Apple, the brand that could, has created dozens of glorious products and services that my professional and personal lives literally revolve around. Having been the underdog for so long, and I can understand their hard-nosed approaches at gaining and keeping their share of the market they deserve. But here are the top 5 things that really bug me about them:
5. Your marketing strategy is basically to make fun of your target audience (hopefully without them realizing it), embarrass them, and hope it causes them to think you’re cool and start using you instead. (Mac vs. PC ads)
4. iPod batteries wear out after a few years, and you can’t easily replace the battery yourself like you can with almost every other electronic device in the world. You have to either send your iPod back to Apple (so they can make more money off of you) or buy a new iPod.
3. The Mighty Mouse sucks. In my opinion, it is the worst product from Apple I’ve ever used. They must not have done much research in long term usage because every person I know that has one has had a problem with it. The side buttons are awkward and testy to the point that I had to disable them, and the tiny flimsy scrolling button screws up constantly.
2. Why do you sell music that can’t be converted or played on anything that isn’t your product? M4a’s suck, I want MP3s. I’ve switched completely over to amazon.com/mp3 now rather than ever downloading another file I can’t send to someone else.
1. People who use Macs think they are better than everybody else. OK that’s not Apple’s fault, but it still annoys me.
So that’s my $0.02. Oh yeah and the whole “Steve Jobs only paying himself $1 a year to be CEO” crap is just a public relations stunt, he makes millions off his own stock. All the CEOs who get all the press they can for paying themselves $1 (Google, Capital One, etc.) are some of the richest CEOs in the country. I’m not counting that as a reason because I’m all for capitalism. Although it is admittedly not greedy, I’m just pointing out the ulterior motives.
Jobs knows what he’s doing. I wish I would have invested in Apple too. If I’d bought 3,298 shares of Apple stock in 1998, for $99,995, at $30.32 a share, it would now be worth $1,997,797.
