Monday, February 06, 2006

AAPL - NYT's Joseph Nocera's Scathing iPod Review

Published on Saturday, the review was entitled "Good Luck With That Broken iPod" and it wasn't pretty. The article argues that Apple is arrogant and that most people don't realize when they purchase an iPod that they are buying a disposable item that is only meant to last 1-2 years. It is a Times Select article so I can't hyperlink it, but here is an excerpt.

"Apple has been willing to alienate a certain percentage of its customer base forever," said Chip Gliedman, a vice president with Forrester Research, the technology research firm. Why? Because Apple is an extraordinarily arrogant company. "Apple thinks it is special," is how Mr. Gliedman put it.
At this particular moment, of course, Apple is special, and it can get away with being arrogant. It has a product that everyone wants, and for which there is no serious competition.
But it seems to me that Apple is on a dangerous course. Yes, it has strong incentives to minimize tech support, but to say "Not Our Problem" whenever an iPod dies is to run the serious risk of losing its customers' loyalty. "I believe that the iPod is one of the most brilliant platforms ever devised," said Larry Keeley, who runs Doblin Inc., an innovation strategy firm. But, he added, he has long predicted that the "maintenance issue," as he called it, would be the product's Achilles' heel. "Consumers are just not conditioned to believe that a $300 or $400 device is disposable." Mr. Keeley, whose daughters all have iPods, has come to believe that their natural life "is just a hair longer than the warranty," and that Apple's level of service is "somewhere between sullen and insulting."
And, he warns, the day will come when the iPod has a major competitor. "There will be competing platforms, and they'll get robust, and other companies will figure out how to crack iTunes," he said. At which point, Apple will reap what it is now sowing.
A final note: You may have noticed there is no Apple spokesman defending the iPod or Apple's customer support in this column. When I called Apple, wanting to know, among other things, how long Apple believes an iPod should last, I got a nice young woman from the P.R. department. She said she'd try to find someone at the company to talk to me. That was on Wednesday.
I'm still waiting.

The New York Times

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