar meetups, to the soundtrack of the latest mawkish, indie, shoe-gazer. Apple's hardware release schedule seems to be intentionally timed to monopolise on this latent trendiness. Each new hardware version is released towards the end of the honeymoon period with the previous version. Owners of the previous version will be sorely tempted into - and often feel betrayed into - buying the new release, sometimes just to solve an ongoing problem with the previous one. But aren't computers meant to last? At £450 a pop, aren't they meant to be some kind of investment?
It's this pressure to upgrade, this position as a status symbol, which I'm increasingly concerned about. The press and the fanboys hang on Jobs' every word to such an extent that he could walk on-stage and say practically anything. Just the act of walking on is enough to send the press running to the phones and Jobs knows it. This level of devotion is dangerous. Microsoft haven't experienced this level of consumer obsession in decades, if ever, and their mistakes have cost them. However their mistakes have made them humble and although Vista was badly received, they acknowledged the problems and made Windows 7 really very good. 5 years ago MS couldn't seem to do anything right, but now they appear to have blended into the background. Windows these days "just works" and MS are relatively silent - the way I believe Apple should be.
Apple conversely got away comparatively scot free with the whole Signal Gate scandal on the iPhone 4's launch. The bumper case: Seriously? That's their solution? 12 months down the line no one seems to remember it. And how about that curious sequence of software updates for the iPhone 3 in the months before the iPhone 4's release, which have rendered most 3G iphones glacially slow to this day? What about the well-documented built in obsolescence of the iPod 3 and 4 that caused the disk based versions to predictably fail after about 18 months. If only it could be proven, then by the letter of the Trading Standards Act, that's actually illegal.
And now the iPad 2: it's faster and it's got cameras. Big deal. I'm not even going to bemoan the lack of Flash - I have an iPad 1 and I can live without it - but am I really meant to upgrade merely for speed and a camera i'll never use? It would be a different matter if it didn't cost the earth, but I honestly believe Apple are hoping existing iPad owners will upgrade anyway out of misguided fashion-consciousness.
There an analogous situation in the PC GPU market: new graphics chips are released so frequently that its impossible to keep up. Its deeply frustrating and needlessly expensive. The games developers target the higher end cards in a race to make the highest quality image, requiring you to upgrade frequently, rather than attempting to optimise for hardware that is more realistically affordable and far more commonplace (mentioning no names, Crytek). This situation hasn't actually been so bad in the last couple of years since Crytek released Crysis, to almost universal guffaws at the graphical requirements. Then again, the situation might have changed because more games these days are cross-ported between the consoles as well as the PC. Games aimed at console have to be optimised within an inch of their lives, since the hardware can't be changed. The PC versions benefit from the initial optimisations, even if the developers later add bells and whistles for the PC only.
In both the case of the GPU market and Apple products, shouldn't we the consumers have a little more to say on this matter? Its fine for Apple to continue with this aura of smug, sophisticated coolness, but we need to be more aware of how we're being manipulated by it. We want reliable products that do their job for the "reasonable lifetime of the product" (Trading Standards) and not to be passive-aggressively bullied every few months into upgrading just to meet the socially acceptable requirements of the time.
If Jobs is responsible for his company's cliquey elitism as I believe he is, I'd hope that if he left, someone else a little more in-tune with average people might take over. How about releasing a bit of hardware that lasts 2 years? One that you continue to improve after the next version is launched? How about some affordable hardware for people who appreciate your quality but can't afford a total PC-to-Apple migration? How about spending a little more time on coming up with a killer feature, rather than a sequence of slight improvements that cost your soul?
Rant over.