Apple vs the World

It’s hard to be sure as to whether the writer of the email was Tim Cook himself or simply someone writing on his behalf but the sense of communication between consumer and upper level management was striking. I felt like I’d voiced a reasonable concern and received a fair answer. I’m not convinced yet, but that’s not the point, the CEO, or at least someone in his office (I highly doubt that Tim Cook has outsourced this stuff to Siri) took the time to reply. It’s impossible to know, but I’m willing to bet it was the man himself. There’s little point the email claiming to come from Tim Cook if it presents the possibility of him being caught on the hop without direct knowledge of the communication if a chance face to face was to occur. What if I’d been a journalist with a national paper? All this things combine for me to suggest that the actual CEO took an actual few minutes from his actual day to email actual me.

That, my friends, is any impressive commitment to client communication. It all goes into why I love Apple. In a world fascinated with doing the bare minimum, where pride in your work is a decreasingly common thing Apple is a firm that stands out for its determination to go the extra mile. Be it in custom milling laptop chassis from blocks of aluminium, having world-class retail stores or simply taking two minutes to reply directly to your customers. I don’t think everything Apple have done in the past 10 years has been spot on, but I do applaud the passion and commitment behind it.

Visit the site for the email.

cyreid:

This post is about something that irritates the living hell out of me, almost as much as people who see ebooks as a bad and terrible thing, despite the fact that they have got so many people reading who wouldn’t normally read.

It’s called iBook Author, and some people don’t like it.

At first,…

seancregan:

Via @gavreads, I’ve been reading this rage against the EULA on Apple’s sparkly new iBooks Author software. The poster, to my mind, and to the minds of various commenters, is up in arms over very little.

What iBooks Author is, for those in the writing world living under a rock, is a free page…

The implications for company managers and workers is profound. Chances are that the business you work for will not prosper for more than a decade and will reward you for an even shorter period.

The article only refers to Apple casually (they are the exception to the norm). It is astounding to see a companies trajectory mapped out against their peers.

Not content with churning out yet another in a long line of MacBook Air clones, Acer’s announced AcerCloud. To be fair, apart from the functionality and Steve Jobs’s presentation, Acer’s service is pretty much nothing like Apple’s. If we totally ignore its PicStream feature, which is nothing at all like Photo Stream, honest, and the ’30 days’ content stream, which is totally different to Apple’s ’30 days’ content stream, it’s like an entirely new thing. Which essentially means Acer used a slightly different shade of blue in its slides.

It gets even better. :)

… a man who couldn’t get one LOLcat’s worth of attention for his writing until he pretended to be Steve Jobs.

Exactly.

John Gruber

I’m not saying the original 2007 iPhone is a better overall device today than the Lumia or Galaxy. It has very little RAM and a much slower processor and you can feel it. But there are aspects of the original iPhone software — animation, scrolling, touch-tracking — that remain superior to any competition. Was everything about the original iPhone five years ahead of the competition? No, no way — especially in terms of hardware. But some aspects of its software were more than five years ahead.