Quartz looks back at Apple’s 2015.
This year, CEO Tim Cook did a lot of interviews by Apple standards, from this month’s “60 Minutes” episode to 20 minutes with BuzzFeed in the back seat of a Cadillac Escalade. He “crashed” a coding party – conveniently while a Mashable editor was in attendance – and “wrote a message” to CNBC’s Jim Cramer. You might even say he likes the attention.
Meanwhile, Jony Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, participated in an FT profile and received the New Yorker treatment earlier this year, inviting a journalist into his Bentley. To the media, a “rare look inside Jony Ive’s design lab” seems to be the prized new “rare look inside North Korea.” (And similarly staged.)
This PR campaign by Apple seems designed to make the company look more open and inviting, but in the end it just makes it all look fake and staged – which reflects incredibly badly on the media outlets participating in these PR events. For a company and accompanying fanbase riling so heavily against advertising, Apple sure does a lot of advertising thinly veiled as actual “reports” or “news stories”.
But hey, people eat it up, so I can’t blame either the advertiser or the willing media participant.
“The new Apple exposed itself in 2015”.
Jobs knew how to keep the P.R. about the product. Cook doesn’t.
I wonder how Jobs would have handled the encryption backdoor debacle.
Cook seems to be doing a fairly decent job here of informing the public on the importance of encryption without backdoors, but of course he could be repeating advised talking points.
He’s certainly doing better than anyone at Google.
60 minutes
Buzzfeed
Jim Cramer
Mashable
Hmm, Well to be honest, I’ve never thought highly of any of those. 60 minutes was great in the 60’s and 70’s. But since then, Eh. Too many puff pieces that cover serious topics. Its kind of like they’re only serious about journalism when it involves us politics. And even then they’re sloppy as heck. But if its about science or tech, forget about it. They treat it like local news covering a bake sale.
I don’t think you know what “blame” means in this context.
Sorry if I misunderstood. When someone says something ” reflects incredibly badly on” somebody or some organisation I usually take it to mean that their bad behaviour means their reputation will suffer, which in turn means that they have done something bad, which in turn means blaming them for their bad behaviour (hence the bad reflection is on them and not somebody else).
The nuances of Apple commentary are tricky indeed!
I can’t really blame you for your constant “in defense of Apple” posts, since it is your modus operandi. However, it does reflect rather poorly on you.
See? Not that tricky at all.
You can believe an action reflects badly upon an entity or disagree with said action, yet still state you cannot blame them for said action. E.g. a homeowner defending his home from burglars and killing them in the process.
While you disagree with the action, and while it might reflect badly upon the homeowner in question (e.g. he might have used excessive force, shot them in the back, etc.), you still cannot blame the homeowners for defending himself.
This is no different. These media outlets need to put food on the table, and acting as Apple’s PR channels does just that. I disagree with them doing so, but I cannot blame them for it.
Fair enough
Thom you should write a book based on serious research through your own writings and posts – call it the “Anti-Apple Stance”.
It’s gone from “irrelevant” to “disingenuous” to “dangerous” based loosely on their financial standing in the computer industry.
I always rooted for undedogs, maybe I’ll go all microsoft after 25 years on apple? 😉
Please ignore me
all those Anal(ists) who keep saying that Apple is gonna crash and burn in the next quarter.
They are limited in what they can do directly to stop these people so a bit of product PR etc can help put forward an alternative view.
As for being open, Open Sourcing SWIFT is a small step along the way. That can’t be all bad now can it?
But the apple haters will ignore it so why am I wasting comment space by mentioning it?