When Steve Jobs took the stage to announce the new iPad on 2 March, the online Apple Store had already been offline for several hours, just as it had been when Apple launched the new MacBook Pros a week earlier.
In fact, every time Apple launches new hardware, the store goes offline for hours. It’s happened so often over the years that it’s become a cliché, yet no-one I know has come up with a convincing reason why it’s necessary. That’s probably because there isn’t one. It isn’t necessary. Imagine if Amazon went offline every time it updated its stock or the iPlayer disappeared whenever a new programme was added.
Content management systems are updated all the time without requiring the website for which they provide content to be offline. These days, you can update, say, a WordPress site with one click inside the CMS itself with nary a hiccup – usually.
So why does Apple do it? The answer is, like so much of what Apple does these days, that it’s a gimmick. It’s supposed to build a sense of anticipation. Heighten expectations. Have us all salivating over our keyboards. And, in many cases, it still does. The thousands of tweets and forum posts whenever the store goes down are testament to that. However, beyond filling Twitter with tweet after tweet saying the same thing, does it serve any purpose? Does Apple sell more Macs because its online store is unavailable for a few hours? Do all those posts and tweets add up to anything tangible? Or does the inability to buy something when they want to actually drive customers away?
In the same vein, why did Apple issue invitations to customers to rush to its retail stores to buy the new iPad days before it went on sale? It knew every retail store in the US, the only country where it became available on 11 March, would be sold out by the end of the day. It refused to accept pre-orders on the online store because it knew it wouldn’t be able to meet demand. The answer, of course, is that Apple has grown to love the limelight. Starved of attention for so long during the 1990s, it has responded to fame in the last decade in a manner that makes Katie Price look like Greta Garbo. It can’t get enough of it. Apple feels about publicity the way that Charlie Sheen feels about, well, publicity. It might as well be on crack.
The signs were all there, of course; they always are. As far back as 1996, Apple was experimenting with the drug to which it’s now hopelessly addicted. That was the year Independence Day came out, a film renowned by Mac users as ‘the one where Jeff Goldblum saves the world with a PowerBook’. It was a brilliant piece of product placement, despite the fact that the PowerBook 5300 Goldblum used to upload a virus to the alien mothership was one of the worst Macs Apple ever made. And Apple made the most of it, running ad campaigns in partnership with resellers while the movie was in cinemas. Goldblum popped up again a couple of years later to advertise the multicoloured iMacs on telly. By that time, Steve Jobs had returned and any chance Apple had of escaping its publicity dependence was long gone.
It’s important here to draw the distinction between gimmicky marketing stunts and advertising. Apple has been responsible for some memorable advertising campaigns over the years, most notably, of course, the ’1984′ Superbowl advert, which launched the Macintosh. It has also produced some of the daftest, like the ‘Think Different’ campaign, which ran just after Jobs took up his position as interim CEO. Few people now associate Apple, the world’s second richest company, with thinking differently or battling to defeat the grey corporate giant.
Perhaps it’s in an attempt to hold on to some of that rebel mentality that Apple indulges itself with this silliness. It’s as if it can’t quite come to terms with being the big guy and it needs to hold on to some of its youthful defiance. But that teenage streak is at odds with everything else the company does, from the slick retail experience inside its bricks-and-mortar stores to the way it brutally negotiates the lowest possible price for components from its suppliers and then squeezes distributors’ margins at the other end in order to maximise its own profits.
It’s trying to be two companies: the multi-billion dollar corporation whose stock is a mainstay of every equity investment fund in the US, and the outsider whose CEO takes to the stage in jeans and trainers with only Beatles music as an introduction.
Very few companies manage that balancing act, and of those that have, none are anywhere near as big as Apple. Perhaps it should to stop the silly stunts, stop pretending that Apple is still, somehow, an outsider in corporate America and, after 35 years, accept that it’s time to grow up.
Kenny Hemphill
