Hungry? Never fear! Writing for the increasingly inappropriately named Boy Genius Report, Tero Kuittinen has baked you a casserole of wrongness!
It tastes terrible and provides no nutritional value, but he … well, he baked it. No one knows why.
“Critics are getting under Apple’s skin” (tip o’ the antlers to Adam Bushman).
You know, Kuittinen could have just said it was classless of Phil Schiller to stoop to responding to critics’ claims that Apple can’t innovate anymore. The Macalope wouldn’t agree with that; he found the remark amusing, even if he doesn’t really want to spend time thinking about Schiller’s rear end. But at least it’s a valid opinion to have. Instead … well, get ready for a whole lot of wrong.
Apple used to have one cardinal rule about its rivals and critics: never acknowledge them.
Wrong! OK, they don’t do it a lot, but they do do it. In 1995, Apple famously ran its “C:ONGRTLNS.W95” ad campaign. Back in 2006, when Apple shipped iPods infected with a Windows virus, the company cracked “as you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.” There are other examples, not the least of which was an entire ad campaign around an anthropomorphized PC.
When the iPhone launched in 2007, Apple never mentioned Nokia or Motorola, the leading handset vendors at the time.
Wrong! Take it away, Steve Jobs, introducing the iPhone in January of 2007:
Why do we need a revolutionary user interface? I mean, here’s four smartphones: the Motorola Q, the BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Nokia E62, the usual suspects. And what’s wrong with their user interfaces?
Jobs went on to explain exactly what was wrong with them. Later in the presentation, he showed how contacts, mail, calendars, the web, and music look on those devices compared to on the iPhone. Needless to say, they didn’t come out looking very well. Jobs’s conclusion:
After today, I don’t think anyone’s going to look at these phones quite the same way again.
Boy, was he right about that.
Back to the guy who’s wrong about everything.
When the first iPhone models were criticized for lack of 3G support, antenna quality or camera performance, Apple never showed any awareness of the critics.
Sure. Well, other than holding a whole press conference about the antenna and giving everyone free cases, they never showed the slightest bit of awareness. Oh, and at that conference, Jobs specifically named and showed video of a number of competing phones—the BlackBerry Bold 9700, the HTD Droid Eris, and the Samsung Omnia II—suffering from the same issue.
But other than that, yes, totally unaware.
But as Tywin Lannister pointed out to his prickly grandson: A king who must remind people he is a king is no true king at all.
That guy who keeps having people murdered and stuff sure is “prickly”!
Also, we’re all really enjoying your forced Game of Thrones analogies, tech writers! Keep ’em coming!
Remodeling typography and flattening the design of its app icons are moves that can be viewed as a welcome revamp …
That pundits said Apple had to do right now, hurry, why aren’t you doing it now, OH, GOD, ONE INFINITE LOOP IS LITERALLY ON FIRE LOOK AT THE FLAMES WHY CAN’T ANYONE SEE THEM BUT ME?
… or a desperate lunge for relevance via cosmetic changes.
Is any other company than Apple as damned if they do, damned if they don’t?
Apple is now previewing next autumn’s products instead of shipping stuff the day it makes an announcement, which used to be its style back in the halcyon days of 2009 through 2011.
Wrong! Apple has always, always, always previewed releases of its platforms well in advance. It has to so developers can have time to code to them. During Kuittinen’s “halcyon days” alone:
- The iPad was announced in January of 2010 and didn’t ship until April.
- Snow Leopard was unveiled at WWDC in June 2009 and released to the general public at the end of August.
- Lion was previewed in October of 2010 and not released until July of 2011.
- iOS 3 was previewed in March of 2009 and released at WWDC in June.
- iOS 4’s developer preview was released in April of 2010 before its general release at WWDC in June.
- iOS 5 blah blah blah June of 2011, blah blah blah October.
Man, it’s so hard to check Wikipedia, isn’t it? Or to read what you wrote and realize how ridiculous it is. You can walk clear across this piece stepping on nothing but sentences that contain inaccuracies.
The Macalope does not demand that we agree, pundits. But he does demand that you not just make crap up.
Not that it does him any good.