Kontra writes, “One of the shiniest memes around recently has been the incessant banging of the ‘Apple’s evil’ drum. Most notably written in endless self-indulgent and self-righteous detail about how one self-important person or another gave up the iPhone…because ‘Apple’s evil,'” Kontra writes.
“There are several leitmotivs,” Kontra writes. “One is that the iPhone fell short of their ideal of what a smartphone has to be. Another is their perception that Apple’s recent growth and profitability necessarily make it evil much the way Google is also considered as such, because all large companies must be, like Microsoft, evil. Of course, Apple is controlled by a single person named Steve Jobs, who, if you’re wondering, is evil.”
MacDailyNews Take: Cough –Michael Arrington – cough.
Kontra writes, “For a more reasoned perspective, let us take a breath and remember what the world was like before Apple introduced the iPhone:”
1. Carriers ruled the industry with an iron fist
2. To access carriers’ networks handset makers capitulated everything
3. Carriers dictated phone designs, features, apps, prices, marketing, advertising and branding
4. Phones were reduced to cheap, disposable lures for carriers’ service contracts
5. There was no revenue sharing between carriers and manufacturers
After providing twenty (yes, twenty), more reasons in his full article, Kontra writes, “It’s sobering to remember that a single device by a company with zero experience in the industry and against all odds caused such a tidal wave of change. Change didn’t come because of Nokia, Microsoft, Sony Ericsson, Samsung, RIM or any other player in the market for the past 15 years bet their company on it. Android and webOS weren’t there before the iPhone. But it’s convenient to forget all this when the meme demands Apple to be smeared with the evil brush.”
There’s much more refreshing common sense in the full article – very highly recommended – here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Tim B.” for the heads up.]
Never-ending frustration with my Treo drove me back to a standard flip phone until the iPhone came around. Thank you Apple, you evil devil you.
Too bad it is so beautifully written. Unfortunately, the trolls are illiterate.
But but……I liked my RAZR phone…..and the java game on it….
wow. now this guy can write. gonna google up his other work now.
I don’t want to remember what it was like before the iPhone.
Let’s not forget how they single-handedly changed the digital music business as well. And then were berated by the media for not going DRM free when Amazon was capable of it. AS if they had any control over that.
That guy’s blog is very sporadic, sometimes months between entries, but man he is good.
“‘Apple’s evil’ drum
Are people claiming Apple is evil or does Apple have an evil drum? If the latter, how can I get my hands on one!
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“PC guys aren’t gonna just walk in and just figure this stuff out.”
Yes- but the Apple guys will and DID. Palm Pre’ this… bitches.
Awesome article-
Apple is Evil
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Google and Microsoft are not evil; right..
If you think Apple’s Evil then you need a dictionary to look up the word!
“PC guys aren’t gonna just walk in and just figure this stuff out.”
They were right. PC guys aren’t going to. Apple/Mac guys are the ones that figured it out and now the PC guys are copying Apple.
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Of course after the other competitors/Carriers/PC Guys first made fun of Apple for even trying their hand on this. Now their eating crow, won’t admit it, scrambling to come out with their iPhone/iTunes wannabe products.
I was just thinking last night how I already take my iPhone for granted – when less than a year ago I was in the dark ages.
before iPhone i use to pay $29 for 200MB data plan on my Blackberry and the 1GB or 5GB (i am not sure) was $69, they use to call it unlimited plan.
@ HMCIV
Are people claiming Apple is evil or does Apple have an evil drum? If the latter, how can I get my hands on one!
Ha! I’m going to have to create a sound patch in Logic Studio named “Apple’s Evil Drum”.
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iEvilDrum, £0.59.
Refused from App Store.
Developers claim Apple is evil for refusing to let them state that Apple is in any way, shape or form evil.
Great article, and the following comments are worth reading.
The dictionary has been useful lately for writers. Those dropping the “memes” are all over. Now this writer made me look up another word: “leitmotivs.” What is there, 650,000 words in the English language? Nicely written however.
Shocking! Absolutely Shocking…that a writer outside MDN or not named Daniel Eran, could summarize so logically and lucidly the fallacy and hypocrisy and yes, self-absorbed bias, of so many tech./computer writers/bloggers regarding Apple and its products.
Here is the general public reality for all those self-important technology “journalists”, summed up in one personal anecdote:
A non-techy friend of mine whose exposure to computers was very basic and Wintel-only for a decade, bought a Mac in 2006. One year later, he purchased a 1st-generation iPhone. After a year of use, he declared it the single-best consumer product purchase he had made in his life.
Mmmm. Lovely writing but if you insist on using fancy foreign words it behoves (look it up) one to spell and/or use them correctly. Oh, and s/he has thrown in ‘meme’ as well. Joy. No wonder I get beaten up by the Windows mob.
@Podnova…
It’s interesting that you used the Brit/Can. spelling for what Americans spell ‘behooves’. How do you pronounce the following letter?
z
“Apple is still ATT’s bitch”
Hahahahah.
You must be unaware that the iPhone is THE smartphone to own, putting Apple in a position of enormous leverage over AT&T;. The other carriers are salivating over it. They’d scramble over eachother to sign a contract with Apple.
While AT&T;has almost zero leverage. If Apple threatens to either leave them or open up to other carriers, what are they going to do? Threaten to push a competing smartphone? There ARE NO competing smartphones. The best they could hope for is suing Apple for breach of contract, maybe. And I say ‘maybe’ because we don’t have a copy of it.
@ Hmmm, too blind to see
More props to the jailbreakers. The App Store may have never happened if it wasn’t for Installer. On my old, jailbroken iPod touch, I, and I am sure many at Apple realized just what a great thing this App Store would be. Pity that Apple rules that App Store with an iron fist.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? In Apple’s case, it seems to be Hardware first, software second. Look at the iPod, which later birthed iTunes. The iPhone, which birthed App Store. Wonder at what joy the Tablet will bring!
Ag-hawk
Yea, that made me laugh too
“memes” especially the “shiniest memes” do show our “exuberance for shiny new things”
However, that Dude is such a good writer …
Betcha he’s making fun of all the “memers” out there who’ve been “memeing” all over lately
Or could just be his leitmotif …
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BC
Oh yea … and we like Shiny New iThings™ …
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Oh, and “Ag”-hawk
Just in case you haven’t figured out yet my lil’ pet name word play sign of messin’ wit ya
Right-click on the “Ag” and you should Get It™ …
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Is one of my leitmotifs
@ Hmmm, too blind to see.
Carriers have no control over the app store, ringtones, music, movies, tv shows, wifi usage, VOIP apps on wifi, extra profit Apple makes from Apple store sales, extra money apple makes from “made-for-iPhone” peripherals, no control over the money Apple and developers make off apps, app upgrades, in-app sales, OS upgrades, third party GPS solutions, etc.
Did I forget anything?
But yes, otherwise AT&T;has Apple in an absolute headlock.
“Innovation Is Good” quote me –
“competition is good” reflects outdated thinking since the field is full of ‘non-innovative competition’ which isn’t the least bit competitive. ‘Competition’ isn’t always good, Innovation is.
Before the iPhone, I had a RAZR, and I was charged by the kilobyte (the KB!!) for data, including AIM messages. And the “web browser” was useless. Sure, you could search Google, but you couldn’t pull up any of the results because they weren’t made for the special “mobile web”, whatever that was. How quickly we block out traumatic memories from our past.
S-P-O-T O-N!
Lots of /b/tards in this thread
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remember motorola a1000
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_A1000?wasRedirected=true
best phone on the market until iphone come around
Every corporation, although not evil per se, is capable of evil, either intentionally or incidentally, once they become big = powerful enough. That’s just the way it is.
Elsewhere in the world, in Europe for instance, phone makers are the rulers instead of the carriers, which has resulted in very low fares.
And guess what, none of these folks will ever be Apple customers. They regurgitate this stuff just so they don’t look incredibly incompetent for using crappy phones and Windoze. I personally just think they are cheap and try to leverage all the work they do to keep Windoze working as an entry into the world of card carrying technocratic “elite”.
@Synthmeister
AT&T;has apple in a headlock? Tell me, with the phone companies ruling with such an iron fist, exactly who was going to let Apple into the game to play? They needed a network to support things such as “visual voicemail” and properly priced data plans.
Without some benefit to AT&T;, none of these guys were going to let Apple into the game. Face it, they could have held Apple off with one hand while the other manufacturers tried to steal the ideas in the iPhone.
Apple did what it had to do to prime the market. It’s the overwhelming acceptance of the iPhone that has caused the other carriers to open up and be more consumer friendly.
No one seems to give AT&T;credit for realizing what a driving force the iPhone could be, heck the CEO of Verizon had probably a better deal than AT&T;did but couldn’t pull the trigger. He’s no waiting for Steve Jobs to die or leave Apple. How’s that for a strategy for you Verizon shareholders?
I was inside a cell phone repair shop with my white-screened Motorola flip phone. They told me that my phone would be too much money to repair, but to check out their other phones that I could buy instead. There were so many iPhone rip-offs available, as well as their pop-up, slider texting gadgets. Yes, the iPhone really changed the whole game.