COMMENTARY | "I have an iPhone, but it's just a phone to me," the person I was speaking with said. (Perhaps he knew I was an Android fan.) "I'm not, like, fanatical about it or anything."
In saying that, he was trying to set himself apart from the stereotypical Apple fan -- the one who ignores reason, evidence, and common sense. Who buys Apple products to attract members of their preferred gender. Who's duped by marketing, and keeps being duped over and over again, year after year. And who then has the audacity to lecture fans of non-Apple products on how their manufacturers are doing things all wrong.
All of these traits are annoying, to be sure. But the most annoying thing about Apple fans?
They're right
And I mean that by basically any definition you can think of. What's the most valuable company in the world, as of a few months ago? Apple. (Its biggest competitor for the title was not Google or Microsoft, but Exxon.) Which one company has been making two-thirds of all the profit to be had in the whole smartphone would? Apple. And its record quarterly net profit of $13 billion these past few months can buy an awful lot of ads.
But what about those ads? Aren't they style over substance? You tell me. Here's a sample of its recent iPhone ads. Do you know what they all have in common? They show people actually using the product, and it works just like in real life. Compare and contrast with this infamous Verizon Droid ad, which talks about trading "hairdo for can-do" but is basically nonsense sexist imagery. Or the one that shows Droids being shot out of stealth fighters. Or a Motorola Xoom transforming into a spaceship.
The Droid was supposed to be the anti-iPhone. If the opposite of the iPhone is vapid imagery and form over function, what does that say about Apple's products?
That they don't work as well
Or else they supposedly have an "Apple tax," which apparently only applies to the Mac since the iPhone and iPad are priced extremely competitively. (They should be; Apple has so much cash, it can buy up the whole supply of the special components it needs, according to Philip Elmer-DeWitt of CNN Money.)
But that tax is willingly paid, year after year, by people who know the alternatives. And every year, fans of the Android- or Windows-based alternatives rant and rail at Apple fans for not buying those instead.
They don't for a number of reasons. Because they're already tied into the Apple ecosystem, with iTunes and iCloud and the App Store. Because they really do like how Apple's products make them feel. And because, when they bought a Mac or iPad, they felt for the first time like this thing was designed just for them ... not to fill a certain market niche or make a certain sales target. Like the people who made it cared about it, enough to do their best.
That's something that many have never experienced anywhere else, at least not in the tech world. And until the fans -- and makers -- of other products realize that, Apple's just going to get bigger and bigger. Until it's too late for anyone else to compete on an even playing field.
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