Wow. They could never run an ad like this now. And yet this was just a few years ago. It reminds me why I used to like them so much. They made beautiful things and seemed like cool people. Now they just make beautiful things.
That's exactly the response the ad was designed to invoke. Wasn't grounded in reality then either. As Apple has become more successful it's increasingly difficult for them to play the underdog/outsider role and their advertising has changed to reflect that. I don't really see much of a difference in the company other than the fact it's more successful and that success has largely come from their consumer electronics products. The Mac/OSX side of Apple hasn't changed much at all.
Hmm, you could be right. It could be I was fooled into believing that Apple was still the cool company that I originally knew, back in the 1980s. Then it really was cool.
So when did Apple actually cross over into badness? Or whatever-ness would make running ads about rebels a deliberate imposture? Before Steve came back? Between then and now?
They were always about the control, starting from the Mac. The Apple ][e was what I cut my teeth on, from a programming perspective. It was a marvelous machine! And you could do anything on it, because there was BASIC and an assembler (after all, what else could one possibly need?)
I saw my first Mac in the store in 1984, just before I graduated high school, and I loved it on sight. The cute little face! The crisp graphics! I had precisely zero dollars, but I looked into a developer's kit. There was exactly one. Apple sold it. It was $1200 or something - an incredibly high bar. Unattainable for me, of course, but even at the tender age of 17 I had the impression that couldn't bode well for the Mac.
The IBM PC wasn't nearly as attractive, but within a year of its release there was software to do anything you wanted, and the Mac still didn't have anything to speak of, except for what the big boys had written for it.
So my answer: Apple balances Jobs yang with Woz yin. And lately, there's been no Woz yin. It's all about controlling the experience - a media thing. They talk about being rebels, but it's the rebelliousness of, say, Twilight.
I'd say it happened at the point where the iPod gained mass-market dominance. It's hard to be cool when you're a market leader, and Apple first rose to market-leader-status with the iPod. Everything else - the iPhone, the iPad, the increased popularity of Mac and OSX - follows from that.
I'd peg it at 2004/2005 with the huge mass market success of the iPod and the Intel switch. That's the point where you couldn't feel sorry for Apple anymore or think of them as anything less than a major industry player. To me that's still pretty cool but I can see your point too. It's certainly less romantic. Apple pre-2001 was basically a good ole fashion tragedy story. Apple pre-2004 was still a feel good diversity trumps adversity -- return of the king type of story. Apple post-2004 is just a really successful but unique business story.
The locked-downness is part of Apple's approach to entering the corporate market.
Interestingly, this approach (consumer -> corporate) is precisely the opposite to RIM's approach with the Blackberry. It almost seems too crazy-bold to have been planned from the early days of the first ipods, but it does seem to be slowly working out.
To be fair, Apple has moved towards the mass market. When you're mass market, and you're the industryleader in certain segments (say, phones) it becomes harder and harder to seem 'cool', or 'outsiderish' - especially since cool is related to how much of an outsider you're perceived to be.
I think it isn't necessarily Apple that has changed. The change might be the perspective of our times. I think any company attempting to sell that iconic revolutionary anti-establishment sentiment today will come off as disingenuous, pretentious, naïve, or all three. Maybe it's the medium: you can't get this message across when people expect their video in HD with 5.1 dolby surround sound, and so YouTube, the blurry pictures with the simple voice will seem like fake nostalgia.
I don't see why not. Aside from a small number of hackers, how does this conflict with how the general population perceives Apple?
Their customers love them. They're still perceived as incredibly innovative. They bring new technologies to mass market with unparalleled success. Even the vast majority of iPhone developers are incredibly grateful for the opportunity the App Store provides them.
It's just a vocal minority here on HN that has decided that Apple is evil. Outside the echo chamber they're still rebellious, disruptive, innovative, pioneering, etc.
Users (and "the product") are more important than your developers, more important than vendors, and more important than business partners. Apple gets this, most other companies don't.
God, can we please unplug from the incredible myopia that is the geek viewpoint of Apple?
They still make amazing products, they still use and contribute a huge amount to open source. So they have their phone OS locked down, there are reasons for that, and they mostly revolve around the best experience for most users. (read not you)
I don't know, as a developer Apple's OS install and development policies hurt and Apple's refusal to let you do things like hack their hardware hurts. And sure I wish Apple was being even more progressive by doing things like selling the iPhone unlocked and open for all networks, thus pushing phone carriers to compete a bit more.
But that said, Apple has done a lot. They push design and refuse to let feature complexity compromise the beauty and simplicity of their machines. Arguably the iTunes music store single-handedly pushed the music industry to drop DRM. The Webkit project has led to a highly advanced and open-sourced HTML5 platform. And Apple has focused their build and packaging process to be more environmentally "friendly".
They are not infallible, and I'm sure many people here would argue that their contributions to the good are far outweighed by the bad, but the point is that it's easy to forget these positive things amongst all the bad press.
I'm not sure how this doesn't apply to Apple's current approach? We've left AOL and CompuServe far behind; OSS is waxing while closed source is waning. Even IBM and Microsoft are reaching out to the open source community.
I would argue that you can wrap up all those up by saying that they focus on the user experience, rather than on any of functionality, features, performance or price. And it turns out people like stuff that works easily, even if it doesn't do exactly what they want.
Neal Stephenson's article about computers (In the Beginning was the Command Line) likens (iirc) Macs to BMWs and Linux to a build your own tank. Sure it might be cheaper and a hell of a lot of fun to make your own car, but it's not for everyone. Not sure he cares so much as while he needs work done he gives you great mileage per gallon.
