I’ve been a big fan of the mac for a few years now. I’ve never been an Apple fanboy, and I am the first to admit that I have my fair share of problems with my macs over the years. But recently Apple have begun to grate my ethical nerves for a couple of reasons.
Blogging and Social Media
Apple have been developing applications that allow people to blog and podcast with their mac right out of the box. (Granted the apps aren’t all that great, but whatever.) Apple customers, and this is a great big generalization here, have been at the forefront of social media. It’s easier to do audio and video work on a mac, and corporate culture of “Think Different” lends its self to these digital hippies that are creating content for free.
However, Apple have not adopted these technologies into their own corporate culture which makes a lot of people think that Apple are being very hypocritical. Bloggers have been bashing Apple’s PR practices for months now and there has been no response at all. Command and control messaging that has been used by companies to build their brand is no longer effective. Consumers are skeptical when they hear the lattest tagline, and it is getting harder and harder to buy into corporate messages. Social media advocates will tell you that the only way to get out of this type of messaging is to engage with your customers. Listen to them, talk to them.
Apple was perfectly positioned to do that. Mac fans are just that: fanatics. There would be so much good feed back coming from their customers. But sadly Apple have decided to close the door and continue to bombard us with lifestyle ads.
One last rant on the Apple’s relationship with its customers. As I mentioned earlier, mac people are fanatics and are constantly waiting for the next product release. There are several websites that write about rumoured products and services that will be appearing from Apple in the near future. A little while ago, Apple tried to force one of these sites to reveal the source of a leak that revealed a new product. Apple argued that the blogger is not a journalist and thus was not covered by the first amendment. Apple recently lost the case, thus granting bloggers the same rights as journalists. (At least in California anyway.)
There is a huge irony in the fact that Apple was the company to get everyone all excited about creating new media, these same bloggers are somehow less credible than other journalists, and finally reinforced blogger’s rights by losing a court battle. Damn, there’s some weird Karma going on there.
Production Practices:
The other thing that bugs me about Apple is that they have positioned themselves to be the ethical company that enables people to change the world. (Search google video> “Apple ads” to see what I mean.) They invoke Ghandi and other labour leaders to make their point in their advertising. How dare they?
Wired ran an article yesterday on how Apple products are manufactured in China. Apple assembles all of their products in China and their labour practices, although not terrible, have been called into question. As the article points out, politically propressive Apple should be way above the minimun labour standards. This is yet another missed opportunity by the Apple PR department.
Another thing about the Apple’s production that bothers me is the quality. Just a few years ago the aluminum powerbook was a the epitome of production quality. Recently bloggers and websites have been reporting more and more defects and shody quality standards on their flagship products. Several class-action suits have been launched against the company and again their has been no public response from the company.
Conclusions:
Will I stop buy macs? We’ll see. Although i like to be an ethical consumer, almost every hi-tech product in NA has passed through an asian factory with relatively low paid workers. As for the PR gaffs and non-communicative nature of the company, we can only hope that Apple will eventually drink the kool-aid and start talking to it’s customers. We’ll see what happens when people start to get really pissed off. They are already making comparisons to the “old” evil-empire Mirosoft.
I’ll leave you with some questions: How important are these things to you? Is the contradictory corporate culture a deterent to you as a consumer? Do you care if your products are produced in sweat shops by a company that markets to the politically progessive?
