Apple - A higher standard

I'm not necessarily an Apple fanboy but I do appreciate what the company is doing and has done up to this point. The quality and attention to detail in most of their products is second to none. They screw up too. Every company does it at some point.

It continues to amaze me though how much the media and people in general just love to hate Apple. Apple is scrutinized to a level of detail that no other company ever has. Any product they release is just hammered when the smallest of flaws show or the one feature is missing. I've been guilty of it myself unfortunately too.

The reason why is that people love to hate what they can't achieve or what they can't have. It is a fact that has been proven over and over again in tests conducted all over. If you had a choice between:

a) getting $1,000,000 but to get it you had to give $10,000,000 to the other guy or
b) getting $750,000 and the other guy gets $750,000

Most people will take the $750K. They simply can't bare the thought of someone getting more. Of course, this is grossly oversimplified but this type of problem exhibits itself over and over again at work, in our government, and at home.

The criticism of Apple over the imperfections of the latest iPhone and the launch of the MobileMe service are just manifestations of this in a more complicated form. The iPhone, despite having 100's of things done right, is criticized for the one thing it does wrong. Usually, this criticism is by a Blackberry user who can't get an iPhone or finds out his company won't support it I'm sure. Of course, there are the multitudes of reviewers who need to sensationalize everything and bad Apple products get a lot of hits.

Same goes for MobileMe although this is a bit more complicated. The media just loves to jump all over Apple whenever it gets a chance. The amount of press Google or MSN (Live...yeah, crappy name), or Yahoo gets when something goes wrong is no where near what Apple sees. Apple should and could have done a better job with this, especially communicating with users. They are hardly the evil jokers that everyone has made them out to be however. Somewhere, something went wrong. They've got it fixed now. Let it go.

I know all this has been gone over before and rehashed ad naseum but I couldn't help myself. Some of the ridiculous complaints I hear just make me want to scream.

Sorry Blackberry users, I've used the Blackberry and now the iPhone. There are some functions out there that I can do on a Blackberry that I certainly don't have on the iPhone (yet) but anyone who uses both and thinks the interface on the Blackberry is superior has their head so far up their rears that their vision has to be tinted a dark shade of brown. The future is and will be the touchscreen interface as implemented by Apple. Anything else now is either a wannabe or is missing the boat entirely (see the new Blackberry competitor to the iPhone as an example of missing the boat).

So if you want what Apple has, go get it. If not, stop telling me what Apple is doing wrong and start telling me what your company/product/gadget is doing right.