I’ve been reading a lot of press lately about the demise of Apple. Their shares are on a downward slump, and every other article about Apple will happily pick through quarterly earnings, dissecting them as if every reader is a qualified chartered accountant. But I want to talk about something else today.
Today, I got a call from my sister in law. She was trying to get her (really) old iMac hooked up to a separate monitor as the iMac’s screen was not working well. After a few efforts, she had to give up on it. That’s where I come in.
The first I knew about her problem was that my wife’s iPad Mini started to beep with a FaceTime call. So I took the call. As she explained what the problem was, I had to take the call on my Mac. I asked her to call me on the Mac. By mistake she ended up calling the number of my wife’s iPhone. So, I ended up taking that call trying to solve the problem of the monitor. The screen on the iPhone made it hard to make out the details of what was going on with her screen, so I hung up, and grabbed my iPad 3 and called her. By now, I was talking to her on the iPad, and trying to deal with her monitor settings. In the end, we managed to get the monitor connected and working well.
I was then asked by her to help with a problem she had to do with her login password. I decided that it would be better switch on Messages on my Mac, and request to take control of her screen. In the end though, my problematic internet connection in Malaysia proved too much for screen sharing to work properly. And that’s when it hit me.
I had just used 4 different devices, to connect to my sister-in-law, herself using 2 devices to solve a problem at a distance of 9156 miles (14,735km). We were using a total of 2 versions of iOS and 2 versions of OS X. I’ve been using Apple stuff for so long I kind of take it for granted that I can talk from a phone to a computer to a tablet, without losing any sanity. I take it for granted that you can hook up an external monitor to a 6+ year old iMac, and be able to configure it to 1080p, without any hassle.
Having bought two beautiful Apple products in the past month, the iPad Mini and the iPhone 5, I now cringe at the latest trend to bash Apple in the tech press. We’ve been hearing that they have become complacent, that their products are old and rehashed, that iOS is clunky and outdated. The fact is, the core value of Apple has been to make products that are “insanely great”. This doesn’t happen with clunky or outdated designs. This doesn’t happen by reacting to competitors cramming their own products with every feature possible, in the hope of pleasing everybody. It happens by staying true to your own values, and making products that do what they are supposed to, when they are supposed to.
Are Apple on their way down the toilet? Who knows in these crazy times! They’ve got more cash in the bank than most countries have. Their market value has slumped, which still puts them in the top 5 most valuable companies on the planet. Who knows which way their shares are headed, but I know that whatever 2013 brings, Apple will come out with beautifully designed, exquisitely made products are amazing on the outside and the inside.