All Points North

Apple does a great job of keeping things secret. This is not hard, of course, all they do is not tell anybody who works for them anything. When I was asked to review the newly launched PowerBooks for MacUser a few years ago the call I made to the PR agency (Bite) was the first they’d heard of any new Macs. The in-house PR knew about the new ‘fastest ever’ laptops but could only tell me what the Apple website had already revealed and as for review units, well forget it.

– Aside — When the new G5 was launched I worked at Dennis on MacUser magazine. we tried to get hold of one from Apple they told us there wasn’t a single one in the country. Whilst I was in the postroom playing darts doing some work one of the afore mentioned G5s turned up for Maxim to photograph. Apple got a small picture on the new products page about 2in high. Bet Maxim wouldn’t get that G5 nowadays, how times have changed.

This secrecy drives people insane with lust or just plain insane. The free coverage and speculation seems never ending but when Apple has a tricky time of it, like this past weekend for instance, the say nothing know nothing approach doesn’t seem to work so well. It allows people to run with speculation and boy do they run. Websites are constructed entirely around iPhone activation issues, reviews of Mobile Me start ‘I haven’t managed to log in yet therefore it’s totally rubbish’ and all the while Apple Pr sits on its hands waiting to do nothing.

But then Apple has built such a fanbase with this approach that the fans do the PR firefighting for them. Look at The Guardian story about 1 million iPhones being sold a few of the comments just attack the Guardian. No PR company could accuse them of having a Windows bias and hating Apple like this and no matter how many people see it for what it is - bullshit, somebody will think it’s true and another Mac fan has been converted to the invisible and unpaid Apple PR machine.

If I could be arsed I’d be looking around all the other Mac forums to see if this was being replicated but I don’t really need to, I know it is. Anywhere there’s a negative comment about Apple there’s sure to be two comments pointing out how very wrong that comment is and that the person who made it is clearly insane for not thinking different like wot Mac users do.

The iPhone 3G for instance is slow and crashes but, I’m in no doubt that some Apple fan would happily tell me that this is the price you pay for having such a cutting edge piece of technology. Also, it doesn’t send or receive MMS messages how retarded is that? Almost as stupid as Mobile Safari (the full web browser) not supporting flash, but hold on Chris, that’s for your benefit! If it supported that buggy trash from Adobe the battery would go flat in an instant. But for all the legitimate complaints Apple PR simply quotes from its marketing materials and leaves the fan base to do the firefighting for them. I emailed Apple PR asking for the reason why MMS isn’t supported, still waiting for an answer.

I wonder if others just stopped responding to any form of news request and just announced stuff a couple of times a year they’d end up building a sense of anticipation and fan base like Apple has. If you don’t make any announcements then the press and bloggers can’t pick over or pick at them in great detail. Perhaps Vista would have been a great success if Microsoft had simply launched it with the press release ‘greatest OS ever’ and left it at that. For the record I use Vista all the time and like it very much.

I seem to remember a story about one of the Saatchi brothers - he could never ever be found or ever attended meetings and so when he did it was a massive event and he became the focus of all attention. I hear he’s quite good at advertising.

– Aside — Charles Arthur didn’t get an iPhone 3G for review and wonders why. I think it’s because they only had two. Yes I know that the Guardian and its excellent technology section is a great place to put your product and most companies would fall over themselves to get a review, even a bad one, in there but Apple most likely didn’t have the stock. And no they can’t just take it out of Apple Store stock because it doesn’t work like that.