apple. oh, apple.
The way Apple advertise themselves, you’d think they were selling common sense rather than what they’re actually selling, that being overpriced silver toys. Take their most recent advert for the iPhone 4, for example, the tag line of which was, “If you don’t have an iPhone, well, you don’t have an iPhone”. Not only is that a patronisingly obvious statement to make but the annoying Apple advert voice-over man says it as if you’re some kind of moron if you don’t have one. He says it with an air of smugness, so much so to the point that you can just imagine the man sitting alone in his bedroom with his iPhone 4, masturbating furiously to the number of apps he’s downloaded.
Although, Apple have always been the cocky bastards of the technological world. You only have to watch their press conferences to really understand just how unbelievably cocky they are. Steve Jobs, the God to the Apple fanboys, always stands on stage in his turtle-necks and light-blue jeans highlighting the stupidity of any products that don’t belong to Apple. Take the iPad announcement conference, for instance, when he claimed that “Netbooks aren’t better at anything”, only to then go on to announce a product which doesn’t possess USB ports, disc drives, LAN ports, a physical keyboard, a webcam or support Flash Video Player. Simply the touch screen and the name “Apple” apparently warranted the ridiculous price tag in comparison.
That’s essentially Apple’s game in a nutshell. You’re paying for the name, nothing else. Whilst what they do is very good, undeniably so, they don’t warrant the price tag you have to pay for it. You can get equivalents from others at a much lower price. iPods have just become ridiculous, you’re not buying a fancy MP3 player with a silver apple logo on it anymore, you’re buying an application device, a camera and a gaming device now. Whilst that’s all technologically quite impressive, it’s unnecessary. I have a phone to use apps on, I have a phone to use a camera and I have a PS3 to play games, I don’t need an iPod Touch to do either of those things, I just want to play music on it.
Even the iPod Nano has become stupid. The first iPod Nano was overpriced but that was due to its size, which at the time was genuinely something which made it worth it. Now we live in an age where most MP3 players are small and compact, so instead Apple decide to stick a touch pad on the tiniest screen imaginable and slap a £130 price tag on it, just for 8GB of memory which is nothing. To put it into perspective, an 8GB memory card will cost you less than a tenner these days. Just ask yourself what part of a Nano really warrants £120.
Despite the overpriced stupidity of Apple’s products, they continue to sell and they continue to be one of the, if not THE, leading electronics retailers in the world. It doesn’t really make any sense to me, maybe because I care more about spending money wisely than I do about having a shiny, touch-screen slab that I can play music from for triple the price. Whilst their products are essentially so successful because of their aesthetic value, I can’t really deny the fact that I would like to own them. What can I say, I’m a teenage boy, I’m supposed to like that stuff.
The products just look so appealing, even though the logical part of my brain is telling me that they’re stupid and unreasonably priced. I wouldn’t turn one down if one was offered to me at a similar price to their non-Apple counterparts, if anything they’d become my brand of choice. However, until they decide to drop the pretentious “we’re better than everything else so we can charge five times as much” act, I won’t be buying anything from Apple.
