Musings on the iPhone, Google, Nerds and Brand Identity Part 1.

I’ve been tak­ing in all the wail­ing and gnash­ing of teeth from the tech pun­dits regard­ing the so called “brick­ing” of hacked iPhones with the 1.1.1 update; and I came to a real­iza­tion about just why the Nerdistanis get so fuck­ing worked up over every last thing that Apple does; and as a corol­lary why they tend to give a free pass to the bull­shit that Google pulls.  It’s all about Identity and Branding.

Here’s the deal. There are cer­tain com­pa­nies that really aren’t in the busi­ness of sell­ing a prod­uct.  Oh, to be sure, they pro­duce prod­ucts or ser­vices; and they damn sure want you to con­sume those prod­ucts and ser­vices. But the method that they use to induce that con­sump­tion is not to sell the prod­uct, but to sell the brand.  Apple is absolutely one of those com­pa­nies; so is Google which I’ll get into in Part 2.

Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m in no way try­ing to say that Apple doesn’t make superla­tive prod­ucts. I’m an Apple fan-boy though and through.  My only com­put­ers are Macs, the only PDE devices I intend to own are iPods, and I will very likely buy an iPhone at some point (cell phones in gen­eral are a mar­ket that I have almost no inter­est in). What I’m propos­ing is that deliv­er­ing a supe­rior prod­uct is part of the way that Apple sells the brand. And have no doubt, it is the brand that Apple is selling.

Case in point, the adver­tise­ments for the lat­est revi­sion to the iMac. Do we get some twit nat­ter­ing on about the power of the mighty Core 2 Duo, or all the won­der­ful spread­sheets that you can whip up at the office? Do we even get a dis­ser­ta­tion on the won­ders of iLife?  Nope, we get thirty sec­onds of the iMac spin­ning in cir­cles.  Imagine if Dell did an ad with an Inspiron spin­ning around…dude, you’re get­ting ver­tigo. But yet for all that the ad is, by Nerdistani stan­dards, fuck­ing retarded, iMacs are sell­ing like hot-cakes.  Another exam­ple is the lat­est crop of iPhone ads. These take a slightly dif­fer­ent tack by actu­ally get­ting into the fea­tures; but not in any sort of tech­ni­cal way. Instead of bab­bling about data trans­mis­sion speeds or any of that crap you get a guy, obvi­ously a hip young pro­fes­sional, talk­ing about how he was able to go online and find out his girlfriend’s bosses fiancé’s name and make her look like a rock-star and pre­sum­ably get a pro­mo­tion. What’s the take home mes­sage here? That guy is so get­ting anal tonight, and I’m cold and lonely. Also, Porches come equipped with super-models as a dealer installed option, and if you drink Captain Morgan hot chicks will perch upon your might­ily upthrust knee. To put this in terms of an out­moded meme from ear­lier this year (you nerds love your memes)…This is insan­ity? No, this is Marketing.

And this is where Apple has done some­thing that is simul­ta­ne­ously a mas­ter­stroke of mar­ket­ing, as well as a right­eous pain in the ass.  With the intro­duc­tion of Mac OS x and it’s open source core. Apple is sell­ing a brand, a very lifestyle, where nerds can play with the cool kids. This is some­thing that I believe that Steve Jobs under­stands inti­mately. Let’s face it, Steve is a nerd that went cool. Cringely touched on this in an ancient arti­cle. Here is the rel­e­vant quote:

In Steve’s mind, he has the best of every­thing. Apple soft­ware is cooler than Windows will ever be. Palo Alto, where Jobs lives, is trendier than Seattle. Even Jobs’ plane, a Gulfstream V, is cooler than Gates’ Challenger 604. It goes on and on. Gates has never even con­sid­ered this lat­ter point, but I’ll guar­an­tee you that Jobs has, and he rev­els in it.

This idea com­pletely changed how I thought of Apple. What Apple sells isn’t PCs, or iPods, or an OS.  They sell “cool.”

The prob­lems start when Identity comes into the pic­ture. I believe that the core of sell­ing a branded lifestyle is get­ting your tar­get to con­flate his or her iden­tity with the brand. I’m cool, because I own cool stuff. You see this at its absolute worst in the Mac-zealot class of fan-boy. You all know the type, the ones that have an ungodly hissy fit at the least sug­ges­tion that an Apple prod­uct is any­thing less than the sec­ond com­ing of Elvis.

The thing is, it’s very easy to begin to project one’s own iden­tity back on to the brand. Because I love open soft­ware and hack­ing, Apple should, nay must, love them too. Here’s the real­ity kid­dos: Steve Jobs hates open any­thing. He hates open soft­ware, he hates user con­fig­ura­bil­ity, he hates “hack­ing,” and he hates your cat. I’m just jok­ing about the cat, Steve doesn’t know your cat; but if that furry fucker keeps installing hax­ies all bets are off. If any­one had the slight­est doubt on this point, look at some of the machines that have come out of Apple dur­ing the var­i­ous Jobs regimes. Mac Plus: that fucker is prac­ti­cally welded shut.  iMac: yeah, lots of user ser­vice­able parts there. iPhone: well, we all know how that turned out.

Of course, at no point has Apple ever claimed that they sup­port “hack­ing.” True, it’s always been rel­a­tively easy to hack at the Mac OS and non-iPod Apple hard­ware; but the dif­fer­ence there is that your talk­ing about a gen­eral pur­pose com­put­ing plat­form vs a spe­cific use embed­ded sys­tem.  Gruber over at DF lays this out in a much bet­ter, and pre­sum­ably less hung-over man­ner than I can. This is the core of one of the points I want to make here.

The out­rage over the iPhone 1.1.1 update and it’s effect on “hacked” iPhones is merely a man­i­fes­ta­tion of the cog­ni­tive dis­con­nect between what most of the pop­u­la­tion of Nerdistan wants Apple to be, ver­sus what Apple actu­ally is. The bot­tom line is if you want to use an OS that actively sup­ports and encour­ages hack­ing, Ubuntu is right over there. If you want a “smart” phone that has a large com­mu­nity of 3^rd party appli­ca­tions, the Treo is wait­ing for you. You prob­a­bly won’t be able to use it to get anal sex; but you may get a hand-job, and that’s really not so bad, is it.

I have to pause here for a digres­sion on the Treo, actu­ally on Palm in gen­eral. These chuckle-heads are the per­fect exam­ple of how not to run a sup­pos­edly open plat­form. Yeah, you can write apps for the Treo, if you can deal with their gods-awful devel­op­ment toolset and if you run Windows since they killed the dev kit for MacOS years ago. And Linux? Bwahahahaha…they don’t even sup­port sync­ing the damned thing on Linux. But don’t be at all sur­prised when each and every hard­ware revi­sion has a slightly dif­fer­ent, undoc­u­mented data­base struc­ture that man­ages to break major fea­tures of any appli­ca­tion that deals with the cal­en­dar, Address Book, Tasks or Notes (you know, the core fuck­ing func­tions of the device). Oh, and dif­fer­ent undoc­u­mented API’s to deal with the hard­ware on every hard­ware rev makes for a brisk game of whack-a-bug.

Back when I could still stom­ach using a Palm device I was sub­scribed to the mail­ing list for the DateBk6, an amaz­ing replace­ment for the built in cal­en­dar app; devel­oped and sup­ported single-handedly by a guy who sees it as a hobby to get away from his real job of sav­ing fuck­ing goril­las. Seriously, if you use a Palm device and aren’t using DateBk6 get your sorry ass over to Pimlico Software and buy a license…he’s sav­ing goril­las! At any rate, I watched devel­op­ment stall for over a year while the devel­oper tried to keep up with the never-ending series of fucked up hard­ware releases, each one intro­duc­ing a dif­fer­ent API or data­base struc­ture. And what was Palm’s stock answer to any­one com­plain­ing that shit didn’t work right? “The built in appli­ca­tions work fine, so it must be a bug in the 3^rd party application.”

Is this what all the whin­ers want from the iPhone? Because right now, that’s what your pre­cious open­ness buys you. And that’s a far cry from “It just works.” Frankly I’m glad that Apple is just fuck­ing hon­est about it. Bottom line, the iPhone is a closed plat­form. Will it ever get opened up? Who fuck­ing knows, and frankly I don’t care. And I don’t fuck­ing care if the rea­son is that the API just isn’t ready; or if it’s just that Steve Jobs is a douche and wants to line his pock­ets with filthy, filthy lucre. If you don’t want the iPhone, as it exists today, don’t fuck­ing buy one. How hard is that?

And one last thing, to the fucks suing Apple because you were some­how tricked into buy­ing an iPhone…suck a dick. You all need to take your hor­ri­ble, evil iPhones, rotate them to land­scape ori­en­ta­tion, and ram them clear up your asses.

Next in Part 2…The Angry Drunk Takes on Google.  I’d be wor­ried about ruin­ing my PageRank, but you can’t get any worse than non-existent!