Mac Mondays: Apple’s Beauty can be fragile
Take a look at the products coming out of Apple’s campus from the past 5 years. Every item Apple has released is still ahead of every other competitor. I look at a CRT Studio display from 1999 and it’s better looking than some of today’s most expensive flat panel monitors. I would rather run a 19� Apple Studio display because of its amazing stand, translucent case and ADC connectivity. The first iPod was bulky and had some issues but is not a relic but a work of art I can cherish four years after its release. With this said, I have seen some beautiful Macs that have gone through some unplanned abuse and it shows.
Apple as a collective puts its soul into the products but if you are moving out of the house and crack one of the legs on your Apple 23� Cinema Display HD, it will cost you about 800 dollars to get that frame replaced. Damaging the case of a PowerMac G5 will cost you a pretty penny and an out of warranty iPod with a cracked screen is a “tough luck� situation because the repair will most definitely be put on the charge card. Spending a lot of time in the Apple stores, you hear horror stories where great people suffered financially because a kid knocked their iMac flat panel over, dropped the iPod or a little too much pressure on the Apple Studio display cracked the enclosure. Apple has flat rate repairs on many products deemed not under warranty based on “abuse� and that’s the price you pay to keep the visual integrity of your Apple product.
It’s funny because when I talk to individuals stuck with a slightly broken product it takes a few minutes of them ranting to finally figure out that the product works great and has never been better but that crack or blemish from a light bulb too close to their display is unacceptable for their Mac and like paint scraps after someone has keyed your car, it has to be fixed immediately. I soon realize that Mac users purchase their computers for many reasons and one being the look, feel and visual presence of the device and how it affects the surroundings. I feel better when I have my iBook or iPod out at the local deli and with good reason. It’s similar to adding a lawn gnome or a fern to your lawn and things would not be the same without it.
Since Mac users are so passionate about the visual, Apple stays ahead of the times and releases products that talk to us and triggers our buying impulses before we know they exist yet. Apple designers have stated many times that this constant effort to give their customers things they don’t know they need yet forces them to use materials and processes that are cutting edge or invented in-house and thus the R&D, testing and trials for new products is enormous. A similar story to this is Apple’s trademark glass staircase used in its flagship retail stores took months to develop and the glass supported by glass technique with a custom cut and angle designed to sustain 400 lbs per square foot is just amazing but required R&D in order to achieve it.
Processes used in the iPod nano, Apple display line and notebooks are cutting edge and sometimes Apple can’t afford to test a product behind closed doors for more than 4-6 months after development ends because competitors would be close behind to beat Apple to the punch. It is cheaper, as a company, to release products that are near perfect and let the thousands set to buy the product’s first revision to be testers to this new technology.
The snow iBook is a great story of Apple trying to make the best consumer notebook at a great price with little for R&D. They created a computer from the ground up and kept it under 1500 dollars in its first 500 MHz revision of the system. The first revision had issues with its hinges, CD-ROMs, motherboards and some video issues here and there. These are not known issues but trust me they were there. The iBook G4 came along 2.5 years later with a slot loading drive, better monitors, increased Airport connectivity, and most importantly a new enclosure built to be more durable than the iBook G3. Two years later with the 1.42Ghz iBook revision the case is smoother with a better enclosure latch, more silent CD-ROM and enhanced battery locking. Many that read the forums and rarely handle the latest machines on a daily basis do not see the small enhancements given to new revisions but the iBook is a machine with a few more years in its current design because since 2001 the iBook has had many changes that would make your jaw drop if you saw the 500MHz and 1.42GHz models placed side by side.
The moral of the story is that beauty is a great feature of Apple’s products but beauty comes at a cost and it’s always better to wait. The longer you wait the better the product will be in my opinion. Even if the latest iBook was rocking a 500Mhz processor I would chose it over the original iBook since things have so greatly improved in the general look, feel and use of the computer’s elements. The 2nd version of the nano will be great and so will the 2nd revision of the Quad processor G5 because Apple would have settled many of the issues associated with first revisions of these products (those you never even heard of). I can’t list internal issues I know of but when you tell an Apple rep that something is happening there is already an internal knowledge base document on it and a steps of service to handle that issues. When you feel weird when your iMac stops outputting video and call Apple then they immediately send a box to you, that’s a sure sign that something is wrong with that iMac’s Midplane and not just your lucky day.
