Steve Jobs is a genius. He manages to make the most crappy products instant best-sellers.
But he does not stop there. He manages to make his customers feel stupid when his product does not work and blames their lack of understanding. And people feel stupid.
Take the example of the iPhone. This crappy phone has all the features that may be found in any Android. However, you cannot change the battery of the phone yourself, the phone takes up to 15 minutes to boot up (a friend of mine has an iPhone, because of the boot time, he cannot afford the phone to switch off), and most annoying of all, you cannot even fit your own SIM card in that phone. It has to be hacked to microSIM proportions before it can be used. That simply means that one cannot use the same SIM card in any other phone. Shipping the phone for repair incurs a courier charge comparable to the cost of a new phone. And yeah, many people are locked on to their network service providers due to the iPhone.
The iPad. Every sane person wondered why anyone would buy the iPad, a tablet so useless that it did not even support multi-tasking. I mean, the iPhone has multi-tasking, then why not the iPad. Unfortunately, there are very few sane people in the world. The iPad too was a hit.
The MacBook Air. The world's thinnest notebook. Or is it? It does not have an optical drive, does not have more than 1 USB port, and one cannot upgrade memory, hard-disk, or the battery. Still, one has to admit that it is one of the most sought after gadgets today
So how does he do it?
I believe that Jobs has a deep understanding of human psychology. His words are carefully chosen. What he wants is that everyone watching him demo a device must feel that they cannot do without it. And he does an admirable work. He constantly uses words like awesome,
amazing,
incredible,
beautiful,
nice,
easy
and unbelievable.
What he tries to do is to act as if he is not an Apple employee, but a third person showing off a latest acquisition, generating loads of envious looks from people across the world, and then, almost everyone wants one of the things he is holding. He follows the well known path promoting the most harmful form of consumerism, one that tells people that they cannot be happy unless they buy.
He sure does an amazing, incredible and unbelievable job,
but I am thankful that it does not work on me!
Nevertheless, I am indeed sorry to hear about his recent hospitalization. I hope that he shall make a quick recovery.
100% Correct.
ReplyDeleteI feel the same too..