Dumb iBook Remarks

Aug 9, 1999

You don't start off articles critical of Apple's decisions with mitigating remarks like "I love Apple Computer", and then go on to nitpick on issues surrounding a product that's yet to even hit the market and whose impact on real-life consumers is still unknown. Especially if you profess to be pro-Apple.

Yet that's exactly what columnist Don Crabb has set out to do in this recent article about the iBook. I enjoy an honestly-written critique any day like the rest of you do (take Charles Moore's writings, for example), but not equivocal essays that take issue with matters that may in reality be non-issues, and which dredge up history for effect. Or writings peppered with words like "silly" and "Apple Boner List" that hint at the writer's confidence in knowing how to run Apple better than Apple itself is doing right now.

It amuses me that all of the severest criticisms leveled at the iMac since it was announced in May last year is now nothing more than water under the bridge. By next week, on the iMac's first anniversary, Apple expects to fall just shy of shipping the 2 millionth unit of its best-selling computer. Those critics must be pretty dumbfounded, I think. It also amuses me now even more that the whole routine is starting all over again, this time for the iBook. But instead of archaic issues like the missing floppy (what a difference a year really makes), writers now have got to be a lot more inventive, so gender issues, built-in mics, and video-out ports have become le topic du jour.

Allow me to dredge up some history myself: Has it never occurred to any of you that the USB industry might have taken off on a different trajectory (assuming it would have taken off at all) had Apple simply included a floppy drive in the iMac? Sometimes you have to look over the treetops to see the orchard beyond, and I suppose Apple did exactly that by making the iMac 'a rib short'. In so doing, they left the door open for third-party peripheral devices to flood the Mac market with add-on products in a riot of translucent hues. And before you knew it, USB had become a buzzword. All because of a missing floppy drive, or so it seems. If a 'flaw' like that can stir a long-dormant USB industry out of its slumber, and create sustained market excitement out of the perceived overwhelming vendor support for the iMac, I'd leave out a feature or two from the iBook myself if I were Apple, just so these vendors can have a share of the action and contribute to the buzz surrounding the iBook.

Coming back to the point of this article: Got a beef with Apple, but don't want to confront them head-on? Fine, print an article on the Web and make your criticisms known, if you feel it helps garner reader support. But I believe gentle persuasion gets you further than ranting does. Nobody, especially Steve Jobs, likes to be told that what he's done is silly.

I should know. I gently persuaded Apple to eventually put that dimple on the round mouse, didn't I? :-)

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