Let’s review the events in Apple-land over the past few months, shall we?
1. An Apple engineer either leaves an iPhone 4 prototype, or has one lifted from him, in a beer garden
2. Said iPhone 4 prototype gets plastered all over the world, taking away a meaningful measure of excitement from Steve Jobs’ planned reveal
3. During Jobs’ big unveiling of the already-unveiled, the Wi-Fi is so saturated by the media’s WiFi networks that he can’t do his demos properly, if at all
4. Apple has no backup plan in place for such a predictable situation
5. Beyond this point, I won’t even mention issuing the Safari 5 press release claiming immediate availability and then not having the pages or the download online for two hours (we’re used to that move from minor league iPod case makers, not Apple)
Perhaps Jobs is getting a bit soft as he grows older. Maybe he’s not banging heads even when heads beg to be banged?
Those five items above are silly, stupid, utterly predicable mistakes. That’s not the Apple, under Jobs at least, with which I am familiar. (Please, don’t remind me about the Apple without Jobs. For that Apple, the four items above would be successes.)
Okay, so event number one is a youthful mistake or maybe a crime. We’ll find out someday. If it’s the former, that Apple engineer should be former, too. Event number two, well, that pretty much had to follow, given Apple’s secrecy fetish. I’m not excusing any crime, if one was committed, but take away the tremendous vacuum Apple has created for the last decade plus and then filled in all at once, in one fell swoop in a beer garden and #2 wouldn’t have happened. Apple created the demand for Apple secrets. And, yes, I understand perfectly why Apple does the secrecy thing, but it only works when you can keep your secrets.
Now, #3 and #4 are just ridiculous. How Apple didn’t see this coming is beyond me. And not having a backup plan beyond asking/telling the media to stop reporting? I have to say, there’s no other word for it than “Microsoftian.”
I would’ve liked to see the iPhone 4 for the first time today. Failing that, I would at least liked to have seen those demos as Steve Jobs intended them to be seen.
I happened to catch the end of NBC’s Nightly News tonight. Brian Williams mentioned there was a new iPhone, but the main thrust of his story was that Steve Jobs couldn’t connect the new phone to the network. Now, there’s some great publicity. I’m not sure if Williams mentioned that Jobs also lobbed a setup made in heaven, “Scott, got any ideas?” to which several “Scotts” sang back a clearly audible chorus of “Verizon,” or if I just read about that one on approximately 1,100 websites.
No wonder Apple’s QuickTime stream of keynote speech isn’t online yet. It may never be.
The funny thing is, Apple brought this WiFi failure upon themselves. Apple used to stream their keynotes and even broadcast them via satellite, but supposedly, this became “too expensive.” Well, that B.S. no longer flies, Mr. Bigger Market Cap Than Microsoft. In fact, it hasn’t flown for many, many years. Apple’s been doing this on the cheap for years and it finally bit them in the ass.
Stop being cheap, Steve.
$40 billion liquid in the bank means that you can hire Akamai or whomever to stream your infomercials, sorry, your “keynotes” and “special events” along with an HD yule log 24/7/365 worldwide to everyone with a screen for the next six and a half centuries. Heck, forget streaming: Comcast just bought a controlling stake in NBC Universal for a mere $13 billion. Imagine, you’d still have $27 billion left and you’d even have some fresh content for your little hobby, too. (wink)
Bottom line: Broadcast your events like you’re supposed to and you can have all the WiFi you need for your demos. If not, you’re either going to want the ‘Net mainlined straight into your 30-pin Dock Connector (that’s your backup, at least; why do I have to tell you this?) or don’t do live demos that depend on wireless connectivity because asking the media to stop doing your job of delivering your event to the world, as you should have been doing all along, isn’t going to work out any better than it did Monday morning. In fact, it’ll almost certainly be worse the next time around.
SteveJack is a long-time Macintosh user, web designer, multimedia producer and a semi-regular contributor to the MacDailyNews Opinion section who, among other things, basically described the iPhone on December 10, 2002.