Tech journos, take note on your iPads: cheering Steve Jobs isn’t journalism
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The only thing worse than an Apple product launch is dealing with the reaction of the Apple evangelists in the days following. Before all the Apple fanboys stop reading this, let me assure you I’m not anti-Apple. In fact, I’m writing this on an Apple MacBook Pro and I live in a three-person, five-iPod family — and one of those people is six-months-old and lacks the basic eye-hand co-ordination to use a touch-sensitive wheel. My point rather is that some Apple fans seem to have — how to put this delicately? — lost touch with reality. Too harsh? Perhaps, but indulge me for a moment. My most recent encounter with Apple evangelists’ tenuous grip on reality occurred at a class for first-time fathers-to-be. There were fifteen of us seated in a hospital meeting room. Over two hours, we were to learn about the mysteries of labour and the adventure of fatherhood. Filled with questions about the meaning of life and the universe-shattering wonder of birth it was only a matter of time before the conversation turned to… the iPhone’s lousy battery life. It all began when one father-to-be mentioned an iPhone app called iContraction into which expectant fathers can record all the relevant information about the progress of the labour. “I haven’t used it,” he admitted, although he assured us that reports about it had all been positive. This provoked a bit of good-natured laughter, until another father-to-be pipped in. “You better hope for a short labour. You’d be lucky if the battery lasts that long.” At this, iPhone-loving-father-to-be got a bit cross. “Watch what you’re saying.” “Hey, I’ve got one,” replied the iPhone-battery-sucks-father-to-be. “The battery life is terrible.” It’s not an isolated instance of how Apple products can turn otherwise rational people into commodity fetishists. When the iPhone was first released in the US, for example, one customer was reported to have queued 18 hours to purchase the phone, only to find it didn’t work. “It looks cool, but I can’t do anything with it,” he whined to Fox News. “I’m angry and frustrated and feel like I wasted my time standing in line.” How to explain to this poor sod that his time was wasted whether the phone worked or not? Unless you’re waiting for food, water, medical attention or to see a loved one, queuing for 18 hours is, by definition, a waste of time. In some ways though, such lack of perspective is understandable, given the press reactions to Apple product launches. Even journalists, who you might expect would be a little more sceptical — if only for the sake of appearances — succumb to the iStupor induced by shiny things stamped with Apple logos. As Newsweek’s technology writer Daniel Lyons wrote last year, “Reporters don’t just overlook Apple’s faults; they’ll actually apologize for them, or rationalize them away. Ever seen reporters clapping and cheering at a press conference? Happens all the time at Apple events.” Lyons went on to describe the ‘Faustian pact’ that some journalists make with Apple, agreeing to withhold criticism in return for access to Apple products and people. Things were no different with the launch of the iPad. (Watch this to hear ‘journalists’ whistling and cheering Job’s announcement.) Such uncritical coverage colours even the local news. Writing in The Sydney Morning Herald for example, Stephen Hutcheon, who was “a guest of Apple” at the launch, told readers: “Dressed in his trademark jeans and black skivvy, [Steve] Jobs described the iPad as “magical and revolutionary” and containing Apple’s “most advanced technology”.” This isn’t journalism. It’s an unofficial Apple press release. Nor is it news. It would have been news if Jobs came out and said “Jeez, I was kinda hoping it would be better than this. It just a big iPhone — but without the phone bit.” (Fortunately the SMH recovered its journalistic senses later in the day with this piece from Asher Moses.) Apple excels at many things. But a sense of perspective and an ability for critical self-analysis are just two things at which they fail miserably. For that we rely on, among others, journalists. As things stands, we’re not being well served. Christopher Scanlon teaches journalism at La Trobe University and is a co-founder of upstart.net.au. |
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19 Comments
Christopher’s problem is his short memory.
It doesn’t take much work on the interwebs to find what journos thought about the iPod and the iPhone when they were first released. Almost universally, tech journos - usually without having used, let alone seen the devices in question - panned them and predicted a dodo-like future.
The bottom line is having been caught out two times, they don’t want to risk someone googling their views in 12 months time to see how they wrong they were. It’s self-interest pure and simple - not Apple worship.
And using the words “journalistic senses” and “Asher Moses” in the same sentence destroys your credibility forever!
Well said Chris. It may be that Paul’s theory above has some basis to it, but ultimately that cannot excuse the media’s breathless adulation about a device that is basically a big ipod touch. The take-home lesson from underestimating the iphone’s mega success shouldn’t be to suspend all critical faculties and worship at the altar of Steve Jobs. Rather, it should be to ackowledge that the phone market had been stagnating or at least not innovating as well as it should have done. This allowed Apple to steal the show with the iphone because it delivered a unified experience through a responsive and stable UI, the app store platform, chic design and a big capacitive touch screen.
Can we please have a ban on the use of the term “fanboy” to describe people who evangelise about Apple products. They are just suffering an iCrush, which happens to us all from time to time. No need to get too iCynical I guess.
This issue is not confined to reporting on Apple. All technical journalists are compromised to a certain extent by the relationship they have to have with the manufacturers, just to get the job done.
Christopher also misses the point about these journalists relationship to their readers. If you are a technical journalist writing for a specialist outlet, your readers are enthusiasts for the products you are talking about. Often these articles are discussions between fans not objective criticism warning of the pifalls inherent in a product.
If the product doesn’t do the job then the journo is morally obliged to say so. However, in the competitive market we have it is often a nuanced discussion of several alternatives, all of which do the job satisfactorily. The journalist often spends most of the article talking about small features which differentiate between equal products.
Yes, Apple are good at hype but so are a lot of other industry leaders who are there on a pedestal to be knocked off.
You think those reporting Apple launches are sychophantic? You should go to a car launch! Technically inept journalists are spoon fed press releases to be regurgitated while the top writers go off on a tangent and talk about everything but the car, engaging in speculation about the machinations of politics at the top of large global organisations.
All successful con artists have known for a long time that the primary consideration in picking a ‘mark’ is to pick someone who will never admit to having been conned. Apple’s genius is to market to people who through their own insecurity will not only not complain when they realise they have been sold an overpriced and inflexible product but to cover their own feelings of inadequacy and in denial of their stupidity, will trumpet the virtues of the product. It sort of like the marketeers version of the Stockholm syndrome.
All marketing schools should have a picture of Steve Jobs in every classroom.
Christopher, I don’t know what sites you’ve been reading, but there are stacks of stories on US sites (e.g. Wired, Ars Technica, cnet) and local sites (e.g. SMH, Computerworld, iTWire) that express plenty of scepticism and disappointment. Lists of what the device is ‘missing’ abound, as do articles explaining how other devices do everything the iPad does already exist (without the downside of Apple ownership).
I second Michael Butler. If anything it is the anti-Apple brigade that is shouting on the airwaves — a bit like Christopher Scanlon, to just write a story and maybe to try to be contrary.
Many buyers of Apple products make their choices based on how it fulfils their needs. In fact on simple statistics many of the iPod and iPhone users will have had to cross the street — ie. from being PC people. And contrary to the facaetious claims that Apple fans in their tens of millions will simply buy anything Steve Jobs brings out is nonsense. You do not sell 250 million iPods unless you are doing something very right. Ditto 42 million iPhones (for the record I have Mac laptop but no iPod nor iPhone but like the sound of the iPad).
Of course if like me you were around when the first Mac appeared (1984) and you were struggling with a clunky command-line PC, well you may give Apple an initial benefit of the doubt. Remember Win95=Mac84 is a fact not Apple PR.
Whole heartedly agree. As I’ve said before where’s the “pros and cons” side bar on an Apple story. You can bloody well bet Samsung Toshiba wouldn’t get the same treatment (I’m a Toshiba fanboi). See some of the comments on the story from yesterday for Apple boosters’ cognitive dissonance.
Isn’t this about the journalism involved with reporting the iPad rather than - you know, what the technical specs of the iPad can and can’t do.
Personally some of the pieces on the iPad (most notably Stephen Fry’s blog) was propaganda more suitable to Soviet Russia or the Nazis - six of one half a dozen the other.
Apple have become who they originally wanted to beat. They have become the Big Brother enemy in Ridley Scott’s 1984 Macintosh ad…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNy-7jv0XSc
BTW I own 2 macs, no iPhone and the next comp will be a Windows box because I want to have the choice to install what I want when I want.
I love my WII; I love my Nokia E71. I like my iPod. Why only like? Because like all Apple products, it tries to hide inefficiencies (battery life, the debacle that is iTunes) with gloss. with the other two products, I can do what I want with them (sure, I’d like the WII to play DVD, but it’s other functions are great - including the games…). When you speak to an Apple user, they will deny that they crash, that they are overpriced, and that the software is buggy. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they will deny, and deny, and thrice deny.
Jobs is a master of PR - what Madonna did for music, Jobs did for IT.
@Deccles: “Isn’t this about the journalism involved with reporting the iPad rather than - you know, what the technical specs of the iPad can and can’t do.” - Totally agree, and it makes an excellent point, I think, regarding “Apple evangelists”.
But it’s the author’s conflating of Apple users and Apple evangelists that is getting on the scrote of a lot of people, it seems.
I’m not sure if I’d invoke Nazis or Soviet Russia, but there has been some fantastic propaganda on both sides of the fence with regards to the iPad. I suppose that’s what you get for suggesting a device will “change everything”.
@DavidLewis: “that they are overpriced” - as someone that buys many things people (particularly gf) would call overpriced, in many areas of tech and not-tech, I think it is too emotive a term to seriously be used off the cuff or in a broad sense for any manufacturer of anything. Expensive, definitely. But with anything, depending on what you want out of it and what value you place on certain aspects, expensive and overpriced do not go hand in hand. Having said that I am not going to defend Apple broadly. For my purposes, a lot of Macs are overpriced (Pro, 13, 15 with no discrete gpu), and their ram/hdd upgrade prices (used to) border on dreadfully overpriced. For others, that might not be the case.
I’m in IT, I know the IBM architecture backwards, I use a Windows Mobile phone with a small screen mainly so I get ActiveSync, and yet two or three ‘ordinary’ people at work now have iPhones, and would kill anyone who tried to take them away from them. A lot of the techos are now getting them, and my next phone will probably be an iPhone. It appears more useable with 1 button than my HTC phone with a dual numeric keypad slider and 7 buttons. The poster above mentioned a stable UI, he forgot to say an amazing UI with super high-res screen, a screen that updates depending on the phone’s orientation, built-in GPS, integrated apps like itunes and shazam, applets useable for ‘ordinary’ folks like footy tipping, the melbourne cup, weight-watching, etc. With lithium polymer battery technology improving in leaps and bounds these days, I don’t see short battey life as a problem for much longer, altho I’ve struggled with a similar situation on an Atom Exec phone in the past and it’s a pain. My current PDA smartphone only has bluetooth and 3G, no wifi and no GPS, and it was $1000 RRP new (naturally I figured out how to pay $300 for it with a few tricks) — the iPhone has the kitchen sink, and I’m pretty sure I can get one retail for A$900. And I can repeat the tricks again for a 40% discount on RRP.
What’s Microsoft’s response to the amazing integrated technologies in the iPhone been? Create a PR campaign called ‘Windows Phone’ which releases no new technology, but simply re-presents all the existing winmob 6 phones that are out there, of which I already have one. Their software updates are woeful and doesn’t even work on my phone — I finally got the right timezone settings downloaded over a year after purchasing it, with the phone and PC playing merry havoc with the time for weeks there.
As with iTunes, Apple’s genius has been to make it easy, to excel at integration, to create cool looking gear, and they have been rewarded with record profits and record market uptake. A mate brought thier iPhone back to the store recently with a cracked screen after dropping it to organise a repair, admitted to the accident, and the guy just gave him a new one and swapped the SIM over for him, no problems at all. If you went back to Harvey Norman with that problem with your Windows phone with crap integration, what would the response be? Here’s our repairer’s name, that will be 300 bucks. I’m not so into music, nor melbourne cup apps or footy tipping (maybe the weight watching), and yet I think the UI and screen crispness on these things is superb. And apparently iTunes will let me sync an iPhone with Outlook contacts and calendar, no problems.
OK, we’re talking about the iPad here which is a blown up iPod Touch, not an iPhone, but I think all the people dissing Apple above are somewhat missing the point and overlooking the reasons for Apple’s recent market success with these last 2 technologies.
The ordinary guy with the iPhone at work loves music, and has a huge collection of digital music, despite being a technophobe. His iPhone takes phone calls, but he can hold his phone up to a playing radio, immediately recognise the song with shazam, go on to purchase the song for 2 bucks and download it forever, and immediately watch a youtube video of the same thing on his phone, all with a couple of screen presses. he can flip photos from one iphone to another using imover with a gesture. you can lock in where you parked the car in a huge westfields carpark or at the airport with a GPS carfinding app and find it again. he loves this stuff. the applets and song downloads cost next to nix.
In the meantime, after a year of ownership, my HTC phone’s touchscreen no longer works when the slider is extended, and I can’t be assed getting it fixed at whatever cost. Whether it’s an Apple gadget or whatever, whenever you’re contemplating buying any new particularly expensive toy, always google the model name and the words ‘review’ or particularly ‘problem’ and see what comes up. ‘review’ sometimes get you the early release journalistic puffpieces, but check out the online forums for known problems.
I couldn’t agree more Christopher. It actually might be a little sadder than the way your describing it too. For the multitude of iPad loving reports, we have the odd one or two that are so overly critical they are obviously Apple haters.
I’m seriously considering (hear “going to”) getting an iPad, because frankly, even though the device is a more powerful, larger iPhone, missing the calling and camera features, it’s actually not really that bad an idea for a device.
But I agree with you, it would be great to have a little more balance in the reporting.
I’m a medium to late adopter usually, best to let them get a few firmware bugs out in the first few production runs. Plus isn’t the iPad going to get 3G in April? Will that make it an iPhone? It needs a front facing camera and mic and speakers for phone calls then. Will it run MSN and Skype? etc
Sean
Why do you want one of those toys anyway?
If you want a phone, buy a phone ($50)!
If you want a PC by a laptop, you will get heaps more computing power!
@Carny - Fair point.
@sean - it’s good to take a conservative position on technology and watch its reception and impact. For myself, i managed to get the wife a cheap ex-demo iphone before christmas and not looked back. I have a mac laptop and two pc’s running windows 7 and gentoo linux respectively. Each have their pro’s and con’s, but there really isn’t much difference in stability across all of them.
Ultimately, what counts in assessing these things is the user experience. The ipod and iphone will survive and thrive for so long as users of alternative devices are disillusioned by their user experience. This is purely how Apple do so well. They aren’t first movers, they target competitors and say “ours is better”. Often it is - but usually in a very specific way. (There are heaps of things that an iphone won’t do that go overlooked)
Can the same be said of the iPad though? It’s not quite a first mover if you count the Kindle. But it’s not quite a Kindle. It’s certainly not a netbook. And who wants an ipod that’s so big it can’t fit into your pocket. Are people so disillusioned with modern netbooks and the Kindle that they would see this as a viable alternative? Maybe, I haven’t too much first hand experience of Kindle (or netbooks for that matter) to have an opinion.
btw well done Chris on a good article!
@Nugget
I don’t actually want an iPad at all. As noted, I would be interested in an iPhone with some qualifications re battery life. I forgot to mention, the iPhone also has innumerable replaceable covers, including ones which stick to your windscreen for GPS purposes, whereas my HTC has silver edging which wore off rather quickly and can’t be replaced easily.
I really think the iPad is a bit ill-conceived, and really only replaces a kindle at this stage. It’s possible it could be used as a super-light and small laptop/tablet for stuff like MSN, net surfing, phone calls, videoconferencing and skyping, etc, but I think the OS would have to be replaced with at least a multi-tasking — at least my winmob phone has basic multi-tasking with all running apps retained in memory.
Any observations about iPads with cameras, 3G, phone capabilities etc are just to help others. ; )
The best pic I’ve seen to date is this one, I have to admit:
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2010/01/28/article-1246801-08103FC5000005DC-202_306x423.jpg
And remember when he used to look like this, the preppy smarmy git (with hair):
http://raincoaster.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/steve_jobs.jpg