HOME / technology: The future and what to do about it.

Is Something Rotten at Apple?E-mail problems, flaky iPhones, and broken Macs. What's Steve Jobs to do?

By Farhad ManjooPosted Monday, Aug. 25, 2008, at 5:40 PM ET

Farhad Manjoo chatted online with readers about this article. Read the transcript.

(Continued from page 1)

What's troubling, though, is Apple's tendency to milk this advantage—when it does screw up, it prefers secrecy over full disclosure, and it expects customers to quickly forgive any slight. Its response to the MobileMe meltdown was a classic example. For several days after the site's rocky launch, Apple refused to disclose what had gone wrong. It wouldn't say why MobileMe was down, and it wouldn't say when MobileMe would be fixed. Only after the New York Times' David Pogue and the Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg published critical columns did Apple change its tune. Two weeks after MobileMe's launch, the company put up a blog documenting the service's status. Last week, it gave all users a credit for two months of MobileMe service.

Apple is dealing with iPhone problems in much the same way—grudgingly. Apple-focused blogs recently reported that Jobs fired off one-line e-mail replies to two different customers upset about iPhone difficulties; in each case, he said Apple was working on the problems. And an Apple spokeswoman told USA Today that Apple would issue a software patch to improve "communication with 3G networks." But that's it: The company won't say why the phone's failing to load apps or connect to 3G, it won't say how serious the problems are, and it won't say what, if anything, customers can do to resolve the problems until it issues a fix.

Contrast Apple's response to how other major tech firms handled recent failures. As Adam Engst, editor of the Mac newsletter TidBits, points out, when Netflix suffered shipping delays earlier this month, it issued an immediate, clear explanation and apology and automatically credited customers' accounts. Netflix customers raved about how the company handled the problem. Voilà: The company turned a tech failure into a PR win. Google accomplished something similar when Gmail died for a few hours on Aug. 11. Within hours of noticing the problem, Google put out a statement on its blog explaining what had gone wrong—the post was titled, "We feel your pain, and we're sorry"—and the steps it had taken to prevent a future failure.

Apple's strategy for dealing with complaints stems from a companywide emphasis on secrecy. Tight lips work well for Apple, building suspense among loyalists and the press about upcoming products and burnishing its reputation as a company that leads rather than follows. But as it expands into new, highly complex businesses—phones, set-top boxes, "cloud computing" services—Apple is sure to make more mistakes. As Jobs wrote in an internal e-mail to employees, the MobileMe screw-up happened because the company was trying to do too much at the same time (the system launched on the same day as the new iPhone) and because "we have more to learn about Internet services."

What's more, Apple's customer base is widening beyond longtime Mac fanatics—people who give the company a pass because they regard it as an underdog. The Mac's market share is growing rapidly, suggesting that lots of Windows users are switching. Last month, millions of people waited in line for the iPhone not because it was emblazoned with the Apple logo, but because they'd heard it was the best phone on the market. Combine that with the fact that the iPhone and MobileMe are vital to people's lives in a way that, say, an iPod isn't, and you've got a recipe for customer dissatisfaction. You may be willing to overlook Apple's silence about a dead battery on your MP3 player. But if the company continues to stonewall people whose phones cut off every five minutes, Steve Jobs better get ready for some marches on Cupertino.

Print This ArticlePRINTEmail to a FriendE-MAILShare This ArticleRECOMMEND...Get Slate RSS FeedsRSS
Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.
Photograph of Steve Jobs by Tony Avelar/AFP/Getty Images.
What did you think of this article?
Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES
TODAY'S PICTURES
TODAY'S CARTOONS
TODAY'S DOONESBURY
TODAY'S VIDEO
Back in the summer of '69—in Afghanistan.85/090701_TP.jpg
Cartoonists' take on Iraq.22/090701_TC.jpg
Tongue of Newt. 52/DoonesburyPlaceholder.jpg