July should have been a great month for Apple, it was the month that was to see the much talked about (and hyped) 3G iPhone, MobileMe service and iPhone App store. Instead the company has been plagued with problems.
First there was the iPhone day (July 11th) launch which didn’t go as well as they had hoped. In both the US and the UK there were stock shortages, problems activating phones, systems crashing while credit checking purchasers and even the UK mobile phone provider’s O2 activation website only supporting Internet Explorer and not Safari! Users upgrading their original iPhones to the v2 software didn’t fare much better with failed downloads leaving iPhones unusable.
Then there was the MobileMe service which didn’t go much better. A subscription service that was billed as “Exchange for the rest of us” and was suppose to offer instant “push” email to your iPhone in addition of synchronisation of contacts and bookmarks between your Mac, PC and iPhone. However they failed to provide the “instant” email delivery and have had to resort to delivery within 15 minutes and admit to missing emails. Then there was the patchy support for PCs, with the site not fully supporting IE7 and so recommended the use of FireFox, yet the synchronisation of bookmarks only supported IE7 and not FireFox! Then the service was deemed so buggy that Apple offered users a month free as compensation and in an email to Apple employees Steve Jobs admitted the launch was badly planned.
Next there were the rumours and concerns over Steve Jobs health after his appearance at the Apple developer confidence. The rumours resulted in the share price dropping as much as 12% and the company announcing that Jobs did not have any long term health problems.
And then the industry wide DNS vulnerability took Apple 3 weeks longer to patch than most other vendors and then only patched the problem on servers and not clients.
And finally, the American consumer reports organisation is recommending that Mac users don’t use Apple’s Safari browser because it lacks phishing filters, just as Infoworld reports that the IBM X-Force security report states that Apple disclosed more security vulnerabilities in the first half of 2008 than any other vendor.
I always admired Apple’s product design and was a Mac user in the 90’s, however I do feel they have started to put style over functionality. Yes the hardware is beautifully designed and Jonathan Ive has done a great job of reinventing the brand through trend setting product design. However the functionality of the products hasn’t quite matched the great design. For instance the iPhone and iPod touch have a great interface and web browsing functionality, but the iPhone struggles with typing, battery life and only has an average camera. Even the move from the classic Mac OS of the 90’s to the BSD based OS X added much needed functionality but lost the classic, simple user interface that was so much admired and copied. Hopefully the last month might be a wakeup call for Apple to concentrate as much on the functionality, security and reliability of their products as they do on the great product design and style.
UPDATE: Steve Jobs’ email to Apple employees admitting the difficult launch of the MobileMe service has now been published in full on the ArsTechnica website.
