John Gruber pointed to this post by Ken Segall, which his readers promptly borked.
Daring Fireball Linked List: The Ever-Arrogant Apple
Basically, a sarcastic take on Antennagate and Apple’s arrogance, i.e. yeah, they’re arrogant because they know better than we do, similar to a topic I covered years ago apropos of the original iPhone.
Looking back, Apple and Jobs did more than survive; they thrived.
So, this begs the question: do consumers want someone they trust to tell us what matters and what doesn’t?
Pretty sure the answer is yes because, most of the time, it just works.
A noteworthy coda pointed out by Phandroid to last week’s Antennagate press conference is comparing the iPhone 4’s sales numbers, i.e. 3 million in 23 days or about 130,000 each day, to the Android numbers, i.e. 160,000 activations each day.
Thoughts on Apple, arrogance, Antennagate or anything starting with “a”, find the comments.
My thought as I was reading it was “just like those German auto manufacturers,” until I got to the Porsche example. Of course, I was thinking of negative examples, like the horrible computer interface in BMW's and the general mulish “Ve are de Engineers!” disdain of popular things like cupholders. Porsche is interesting – a few years ago, they got very low consumer ratings, because rich people would be exceedingly picky about things going wrong on their leasemobile. They solved that with PR, which is of course what this is all about.
I almost bought a turn-of-the-century one when they got under $30K for a low mileage example with what must've been $10K worth of options. But I opted for new but trailing edge functionality over image. And besides, I have made a lot of Porsche and Porcupine jokes over many bow-tie years.
Yes, people do want to be part of a tribe and be told what to do to reinforce their membership, excluding outsiders.
Yeah, the comparison to Porsche was a funny one, especially (for me anyway) in light of the Cayenne, which feels like a total sell-out to market forces. I have yet to see one of those actually towing something, surprise.
Your point about tribe membership is spot on, and applies especially well to the cult of Apple. High-end devices are high margin and cash cows, but they attract a (mostly correct) sense of entitlement to skin in the game, i.e. if the fancy and pricey new phone won't hold a signal, make it right. Don't tell me how to hold it.