Apple's Bad Week Continues

Perhaps the public relations damage was inevitable although Apple has risen to exalted status and fallen before. The iPod and its free iTunes software changed that. Apple was suddenly the darling of the tech sector's eye again. Emboldened by their success, the company mashed unlikely partners AT&T and Google into the iPhone.

Apple honcho Steve Jobs narrowly avoided a public relations crisis when he slashed prices only months after releasing the most hyped product of the decade. Quickly and decisively, he marched back to his consumers (none of whom deserved any special treatment) and proferred $100 credits. The move was sheer marketing genius, the kind that has landed Jobs a place in the history of the Information Age now being written. Even Amazon's announcement this week of a new store to compete directly with iTunes didn't seem to shake the customer even though Amazon is big enough and powerful enough to make the market a two company race.

But the whimsical Apple, your buddy with the iPod and the cool talking guy hawking Macs on television, turned vicious today. After a group of tinkerers, led by a recently graduated high school senior hacked into their iPhones and found they could use it for other applications, they released the know-how to the world. Geeks, especially in the computer sector, are like that. These are the folks who skipped Tivo and DVRs, bought a $400 budget laptop and made their own.

And Apple hosed them today. With the release of a new set of firmware, programs that instruct the iPhone how to operate, Apple not only undid the damage to its AT&T partner, but rendered the consumer's phones unusuable if they downloaded the firmware.

Writing at Ziff-Davis tonight, Jason O'Grady says he has no intention of upgrading. He'll skip the new features to keep his choice of carriers alive. Over at PC World, blogger Melissa Perenson reminds consumers that Apple warned them this might happen. She is taking a wait-and-see approach, she says, but reports that the team responsible for hacking the iPhone in the past promises a "restoration hack" in the future -- perhaps as early as next week.

All of this begs the question: did Apple, the darling of the tech set, risk its credibility with the move? Will there be an iPod backlash in addition to what might every well be an iPhone firestorm?

And more important is this question: when consumers bought the iPhone they undoubtedly gave away too many rights, but once they owned the equipment, the device should have been free for them to use as they see fit. So besides lost credibility, we would not be surprised to see Apple challenged in court over destroying equipment owned by consumers.

Stop the phone from working at the iTunes music store? Sure
Stop the phone from working on AT&T's network? Absolutely. A no-brainer
Stop the phone from working at all? I'm lost on that one, and so, I think, is Apple for taking consumer choice away.

Labels: Apple, iPhone, iPod

posted by George Bounacos at 9:22 PM |