By Quentin Langley
Apple is a cult company – a tribal brand. It has passionate support in terms of depth, if not always in breadth. As the only slightly cynical Courtney Thorpe put it in a post on Gizmodo “You Apple fan-boys . . . Apple could put out a brick and tell you it’s an iPhone, and you would buy it”. When Apple messes up, it’s a big problem for the brand.
The iPhone 4 antenna problem was mishandled by Apple, and badly so. It may even have revealed a problem which goes to the heart of the company’s business model. The first word that most people associate with Apple products is ‘cool’. This is far from a bad thing, and it is not to say that Apple has not been a technical innovator, it has. But it is more Mercedes Benz than Ford. Apple’s early adoption of the use of icons, mouse-controls, pull down menus, etc. did not change computing. It is when Microsoft mass produced these things that the world began to change. The real marker of Apple products is not that they are better than those of their competitors, it is that they are cooler. This, rather than product performance, is the real USP.
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