Tech by PC

I just saw an article on Wired called 8 Signs That Apple Customers Are No Longer Special. I am going to breech the Apple vs. PC subject here with my 2 cents. First of all, the article has some good points, but the larger picture is that Apple has fans that spend money on them rather than customers. Customers are a fairly loyal sort of people. You give them a good product at a good price and they will likely return when they need to replace that product. Even more, they will go out and tell their friends who they bought the product from and you can build a base of loyal customers this way. A fan on the other hand is fickle and moves on as soon as something better comes along. Apple’s “customers” are more fan than customer.

Apple is innovative, that is for sure, but among the items in the Wired article, the most telling for me is the lack of Firewire in their latest MacBook offerings. Apple insisted on Firewire back in the USB 1 days, and it got them some flack then despite being a superior product. When USB 2 came along, some questioned its superiority. I prefer firewire still, even though I don’t own a Mac, because of a perceptable improvement in latency over USB 2. I’m not going to argue that point in this article because there are dozens of other factors to consider when comparing the two. Nevertheless Apple promoted its more expensive Firewire standard. More expensive mainly due to licensing and volume. Apple fans complied and purchased more expensive external Firewire drives and so forth. Leaving Firewire off the latest MacBook leaves all of those devices without connectivity. Is Firewire obsolete? Probably not, especially in its newer and faster forms, but it is quickly moving into the realm of Betamax. If Apple can’t support and sustain a technology that it forced on people from the beginning, then what kind of big influence on the industry is it? Not much.

The biggest draw to Apple lately has not been its multimedia prowess or its graphics arts tools, but rather its image. It was cool to own a Mac and uncool to own a PC. Well, if you talk to Mac people that was the case. The reality is that most fan-like PC enthusiasts are so comfortable with their choice of PC that they do  not even care to get into the “fight.” The gaming crowd knows that PC provides a more versatile gaming platform. These fan like PC users are too self-assured to bother with the Mac fans, and many of them own Apple products such as the iPhone and iPod because those devices make sense.

Yet another problem plaguing Apple is economic conditions. I do not believe the world as we know it is coming to an economic end. This is just another cycle and will eventually be behind us. We’ll look back and no one will call it a depression except maybe people who don’t know anything about history. That’s my opinion. The fact is though that many people do not have the descretionary spending power that they had a year ago. People buy PCs because they need them to perform a job. People by Apple because they want it.

At work up until a few months ago there was still talk from almost every front about people wanting to purchase Apple computers for home use. The drawbacks were all practical in nature: It doesn’t connect through VPN, etc. Today there is no real talk.

One other issue I noticed was about the Apple commercials that made fun of Microsoft. There may have been an element of truth in some of them, but others were just either misinformed attempts to make humor or outright lies. When Microsoft hit back, they did so with facts and realities. The Apple fans just laughed at how incompetent Microsoft was at making an advertising campaign. All the PC geeks and decision makers for companies just nodded their head and drew back to reality of their PC platform.

Apple couldn’t make a superior technology like Firewire work, why do we think they will be able to sustain anything else? The iPhone is the subject of much study at other cell phone companies and it will eventually have an equivalent counterpart that is non-Apple. I’m not sure who buys an iPod anymore. With cheap legal MP3 offerings abundant it makes more sense to buy a more versatile player that doesn’t tie you to iTunes and allows things like subscription music.

Apple is a successful company catering to fans. They need to focus on that area and keep  their fans happy. My first suggestion is a revision of the MacBook to include Firewire. It should be a consideration due to the precident it sets that Apple is so willing to abandon peripherals. Why invest in something, even as a fan, when you can’t trust that you won’t regret that decision during your next hardware purchase? My second suggestion is to go back to what works. Cater to the fans by continuing movie placement – I saw a few movies recently with PCs instead of Macs. That was odd! I also think a discounted price is in order. The second largest barrier to a Mac is price. The first is productivity – If you can’t do what you did on your PC then it is a problem.

I named this article different from Wired’s because I think the problem is that Apple’s customers were never special, only their fans were.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 10:50 pm and is filed under Hardware, Soapbox. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.