MATT BOLTON…
remembers when Apple was the scrappy underdog, but the com pany needs to forget those times
Some people, you may be shocked to learn, don’t like Apple. The company has a reputation for needless nannying, deciding what you can and can’t do on your device with a smack of its schoolmaster’s cane. There are people who think this even today, who know a few key nuggets they can cite to back up their premise, like ‘So can you set any song you want as your ringtone?’ And though these are generally disingenuous arguments, they’re hard to actually argue with.
The thing is, Apple itself doesn’t exactly help in this regard. These people will now have heard all about the iPhone speed-throttling debacle, and the narrative is entrenched deeper. What Apple did was actually an elegant solution to an intractable tech problem – but it can’t just go around making these decisions, vaguely referencing them buried in release notes, and then be surprised when people say ‘Hang on, you made the old iPhone you’d probably like me to pay to upgrade deliberatelyslower!?’
The problem is that a lot of us Apple users are actually used to Apple making sweeping decisions on our behalf, and don’t mind it. We’re from a time when Apple was a big brand, but its products were niche. If you used them, you were fairly committed to them, and you kind of bought into Apple’s ethos. Yes, Apple could be a bit of a nanny and make changes on your behalf during an operating system update, but OS updates only came every few years, and we were okay with these quirks because if they adversely affected 3% of people, that was a tiny impact overall, and probably helped the rest of us. Here in 2018, though, Apple is the biggest brand, and its products are mainstream. But sometimes, it still acts like it’s a minor player that can get away with making changes like the battery tweak quietly. However, changes like this don’t affect a few, mostly tech-savvy users any more. There are over 1 billion iOS users. If a change affects 3% of them, that’s 30 million unhappy people, complaining loudly, and filing lawsuits.
Even something more minor, like the fact Apple recently changed how you toggle things on or off for Spotlight search results on iOS, can make a big difference. In this case, a new option was added to remove an app from appearing in Spotlight, and if you had previously chosen to stop an app’s files showing in Spotlight, the iOS update automatically set the whole app to stop appearing. No warning. No note. Something that worked suddenly stopped working, with no obvious reason or fix.
Apple’s customers are no longer those intrepid people who made a choice to break out of the Wintel mould. They’re just regular people who don’t think of a phone as a computer that needs maintenance. If you make their iPhone appear to stop working, then you have made it stop working.
Apple needs to stop acting like a lovable rebel and embrace the responsibility that comes with being The Man.
Changes like this don’t affect a few, mostly tech-savvy, users any more