Bad Apple

For a company that is generally so consistantly right, Apple sure has been making a lot of missteps recently.

The first I noticed was with iLife '08. In addition to updating Garageband and iPhoto (both of which are MUCH better, by the way), they also launched a heavily-hyped completely overhauled iMovie... which was uniformly hated. I can sort of understand what they were going for. The program effortlessly syncs up with Youtube; combine that with the Macbook's built in iSight and you've got the videoblogging tool for the masses. Never mind that all the advanced functionality that iMovie HD (that's what the old version was called) is gone, because what's really important is that you can upload to Youtube with one click.

The second blunder came this week. In his Keynote address unveiling the wholly-retooled iPod line, Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone was dropping in price to $399. That's a $200 price cut if you're bad at math. Obviously, this sort of thing happens all the time in the tech industry. Prices are always dropping as the next new thing comes along. But the iPhone's only been out a few months now and pretty much everyone who purchased one in the first wave is, understandably, feeling scammed.

The nice thing about Apple, though, is that you can still count on them to own up to their mistakes and make things right. Anyone who gets a copy of iLife '08 can download a copy of iMovie HD and you can actually have both versions of iMovie on your computer without any problem. On the iPhone front, Jobs put an open letter on the front page of the Apple site apologizing and letting current iPhone owners know that they'll soon be getting $100 credit with Apple. It's a canny business move--maybe it'll go toward one of those nifty new iPod nanos--but it's also just being legit. You gotta respect that.

I don't know why I felt the need to rant about this since anyone who cares probably already knows all about it. I guess I was just shocked to see Apple screw up so flagrantly and twice in as many months. It makes me a little concerned about a company that has always impressed me. Let's hope they go back to doing that.