Apple loses its cool

Published May 14, 2010 at 8:30 p.m.
...Once the underdog cult darling battling the evil empire, Apple is fighting an image problem — and critics, who say it’s betrayed the digital revolution...
Sheez, they’re getting awfully touchy out in Cupertino.

Sheez, they’re getting awfully touchy out in Cupertino.

Last week, when Ellen Degeneres aired an innocent spoof of an iPhone ad on her talk show — in which she fumbled around on its touch keypad (“my fingers are so much thicker than I remember...”) — the all-seeing Apple eye was watching. And it didn’t like what it saw. Next day, having heard from the company, Ellen was apologizing on the air for making the iPhone look — imagine this — “hard to use.”

You might think Apple would’ve been in a more magnanimous mood, having just announced the sale of its one millionth iPad. But the Silicon Valley–based behemoth had reasons to be on edge: news was leaking of a possible antitrust investigation into Apple’s agreement with app developers — apparently aimed at shutting out Adobe’s Flash and other third-party programs from its App Store — prompting unhappy comparisons to Microsoft in its bad-old monopolistic heyday.

And that was only the latest in a torrent of unflattering Apple stories. These days, Steve Jobs — whose company has a market cap, at around $215 billion, rivaling Redmond’s — wears the black hat. His App Store censored political cartoonist Mark Fiore, rejecting his iPhone app because it “ridicules public figures” (though all was forgiven after Fiore went and won a Pulitzer, and Jobs personally admitted Apple’s “mistake”). Bloggers refer to Apple’s “Gestapo” tactics in tracking down a famously lost-and-found iPhone prototype — showing up at the home of the guy who discovered it and calling the cops to break down Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s door (after he wrote about it), seizing his computers. Even New York Times media columnist David Carr has gone from fanboy to scold, calling out the company’s “churlishness” toward Adobe and comparing it to the Church of Scientology, “another nongovernmental organization preoccupied by secrecy.”

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