“When I switch on my Apple Mac, the first thing I see on the screen is a smiling face – the icon of Apple’s operating system. It seems apt. Once the technology world’s underdog, Apple has become the consumer power-brand of the 21st century, a company that knows what real people want from their cutting-edge gadgets,” Julia Pierce writes for The Independent.
Pierce writes, “Apple has had reason to be cheerful. But the happy face on the screen of my MacBook laptop is starting to look more like a pained grimace. In recent months, court cases, faulty products and bad PR have taken the shine off these objects of consumer desire. Could the unthinkable be coming to pass? As David has become Goliath, has Apple lost its cool?”
Full load here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Leo” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: This piece should be used in university media classes to illustrate how to generate a hit piece. The Independent: Yellow journalism at its most obvious.
Ok once and for all people:
The Mac “smiley face” (sic) logo is actually TWO FACES.
The dark half-face on the left represents the Mac’s computer screen and the lighter face on the right (seen in profile) represents the USER.
Mac and user, both happy. It represents INTERFACE.
It intentionally evokes the Picasso style.
None of this is “made up” on my part.
It is stunning how few people have working gestalt systems capable of seeing this simple example of emergence. Is it the water?
Think different.
Oh, and is this guy using Mac OS 7, 8 or 9?
==
“When I switch on my Apple Mac, the first thing I see on the screen is a smiling face – the icon of Apple’s operating system.”
==
I don’t know about y’all, but I see a gray apple when I start up my Mac OS X.
Artistic license and editorials don’t mix, m’fer.
*shaking head* You sad little leftist, Tango! Are you getting all scaredy-waredy because mean ol’ Ann Coulter is out there invading your homelands and converting all your friends to Christianity? Bwhahaha. Ann Coulter knows her field inside and out. Julia knows nothing. There’s the first difference, right there, but you leftists seem to have such a hard time with obvious realities. Crawl on back to DailyKos!
I’m beginning to wonder if Linux Guy is channeling the spirit of Joe McCarthy or if he’s just off his meds.
According to him, anything or anyone that criticises anything American – including Apple – is part of the communist menace. And yet he uses software which was developed under a co-operative, almost socialist spirit. Strange really.
I think we (mac lovers) should just stand back, and watch as the windows world gets tired of a bad computing experience. And in the end, when apple still has a better OS, we should laugh at them. by the way, my mac is from 1999 and i have only upgraded the RAM, by 256 Megs. and I am running OS X, and running it well. I’d love to see any Windows computer from ’99 running XP with hardly any upgrades.
Yes, I hate Windows
Apple’s silence is deafening concerning the 10.4.7 fiasco. How quickly they release a solid 10.4.8 that fixes the problems is crucial, to assure Mac users they haven’t totally lost it technically. There’s no pressure on Apple, considering Vista’s continuing slippage, so it’s hard to understand how this has happened. Is OS X turning into Windows because of Boot Camp?
He uses an old system, and writes for The Independent — say no more.
I admonished this paper not so long ago for filling its front page with a “We’re Doomed” eco-porn non-story — while nestling above the masthead was a ‘Free air tickets to New York’ come-on for faithful readers.
Ha!
“The Independent is a loathsome British commie rag that despises all things American.”
LinuxGuy you should realise that to the average non-American a statement like that just makes you sound like a moron.
The Independent’s tagline used to be: “It is. Are you?”
What, crap?
The Indepedent is well known in the UK as being middle-class left, which is even worse than extreme left.
At least the extreme left stand by what they believe in (what they believe in is a load of socialist claptrap, but at least they believe in, and live it).
The middle-class left preach on about leftist inclusive policies, being soft on crime, soft on drugs, while at the same time being sealed up in their ivory towers drinking champagne and having dinner parties, safely protected from the chaos that their policies create.
His slip up with the smiley face shows that this is nothing more than an Apple-bashing-by-the-numbers, based on research that this idiot did about 10 years ago.
It could be worse, at least it’s not The Guardian.
Soft on Crime and Drugs? That explains why Britain has a much bigger problem with both than the US…now I understand. The Independent is a reputable media voice, certainly more so than the average web site. If someone has an opinion I fail to see what getting worked up is supposed to accomplish except illustrating the unwillingness of some to accept the fact there is a diversity of opinion on most issues.
LinuxGuy and Mac Prodigal Son “Yellow journalism? No, red journalism. The Independent is a loathsome British commie rag that despises all things American. But If Steve Jobs had been an incompetent loser, they would have loved him. Ignore this driveling idiocy article.”
Except it’s not. There are far more left wing papers over here. The Independent is so middle of the road on every possible issue it’s dubbed the “Indescribablyboring”. I wouldn’t worry about it hating Americans. It doesn’t hate anything. Or like anything either to be honest.
I’ll agree with your last point though. Ignoring this article works for me.
Could we please drag this out of the gutter? The writer of this article happens to be the mother of my children. Go ahead and disagree all you want; it is an opinion piece in a respectable British national newspaper about a computer manufacturer – it is hardly an affront to humanity or to a religious belief as some would seem to have it. Whatever you do, please do not descend into personal insults against the writer; it is genuinely hurtful to see someone you love degragated in such a way when they are merely trying to prompt a useful debate (and it is a useful debate if you care about Apple computers); moreover, such insults only degrade the insulter.
I would just like to clear one thing up: the whole first couple of paragraphs, which waffle on about how the first thing you see when you turn on an Apple Mac is the “Happy Mac icon”, were not written by Julia – they are the work of Independent subs who for some unfathomable reason altered the original draft. When we picked up the newspaper yesterday (Julia did not get to see the altered version before publication), the first thing I said was, “I cannot believe they changed that. Every Mac user out there is going to say, ‘The first thing you see when you switch on a Mac is a grey Apple’!” This poorly-altered opening is bound to detract from the article as a whole, but I ask you to read past that. The writer _does_ use a MacBook (it’s mine!) – she is not lying, although anybody reading those first published paragraphs could be forgiven for thinking so.
The main point, though, is this: I develop shareware software for OS X. Both myself and the author of the article use OS X as our OS of choice and we are a three-Mac household. Neither of us would even consider returning to Windows: the article was not written by a Mac-basher. But that does not make Apple infallible. Apple is not a religion; it is a computer company. They happen to make an amazing operating system and some very solid computers; they also happen to have some amazing software engineers who are incredibly helpful (I could name several Apple software engineers who have made very useful contributions to my shareware app; I doubt there are many major companies about which you could say the same). Unfortunately, for all of the amazing things they do, Apple also happen to have a very arrogant attitude when it comes to dealing with the press or with customers with out-of-warranty machines or with unrecognised problems. If you’ve never had to deal with this, then I envy you.
Apple get away with a lot because they have a vocal fanboy following who are more than happy to make personal attacks on strangers who dare to question their brand-of-choice; they cannot remain unchallenged forever, however. And this was the point of the article (which _was_ well-researched), as anyone who read past the first few paragraphs will realise: Apple have not dealt entirely well with its increased market share. The article was about calling Apple to account. Apple is a big, corporate business – it is not, as another writer recently pointed out, a worker’s co-op. I have no idea what “yellow” journalism is (although I personally don’t see “red” as an insult), but I do know that good journalism tries to call the goliaths out there into account. (But yes, I wish Apple was more of a goliath than MS too.)
Oh, and it seems that some people have got two different articles mixed up. Beneath Julia’s article there was a separate piece by somebody who said that they liked their iPod but didn’t like Apple; nowhere in the main article did Julia state that she didn’t like Apple.
I think there is an interesting debate to be had here. I just hope it can continue in a civilised way without personal insult.
the independent is actually a fairly objective news source most of the time
there is probably more to the options story than meets the eye
and certainly as apple transitions from underdog to top dog more entities will look forward to seeing them fall
remember the words to don henly’s ‘dirty laundry’:
kick ’em when they’re up, kick ’em when they’re down
KB, good man — I’m glad to see you stand up for your wife and clarify the confusion.
I actually came to this site to look for your response after seeing your blog entry. Glad I found it.
As for the first paragraphs… tragic things like that happen all the time. That was one of the reasons I dropped my freelance journalism. Too much editorial freedom to my articles (in a small town), while keeping my name as the article’s author. But of course, writing for Independent is a different level of professional recognition, one not many can ever achieve.
I do use a Powerbook, but frankly I treat Apple for what it is: a product manufacturer. As for the Macbook… I bought it, and then had to return it for all the quality issues it had. The only reason I use Apple is due to the innovative software, like the one you’re developing. Other than that, I don’t care about what branding my keyboard has.
Some people in this discussion took it a tad too far. I thought the Apple user crowd was supposed to be a bit more intelligent than that.
Cheers man.
Good for you for sticking up for the mother of your children. Some of the children on this board will get the point when they too are fathers (or mothers).
I’ve been writing for newspapers since before the Mac appeared, & I had one of the first 1984 batch to hit Britain. They’ve always been variable in quality control on first release. As far as the Indie subs are concerned, I’d give them hell. It’s out of order to put substantive changes under a reporter’s byline.
As to the vulgar semiliterate kiddies blatting away here… we don’t need to listen to people who think someone called “Julia” is a man. Nor do we expect rational thought from fanboys; if they were capable of rational thought they wouldn’t be fanboys, a liminal state of being — perhaps in some cases perpetual liminality — marked by inadequate autonomy and the need to reify the fictive attributes attached to a commercial product by marketing experts. In other words, the fanboys are suckers for the reality distortion field.
Fanboys: Julia’s old man just released the best piece of Mac shareware I’ve seen for years. His woman’s a reputable journalist. The Independent — for which I was a columnist for 10 years to for which I still write regularly — is middle-of-the-road liberal. An example of a “commie rag” would have been Pravda, or even The Morning Star. If you are going to try to take the moral high ground with a weak case, adopt a relentlessly elevated rhetorical tone; infantile insults don’t cut it. It’s considered polite to deploy spelling and grammer properly in a public discourse. Now carry on. I’l not be back. Too depressing.