It’s not often that I jump into tabloid style headlines but as our podcast listeners will learn in this weeks show, when I started to write this article I had just had my iPhone trashed by a ‘safe’ iOS update.
With that in mind – Has Apple just Reached Crisis Point?
So that’s a question this Apple fan never thought he would ask, but it has been a pretty terrible couple of weeks for Apple, and that’s despite a wonderfully successful iPhone 6 launch weekend.
Apple are one of the most successful companies in the world, certainly amongst the tech elite, with an army of loyal fans and enough cash to buy a country or two. Yet somehow they are now making mistakes, not minor errors but inexcusable major and high profile mistakes.
Apple are known for making beautiful devices of the highest quality, my iPhone 4s is still a wonderful device which oozes class, the 5 and 5s were great handsets, and Apple certainly didn’t need to follow a market trend.
The iPhone 6 – a Thing of Beauty or Flawed Genius?
Enter the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, let’s not mention that Apple of broken away from their guarantee of single handed use or the lack of natural upgrade path for existing owners, but the inspiration of the tech world have revealed that their testing processes must be pretty much non-existent.
The iPhone 6 plus has a serious but easy to detect design flaw – the materials used to build it aren’t strong enough to support its increased dimensions and it can physically bend when placed in a pocket.
Apple’s testing procedures also came under the spotlight when the first software update to iOS 8 broke some pretty key elements on the phone, including the ability to make a phone call. Yes a software update for a phone broke its primary function.
Apple quickly pulled the update but how did it ever pass quality checks and make it to release?
In my own experience the next version of iOS also trashed my iPhone and I needed to perform a factory rest with iTunes on my Mac.
You might forgive these errors from a fresh inexperienced start up, you would probably take the P*** but for Apple to get the basics so wrong is very worrying, it really makes you wonder what’s going on behind the scenes.
Missing promised functionality, software that breaks phones and serious hardware design flaws, Apple are clearly missing Steve Jobs and losing friends, what happens next is up to them…
The Smartphone market needs someone to lead the way and to keep raising the bar, for several years this has been Apple but if Apple is now slipping up then is there anyone who can step in and fill their shoes.