Has Apple Become Just One of the Crowd?

Remember a time when every week generated exciting stories about matters Apple? This was in the days before Mighty Mouse, Intel, and Boot Camp. Life was tougher then, so every glimmer shone like a solar flare in an eclipse. It is funny how times have changed so quickly. Now, even articles about how Windows is better than OS X hardly raise a flicker of a flame.

But has Apple “jumped the shark?” Has it reached and passed its peak, when all news was positive? And now, has Apple become just one of the crowd?

The gloss has gone off Apple. It’s products are now no longer infallible. It’s possible Apple products never were infallible, but we just got told they were by all the Apple evangelists who greatly outnumbered run-of-the-mill Apple customers. The Apple market, having spread to MP3 players, is now less informed and less committed to the Apple cause. The Apple evangelist is now the one who has become greatly outnumbered among Apple customers.

Nowadays the shine quickly goes off new products. Remember the Apple TV? Leopard will come, get four to six weeks of press, and be forgotten.

Wizened folks have wondered for a few years whether Apple would lose its gloss once the masses came on board. And it seems they were right. The iPod has been, of course, the best thing that ever happened to Apple. But, as Microsoft, Dell, and others well know, success has its pitfalls. One of those is mass production.

It’s hard enough to keep a grasp on quality of a product as it rockets into the stratosphere of sales, but when all around you, quality is being forsaken, it must be hard not to lower the bar.

Speaking to fellow iPod users, I find a common theme. iPods aren’t particularly reliable. When I take a straw poll in my class—which is dominated by the iGeneration—the consensus is that iPods are crap. One user is onto her third, the other two having packed up. Interesting, as two of the three I’ve owned have given up the ghost in under two years. Everyone in that class seems to know someone who has had trouble with an iPod.

And yet, everyone says it’s hard not to buy iPods because when they work they work well and are easy to use. Maybe it’s the ubiquitousness of the iPod that keeps it as the market leader. Just like Windows.

Now, throw in a couple or a few lawsuits in the last few years, some over quality, such as scratched screens, and you can see that the gloss really has gone off Apple.

But this is Apple: good at distorting reality a little to ensure you return, as my classmate is drawn to do with iPods. Our esteemed Apple Matters colleague, Chris Seibold, summed it up perfectly the other day: “The question isn’t who is going to screw you over but who will leave you thinking they did it for your own good.”

Apple.

It’s not always easy from inside the Apple fold. And I know when I get on PCs I am more often than not shocked at how unfriendly and unreliable they can be. And I cynically expect the non-iPod MP3 players are no more reliable than iPods.

However, Apple has become one of the crowd, and that has made Apple news less, well, newsworthy.

It does seem that most Apple commentators are treading water lately and hoping that the iPhone will be the lifeline they need to regenerate regular, new, and interesting stories about Apple. Already more has been theorized about the iPhone than the General Theory of Relativity has in the last 100 years. That in itself reflects how desperate the media is for some buzz. The iPhone will give us some buzz to write about. Among it all though, hopefully we won’t be writing about a lack of quality control.

Apple, with Intel inside, a two button mouse, Windows on Mac, massive mass production, and a decline in quality, has changed so much there’s nothing much left to differentiate it from the rest of the crowd.

Wonder how much mileage we can get out of the iPhone?