Brad Feld

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Hit In The Head With An Apple

Apr 04, 2013
Category Technology

I got an interesting email from a friend who has historically been a huge Apple fanboy. I asked him if I could repost it verbatim and he said yes. It follows – I’m curious what your response is to this.

While I’m still very involved with the art world here in Colorado and still working on conservation issues we’ve actually just returned from almost a year away, the last 6 months in India.  I realize that a lot of what I see is colored with the lens of India, but maybe that’s helping to make things more clear.

Anyway, in preparation for re-entry after India (we were in rural, south east India, without much electricity so I figured home might be a shock), I started to try and catch up on things.  Your blog was one of my tools for this.  I read the post on creating the best product, agreed, and moved on.  One of the first things I planned on doing once home was to buy a shiny new macbook to replace my 4 year old white macbook.  Maybe going to the mall, rather than just buying it online was my first mistake, but the cult of apple and the temple that is that store made me gag the second I walked in there.  And while my macbook may be old, my use of apple products is right where they want it to be… had the iPhone5 the 2nd day it was out, mcgyvered the Airtel sim cards to work as nano-sims card in india, have a small film production crew all working on the latest macbook pros and iMacs, iPads and iPods at home… on and on.  But in the store, what I noticed was a culture of elitism and insincerity.  I had a 4 year old laptop with me, and was treated like a Luddite because I didn’t look up to speed.  Insulted, I kept the $4,500 in my pocket, thinking I’d keep the laptop running, which I did.  Small thing I know, but my thought was “if apple doesn’t care about me, who do they care about?”  Today an even smaller issue illuminated this even more.  I went in again, this time to replace the defective “top case/keyboard” from these old white plastic macs, and was told that the machine was now “vintage” (that’s the official apple label), and that they couldn’t replace the “defective part” (also their official language) as they had done in the past, because it is more than 4 years old.  I thought that maybe I should just get a new machine and quit belly aching, but I pushed a little just to see what apple thought about a customer like me…  and called apple to ask if there was anything more they could do.  After a lot of insincere apologies, I asked if there was really nothing they could do.  The support supervisor insisted that there was no more senior person to address this issue but that I might try craigslist.  I was pretty surprised that apple’s official support process ended with telling the customer to check out craigslist for an old mac to scrap for parts.  I’m such a pushover that if he’d offered me $100 credit towards a new macbook, I’d have smiled and bought another apple product.

As I right this, it sounds too much like a rant.  But I couldn’t help writing, first to say hello after a long while (I did hear about the 3D printed tooth in Croatia…amazing!) and second to just try an make sense of what apple could possibly be thinking… the “cool factor” is clearly waning, they’re products are overpriced, and now they’re indifferent, even hostile, to customer who regularly spend tens of thousands of dollars on their products.  Can they really be thinking that the best product is the one that you replace really quickly with something “cooler” and more expensive?  I think this time, I might really go get the chromebook.  I can’t be alone, and that can’t be good for them.