Once again the Macalope must exhort you, dear reader, do not ask for whom the Apple doom bell tolls. It tolls for Apple.
I mean… duh. That’s why it’s called the Apple doom bell. It’s right there in the name. Says it right on the tin. Couldn’t be more obvious, really. Try to keep up, Gordy.
Writing for The Week, Navneet Alang describes “The sad end of the Apple era.” (Tip o’ the antlers to Shawn King and @JonyIveParody.)
Sad! Alas, to all things there is an ending. Except, apparently, Supernatural. 46 seasons and a movie.
One thing was conspicuously missing at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show…
Good taste.
…the looming sense that everyone was scrambling to catch up to Apple.
Oh, is this a thing we now admit was happening for years? Because to date the conventional storyline was about how so-and-so beat Apple to the punch by announcing a thing at CES similar to something Apple was rumored to be working on. And then the CES thing never saw the light of day or otherwise fizzled after Apple’s product was released. Or that “Phones I saw tech journalists holding at CES” is a meaningful metric. So, are we recognizing reality now?
Right now, that means the tech world will begin to be led by Google and Amazon…
Both have sold fewer of their always-listening Chatty Cathy cylinders than Apple has Watches, but they’re the leaders of the tech world and Apple’s dominance is at an end. Once you decide that actual numbers don’t matter, literally anything can be used as proof that Apple is toast. Including toast itself.
Now it is time to provide “examples” of how bad things are for Apple. For example, you may not have heard that the company removed the headphone jack in the iPhone 7. It’s true. But as Apple no longer sets the trend, everyone will be keeping the headphone jack on their phones certainly. You can take that to the imaginary bank and imagi-deposit it.
When you’re piling on the anti-Apple evidence, always remember to put a cherry-sized wad of hand-pressed baloney on top.
There is also a sense that while Apple’s products always excelled because of the marriage of design and function, now the former has come to overshadow the latter, resulting in thin laptops that require an absurd array of dongles or wireless headphones that easily slip out.
If your takeaway from the AirPods is that they probably slip out easily because Business Insider quoted a bunch of people on Twitter saying “Eh, they’ll probably slip out” back in September before anyone had any, please close the laptop you’re typing on and wait for the Sanity Police to come collect you, you’re in violation of several statutes.
Point of fact, AirPods are the sleeper Apple hit of 2016. Even the people who laughed at them are apologizing and turning into converts. With AirPods and Beats, Apple’s now taken 40 percent of the online market for wireless headphones.
The Macalope really doesn’t understand why it’s so darn hard to write a reasonable piece about Apple’s problems. The company does have problems! And some of Alang’s points are well-taken. But when you’re calling something that is clearly a hit a failure, you need to reevaluate your assumptions because you’re not providing analysis, you’re just driving the clown train to Bananaville.
[An earlier version of this column implied AirPods alone had taken 40 percent of the online market for wireless headphones. That was incorrect. Apple alone has 26 percent according to Slice and has 40 percent when you add in Beats. The Macalope regrets the error.]