Shamelessly angry rant: Apple

[haggholm]

Caveat lector: This is a rant with a lot of intentional hyperbole.

---

During my attempts at figuring out what phone to get next, I spent some time on manufacturers’ websites. This is always a frustrating experience, because phone manufacturers tend not to publish very detailed information (at least not on any pages I came across), and because my questions tend to be a bit arcane (Will this phone allow me to subscribe to an LDAP directory as an address book?).

None, however, managed to enrage me as much as Apple’s website, which appears to be made of fluff and chromed trimmings. The technical content amounted roughly to We make a phone, with pages of filler largely consisting of We are awesome and we make awesome stuff. I don’t want fluff. I don’t want marketing-speak.

Marketing speak doesn’t work on me, because holy shit, I’m not that stupid. Surely I can’t be very unusual in picking up on this? If somebody tries to sell me something based on their assertions that it’s awesome and cool people use it, I will tell them to fuck off. If you want to sell it to me, tell me about the features it has and hand me a spec sheet. I don’t mean eighteen different pages that bury various technical details in fluff, and one annoyingly laid-out page with some tech specs; I mean a single, clean page where the features are enumerated and I can actually get a solid sense of what the damned thing does. The lack of this sort of thing—which is standard issue in the PC world where I am used to buying hardware—seems to express contempt for my demographic, i.e. People who want convenient access to information on what, exactly, it is that they are buying, before they buy it.

I feel like they are being condescending in that, insofar as the advertising is directed at me, they are saying either We believe that you are stupid enough to buy our product based on the shit we’re telling you, or We believe that you’re too stupid to grasp any of the real information, so we‘ll give you the information equivalent of crome-plated turds instead. (It’s that or We don’t have a good product, and they don’t seem to believe it.) Of course, the reality is that their marketing isn’t aimed at people like me, but that message isn’t terribly helpful either: We don’t give a shit about you or your kind, and if we come off as condescending or offensive, who cares? You’re just a nerd, nobody gives a damn.

Admittedly, it’s possible that they just don’t support anything I care about—good IMAP support, Google Calendar sync, LDAP, etc., and so just don’t have any information to share.

It also annoys me that the website contains misinformation. For instance, they claim that the iPhone has a standby time of up to 300 hours, which is literally true, but only in the sense that up to doesn’t actually specify a lower limit. People I know who use the things seem to opine that they need to be recharged on a nightly basis. Two days, 48 hours, is too long, so less than 15% of the advertised standby time seems truly realistic even for users who do very little actual calling. Of course you can’t trust manufacturer stats, but at least in the world of laptops I can usually trust them to get their numbers within the right order of magnitude.

---

The phone itself has more problems—the ludicrous lack of copy/paste, the fact that you can’t even run software updates without running iTunes (you not only have to have a PC, you also have to run an OS Apple bothers porting iTunes to)—but that’s not the point of this rant…

---

The truly aggravating factor is that, through no fault of Apple’s marketing department (whom I consider roughly equivalent to that of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation), I can’t discount the product. Their marketers and web people may all be assholes, but too many people whose judgements I trust and whose opinions I care about claim that they make good devices, that the iPhone itself is actually a good product. And it may well be…and so I can’t just dismiss it…and so I have to seek out information about it, regardless of what the search may do to my blood pressure. One thing is for sure, though: If I ever buy an Apple product, it will be in spite of their marketing, and very grudgingly. I might also have to scrape off the logo to live with the shame.

Comments

iPhone

[(Anonymous)]

I've got an iPhone 3G, so here's some first-hand stuff about it
IMAP
-my 3 gmail addresses (2 and 1 google apps) are configured with IMAP
-Google has yet to offer push service, so the iPhone checks for new e-mail in the background (there's a setting for the frequency of this)

Calendars
-Google has an app for the phone that allows you to use many of the google services (it's really like a browser, using pages formatted for the iPhone screen resolution)

-Battery life: I use my phone a lot (data, games, e-mail, texting) and I usually have a good day to day-and-a-half on a charge. The 3rd party games suck the most of the battery life. Music isn't too bad. One plus, it charges very quickly. I'd say an hour tops.

The phone currently doesn't allow 3rd party apps to run in the background, so Google Talk for example, is only really useful if you don't have any other need for your phone.

Copy and paste, and a bunch of other features (hopefully recording video) will be included in the new OS this summer.

As far as LDAP, the phone might support it when you use a Microsoft Exchange Server for you e-mail, but I don't think you can add your own. I haven't seen a setting for it. There might be a third-party mail app that supports it. Or perhaps a desktop app that connects to your LDAP server and syncs contacts in your address book.

I'm not sure if this helps any, so ignore me if you already know this stuff!

Devin