I'm writing this on an Apple keyboard, with my Apple MacBookPro, on my Apple Cinema Display, with my Apple mouse... connected to my Apple Time Machine. I don't call myself an Apple fanboy, but the quality of their products is always worth the additional cost in my opinion.
It's not just the beauty of their products that I appreciate, it's also the mystique that Apple ingenuity was always a step ahead and a step above everyone else. Sure, the Apple versus PC commercials were funny, painful (for PC's) and compared the two systems. But they compared the incredible gap between the systems, not how they were alike.
Until today.
Steve Jobs unraveled two decades of near perfect Apple brand marketing and mystique today by admitting that the Apple iPhone 4 was just like any other phone, stating, "It's certainly not unique to the iPhone 4... you could go to YouTube and see Nokia phones and Motorola phones doing the same thing."
Behind him on the screen:
Not unique to iPhone
Wow. With over 170,000 words in the English dictionary, Steve Jobs decided to use the single most important word that I find synonymous with the Apple brand. Unique. When I bought my daughter an iPhone and my bill is 30% more than my Verizon (Droid) bill, I thought unique was exactly what I was paying for. I don't mind paying extra for unique...
Apple was unique. Until today. Now they're just another manufacturer that knew they had a problem, but were so arrogant that they decided to release their product anyways. Jobs says that the Bloomberg article "was a crock", which begs the question of what kind of testing did Apple actually do?
So today, Jobs' answer to the masses? "Let them eat cake!". He didn't actually say that... but it was close: "Let them have a free case!"
This post was written by Douglas Karr
Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.