What have we heard about Apple ad nauseam for the past year? It’s not just that Apple is doomed.
We hear that Apple needs to build an entry-level, less expensive iPhone or risk being left behind as Android dominates the smartphone world. Or, something like that. Such analysis overlooks Apple’s typical customer, and, importantly the customers Apple does not want.
The Geek Crowd & Hee Haw Folks
Look at Apple’s entire line of products; from Mac to iPhone to iPad. What’s common among all of those successful products?
It’s the same commonality featured in Apple’s apps, in both the iTunes App Store and Mac App Store.
Premium. Apple is proud of what they design and build, and they’re willing to charge for the privilege and pleasure of owning an Apple designed product.
Much of the criticism aimed at Apple seems to come from three groups.
The first is the technorati elite who love the openness of Android OS as if it were a Linux PC that can be built from scratch.
The second group is comprised of market pundits and analysts who insist that Apple needs to have this product or that product or a lower price just to survive.
Remember netbooks? They’re mostly forgettable. Yet, every tech pundit with a keyboard and digital soap box declared Apple dead in the water unless they introduced a Mac netbook (as in cheap).
Are we not glad Apple does not listen to the crowd? Where are netbooks today?
There’s a third segment of the population that simply echoes the same old tune. ‘Apple’s products are too expensive.’ And, for that crowd, they’re correct. As the Bible says, ‘Do not cast pearls before swine.’ That group simply doesn’t appreciate or need what Apple does.
Speaking of swine, that brings me to the two customer groups that Apple simply doesn’t care about at all. The first is the technorati elite, the geek who loves product specifications and doesn’t understand the words ‘user experience.’
The second is what is often termed as the Hee Haw crowd, those who live in the digital equivalent of Kornfield Kounty. They care not about user experience and care even less about product specifications.
What they want is a cheap phone, and whether it’s smart or not doesn’t matter. Smartphones with Android OS are perfect for this not-so-smart crowd.
They make calls, play a few cheap games, but seldom use their so-called smartphone for anything smart– no third party apps for productivity, for example. And they don’t use much bandwidth hogging data for browsing the web, managing email, or anything else that marks 21st century digital citizens, so they’re the darling of the cell phone companies, too.
Apple’s Cupertino compass is not set to point toward the crowd of spec-toting technology geeks or the Hee Haw folks addicted to Facebook. Both groups are fickle users, not loyal, and not even worth Apple’s effort to cultivate. The former complains about what Apple doesn’t put into their products, and attempts to dictate what Apple should do. The latter isn’t interested in quality because any car with four wheels will get you there.
Apple is proud of their hardware designs and software usability which make up the user experience, and rightly so. Fortunately, Apple has many hundreds of millions of customers who do not belong to the technology geek elite, or the Hee Haw barnyard crowd. Apple’s customers appreciate quality, reliability, and usability in a seamlessly integrated ecosystem, and are willing to pay for it.
Neither geeks nor Hee Haw folks understand what Apple’s customer base– which numbers in the hundreds of millions– already knows.
Alright, do you know How Apple Is Getting Killed By The Rapid Pace Of The Modern Technology Product Life Cycle? The answer isn’t surprising, so check out my site for details.
About Kate MacKenzie
Dead on Kate… Two points, the technorati write the blogs, and the here haw gang drives the market share numbers. It explains perfectly why the world is getting fooled.
Perhaps I’m one of those technorati because I actually make my living with Apple hardware and OS. My beef with apple is that Mac OS is getting less stable, more obscure and impenetrable and less friendly to the wide world of linux/unix based open source software. In other words, they are screwing up the OS.
Apple hardware is not being refreshed or pushed forward. The recent price cuts in retina display macbooks are because just about every review tells you that the video support is inadequate to drive all of those pixels. Mac OSX is not resolution independent so many apps/websites look bad on retina display. They keep taking features away – such as optical drive but give back little in return.
I have an iPhone4. I’m perfectly happy with it. I’m still running iOS4.x because it seems that every IOS update has broken something. Every update seems to break networking or the alarm clock in some way. By staying with iOS4 I still have a usable maps application.
I have an iPad2 – i use it maybe once every 2 months. Maybe if they come out with a retina display ipad mini Ill look at it as a reader since I’ve learned to hate reading on my ipad due to the strain it puts on my eyes.
Over my lifetime I’ve probably purchased 50 apple computers. I used to replace my working machine every 18 months, but now its every 3 or 4 years. Recently that has been because I did not want to lose snow-leopard.
Apple thinks its smart to keep pruning their customer base of folks they dont need to please. I think its gratuitous and dumb. 1% here and 2% there and pretty soon you have pissed away 5% or 10% of sales.
YES! Thanks Kate
Absolutely freakin’ spot on, Miss Kate. Why aren’t you working at Business Insider? Oh, wait. They don’t like to write using your technique– logic and reason and facts.
What a shame.
The ‘Hee Haw’ folks line is priceless.
You’ll get plenty of flack from the Android geek set, but won’t hear a word from anyone in the latter group, the Hee Haw crowd. They can’t read.
Bwahahaha!
Seriously, thanks for helping to set the record straight. It seems that so much of what I read these days is written with an agenda or bone to pick, so it’s good to get a dose of reality here and there.
Do you get hate mail?
Probably not. Android and Linux geeks, as well as your ‘technorati elite‘ probably don’t read Mac360.
Thanks for sharing a few tidbits of truth on a slow news day. One of the funniest things I’ve read to date is that Google makes more money from iOS apps than they do from Android smart phones.
Strange. I didn’t read about that in The Wall Street Journal.
As a self confessed geek, and apple nut, I disagree with you on one point. The Technorati elite who love the openness of Android OS. Bah – I am happy to say I’m not one of these. They are so totally uneducated about the Mac platform – they consider it closed, apple an evil money grabbing company. Yet, Apple is an Open company, their unix based operating system has an open source core. They arguably are one of the biggest supporters of Open source, giving back to the community things like CUPS printing system, several enhancements to GCC.
*Anyone* can create software for their phones, and Apple will market and provide an app store for their creations. Remember phones before the iPhone? – No native software allowed. You are stuck what the manufacturer gives you, and thats that. Yes, you might have old J2ME java, but this is unstandard and a java app that works on 1 phone probably wouldn’t work on another. And, should you make an app, best of luck trying to market it, and should it be successful, it is open to be pirated a million times.
Apple changed the game. They made it so that *anyone* can develop software, and make potentially millions. They provide the IDE, the compilers, tutorials. They protect your investment by securing the platform, to stop end users installing any pirate copies of your game. I dont understand why ‘the technorati elite’ hate it?…. probably because they cant install pirate stuff.
Great article Kate!
Also I’d agree that the REAL technical elite like and use Apple. It’s the fake, wannabe geeks that don’t understand the technology behind Apple products. I call them faux nerds.
People who know nothing about technology, and people who know what they are talking about when it comes to technology, like and use Apple.
People who THINK they know what they’re talking about but actually are clueless are Android users.
That’s been my conclusion from managing mobile devices in the enterprise for the past year, and from my online observations.
Yup. I also remember back in the day when Apple just HAD to make a sub-$500 ‘PC’ in order to survive further. Didn’t happen. Was also around the time when The Future was supposed to be free ‘PCs’ and cost subsidized by ISPs and advertisement. We can see how that turned out. There is a reason these perennially pessimistic pundits and self-appointed prognisticators are not heads of $billion corporations.
I must admit that I’ve fallen behind reading Mac360 and your site. I’m sorry. Having been an Apple customer for 30 years now, I agree with your key points and I’ve always been thankful for the way that they put quality and useability at the top of their priority list. I must say that although it falls outside the scope of your post, there is one more group that Apple has seemed to care less about than before. I’m talking about the creative professionals and other power users.
I understand that you and many others are “Pro” and the MBP and iMac serve your needs well. The group I’m talking about is the group that requires machines that run 24 hours a day and must have multiple processors (not just multiple cores) and room to house multiple hard drives and expansion cards within the chassis. While the smaller form factor, consumer oriented designs are very powerful these days, the laptop grade components in them won’t stand up to the requirements. I’m just one more Mac Pro owner that is concerned about what I see (or don’t see in this case).
Kate’s Note: I’m probably in general agreement with you on this, Eric. Apple seems less concerned about that ‘power user’ group than in years past. It may be that a large chunk of those users are satisfied with a high end iMac or fully equipped MacBook Pro. I sure would love to see a new Mac Pro and a standalone Retina display.
Excellent piece, I wish there was a better descriptor than Hee Haw crowd, the cheap peeps? It implies a rural crowd which i think the cheap peeps are not limited to. These folks are everywhere.
Kate’s Note: Don, you’re probably right. ‘Hee Haw’ is good for a little humor, but not an accurate description of the whole range of Android commoners.
I don’t think agree with your statement “that group simply doesn’t appreciate or need what Apple does.” Being unable to afford something doesn’t make someone less able to appreciate nice things, and certainly doesn’t mean they don’t need them (or at least wouldn’t be much better off).
A prime example is college students. Unless Mom and Dad foot the bill (lucky them, but not everyone has that luxury), not many college students can afford a new MacBook or iPad, especially if starting fresh out of high school. So, a lot suck it up and use crappy netbooks, etc., because they can afford that, but they’d be much better off and probably do better in school with Apple products. Not too mention the education providers (public high schools?)
And yes, they can appreciate the “niceness” of Apple products, but maybe their more concerned with eating something other than a daily serving of Top Ramen than they are with having a stylish computer.
Affordability isn’t really the issue for the ‘Hee Haw’ crowd (great line). iPhones and iPads are available at Walmart, the home of Hee Haw. Apple’s products are not that expensive and quite competitive with comparable hardware.
The difference truly is the user. Most Android users go for price and don’t understand the usability aspects of iPhone or iPad vs. anything Android. They don’t care. It’s just not important to them. Interestingly, though, is the steady stream of customers switching from Windows PCs to Macs, from Android devices to Apple devices. You seldom hear of it the other way around, and when you do it’s news from some ‘geek’ who’s making a splash and a statement, rather than being indicative of a trend.
Cool classism
Wow, I can’t believe something this heinous was linked to by Loop Insight approvingly.
1. Labeling a marketable population the “Hee Haw crowd” sounds as if the writer is bigoted against people who live in rural areas.
2. However, the show “Hee Haw” was “successful in all of the major markets, including New York, Los Angeles and Chicago” (says Wikipedia) so maybe the writer intends to evoke cost-sensitive mainstream consumers.
3. On the other hand, Google doesn’t have any particular results for “Hee Haw crowd” so maybe the author is making all of this up Onion-style to play on self-congratulatory biases of people who buys certain things.
Kate’s Note: Let’s go with what’s behind Door #2, Monte.
Hey Karen (sic), your little bird graphic that accompanies this article sure makes it sound like door #1.
If you ever come to Alabama, I’d love to show you how modern we countryfolk are.
I think “cheapskate” is more fitting. These folks honestly think that Android and iOS are equivalent when they’re not. No matter how you demonstrate it, they’re only seeing the price tag. They’re the same group who thinks Harbor Freight tools are as good as Snap-On.
Kate’s Note: It’s door #2. There’s probably a better description than ‘cheapskate‘ or ‘Hee Haw folks’ but the sentiment should be easily understood. After all, some people think Faux News is ‘fair and balanced.’
There’s a third group that Apple doesn’t want: Adults who can make their own decisions about what they want to view, without arbitrary censorship.
True that. Apple doesn’t want perverts and retards and their favorite apps mucking around on their products.
FWIW, though, since each iOS devices comes with a browser, how is anyone limited from viewing anything? Where’s the censorship?
Does a restaurant ‘censor’ your choices in food by limiting the menu to choices the restaurant’s chef approves? No. You’re free to go elsewhere.
So, go.
As an Apple Fanboy (2 iMacs, 1 MacBook Pro, 2 iPhone 5s, etc – including new & amazing fully loaded 27″ iMac), I sympathize with Apple for all of the bad press that they have been getting lately. They now join the ranks of the GOP, the South & Christianity as those hated by the Beltway Mainstream Media! I think in Apple’s case it’s because our anti-American Media detest successful private enterprise.
Perhaps Geeks might even wish to start to reconsider the other 3 that are hated. Perhaps there’s something of importance there also…
Just saying!
Congrats Kate, your writing is getting traction.
Keep it up.
Keep this up Kate and you may find yourself in the crosshairs of Dan Lyons.
Kate’s Note: Gulp!
P.S. Dan Lyons was so funny as Fake Steve Jobs. Something happened to him when Jobs died. Lyons has become an angry old man who shouldn’t be allowed on the streets alone at night. He’s editor-in-chief of ReadWrite, which tells us that American journalism at popular digital rags has devolved into a perpetual state of disrepair, where sensationalism trumps facts, and fictionalized content rules.
C’mon Kate, tell us what you REALLY think. I believe you have struck a cord with readers tired of the bullshit and who appreciate straightforward, honest writing. More please.
PS: Maybe it is just me, but except for a couple of writers, Macworld has gone off in a direction i don’t care to follow. It has been awhile since I checked out Mac360, I think I need to remedy that.
Kate’s Note: You gotta love the Macalope and there’s only one place to find him. Or, it.
i agree with yr basic points but cringe at your dismissive characterization of a crowd who has a different set of values from apple’s target audience as the “hee haw” crowd. grossly elitist and condescending.
Elitist? Gimme a break. It’s a spot on analysis of the competition, and definitely a group Apple doesn’t care much about. Swine and ‘hee haw” are good lines and highly representative of the class that thinks Android is a true smartphone. Apple pays lip service to that crowd by offering iPhones and iPads at Walmart, and giving discounts on old 4and 4S phones.
“Swine and ‘hee haw” are good lines and highly representative of the class that thinks Android is a true smartphone.”
Do you know the definitions of elitist or condescending?
Yes, and neither definition says anything about swine or hee haw. However, the definitions of swine and hee haw seem to be appropriate for elitist, holier-than-thou Android users, or the run-of-the-mill commoner Android user.