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The cool cult of Apple
Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple
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Makeshift memorial shrine for Steve Jobs.
Kai Ryssdal: There's a book on the bookshelf in my office called "The Cult of Mac." It's leftover from the guy who had the office before me, but it's not a bad start to our coverage of Steve Jobs today.
"Cult" is kind of a strong word, but it's not far off the mark. You don't hear the kinds of things being said about Apple and Steve Jobs today being said about Dell or Nike. Nobody's going to be leaving flowers and candles outside a Verizon store anytime soon.
But long before Steve Jobs ever got sick, people -- and you know who you are -- were calling themselves 'Mac people.'
Marketplace's Stacey Vanek Smith explores how Jobs and Apple managed to make personal computers so personal.
Stacey Vanek Smith: Outside of the Apple Store in Soho, Colin Bartlett adds a red apple and a letter to a growing shrine of flowers and candles. Bartlett has two iPhones, an iPad and two MacBooks. He says part of why he's been so moved by Steve Jobs' death is his experience with these products.
Colin Bartlett: I think it's that empathy, that feeling you get when you use it. It makes you feel like the company that built it cares about you.
Making people feel like it cares is exactly why Apple is Apple, says Jen Drexler, a brand analyst at Just Ask a Woman.
Jen Drexler: You joined it. It's like enrolling in college and wearing the sweatshirt. You joined this brand the second you became hooked on one of the products.
Part of it is the cool factor. Drexler says instead of focusing on selling to businesses and targeting the cubicle culture, Mac aimed its products at musicians, filmmakers and visual artists.
Drexler: And then everyone else who has one can feel a little bit of that too. I can tell you I've never done anything creative with mine ever, but I would like to believe people think I do.
And once you buy in to that perception, it's hard to get out. Apple's products have never played very well with others. PC documents won't open on your Mac; your iTunes songs wont load onto your Android phone. All of which creates an aura of superiority, says consumer behavior consultant Britt Beemer.
Britt Beemer: Part of that non-compatibility was kind of a snob appeal Apple also created for its customers.
Beemer points out Apple products also quickly become incompatible with themselves. For instance, if you buy a new iPhone, it won't work with your 4-year-old MacBook Pro. And when you finally break down and buy a new laptop, you will discover it no longer syncs up with your old iPod. At least that's what I hear.
Beemer says this cycle, vicious though it feels, is exactly what Apple's consumers thrive on. The short life span makes Apple products synonymous with what's new and what's cool. Which kind of makes you cool.
Beemer: People discarded an Apple product to get the new Apple product. If you have an Apple product, you always have the latest technology.
Beemer did a series of consumer studies for Steve Jobs back in the '80s. He says even back then, Jobs wanted people to get emotionally attached to their machines.
Beemer: He one time told me, he said, 'Britt, the day people put their wedding pictures in their computer is the day I know we've won.'
In New York, I'm Stacey Vanek Smith for Marketplace.
EDITOR'S NOTE: The above piece on the personal appeal of Apple products overstated the severity of compatibility issues with other operating systems and devices, and among Apple products. To hear a follow-up conversation between Kai Ryssdal and John Moe, host of the Marketplace Tech Report, listen to Marketplace today, Oct. 7.
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Britt Beemer was dead wrong about Apple's backward compatibility. His new iPhone won't work on a 4 year old laptop, if it is running the 6 year old OS X 10.4. "At least that's what I hear" Really? Who did you ask, my grandmother?
And what documents cannot be opened on a both a Mac and a PC? The pictures form your digital camera are jpegs and I think my toaster can even open a jpeg these days. That paper your kid is writing for Freshman English in MS Word? He or she can open it up Word which comes as part of Microsoft Office Suite for Mac that has been available for almost 10 years. PDFs, same thing, as long as you have Acrobat Reader you are good to go. I think it's time Mr. Beemer visited his local Apple Store and hears the scoop from someone who knows.
Apple is not selling millions of Macs to first-time Mac owners every year based on snob-appeal and incompatibility. Apple relies on the relationships it cultivates with its customers to be the strongest selling point to future customers. “Surprise and delight†is the mantra in Apple Retail Stores. That is why people are buying Macs. That and they still “just work.â€
I agree with William too. With all due respect Ms. Smith, Apple made great strides since the 90's to improve compatibility with the PC world. My livelihood as a video producer depends on my being able to share documents and clips with my corporate clients. I can open their Word docs and spread sheets and they can easily see mine. The only thing I can't open are .exe files, and why would I want to? They're very virus ridden. I've been using Macs professionally since the mid 80s. I got a virus. Once. In 1992. From a PC file. I can run Windows on a Mac with helper software, but a PC can't run the Mac OS. So who's the put up the brick wall? It's not about cool, it's about who built a better OS.
I should start of saying I don't normally comment on the great stories you often do, so I apologize for only jumping in for a bad one, but for this one I had to speak up. Your piece on the cult of Mac is flat out wrong on a number of fronts, including Apple products going obsolete so quickly. I think if you looked at used pricing data you'd see the opposite actually, Apple products hold their value more than most electronics and that many Mac and Apple users use their products a long time, often longer than PCs. You will today find many people still using Macs that don't have Intel chips in them and many using their old hard drive based iPods, which do still work with Macs and PCs alike. And the Windows compatibility part of the story was a complete joke and dead wrong, been using Windows documents on Mac Office for years. Apple computers may be cool, but I think part of the reason is they are well designed (just compare the MacBook power plug to a Dell to get a sample of the difference in thinking of the two companies) couple that with great software and that they do last a long time and you do get a cult.
Please don't use "experts" who misrepresent reality. To set the record straight in response to this evenings "expert" on Macs:
I use my Mac for business consulting and open files from PCs all of the time without any special software. This is the 21st century. The days when Mac users had trouble opening common PC file formats ended in the 20th century.
And that bit about early obsolescence of Macs is wrong in my experience with Mac computers. I've kept each of my Macs between 7 and 10 years. They still work, just the internet started to demand faster computers with more memory. Plus, I needed to add a laptop for travel.
Macs don't crash and fall apart the way PCs do. Friends I know who buy less expensive PCs have to spend time finding people who can fix them, and PCs usually need to be replaced sooner. PCs wind up costing people more.
As for iPod compatibility - I just bought my first iPod this summer, so I'm not qualified to comment on that. It would be nice if your on-air experts would also refrain from commenting when they simply don't know (or have some hidden marketing agenda, perhaps).
I have to agree with William. This report is riddled with inaccuracies. On top of that, I felt the summary of Apple (on the day after its founder dies) as merely "marketers of cool" was a bit unfair. The company is worth as much as Exxon. Did it reach that success simply, as you say, because they marketed themselves to the "cool crowd." Is it possible that Apple might have out innovated its competitors.. "cool" commercials or not?
This starts as an interesting enough report. But the last part of the report with Britt Beemer on non-compatibility is just plain flat wrong. For instance "PC documents won't open on your Mac" is exactly backwards. Going back more than twelve years that I can think of the Mac has always opened PC docs (such as MS Office) but the PC could not open Mac docs-a limitation of the Windows environment. I have three iPods that go back to 2004 that continue to work perfectly with the newest operating system. I have never had this kind of compatibility on any Windows machine. This story needs extensive basic fact checking.
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