The two faces of Apple
Apple’s schizophrenia is getting worse.
One the one hand, the company has long traded on the image of the unconventional, creative, innovative outsider, the computer company that thinks outside the box and is not shackled by the corporate culture of other IT businesses.
This reached a peak in the Think Different 
advertising campaign of the late 1990s. Remember the manifesto?
Here’s to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.
The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.They’re not fond of rules
And they have no respect for the status quo.
You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,
disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing that you can’t do is ignore them.
Because they change things.They invent. They imagine. They heal.
They explore. They create. They inspire.They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?
Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?
Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.
Because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can
change the world, are the ones who do.
This message was reinforced by the choice of suitably innovative and creative individuals who made a name for themselves by thinking differently.
Apple has continued to sell this dream. It works.
On the other hand, woe betide any blogger, forum or individual who actually tries to embody any of the qualities in the manifesto. Apple’s ugly, über-corporate face is waiting in the wings.
It would be tedious (and lengthy) to record all the occasions on which Apple has displayed its vicious streak. Pointing you to today’s news is enough.
A poster in The Something Awful forums reproduced some information from one of Apple’s Service Manuals to help people rectify what seems to be some shoddy work with thermal paste in the latest MacBook Pros.
In a flash, Apple Legal had the take-down letter to serve on the site, thundering that “the Service Source manual for the MacBook Pro is Apple’s intellectual property and is protected by U.S. copyright law.”
Gizmodo puts the real significance of the letter rather well:
Of course the real problem isn’t the single excerpted page being linked from Something Awful, but instead the fact that the image shows the extremely sloppy manufacturing process that is causing the MacBook Pro to run at temperatures as high as a 95 degrees Celcius under full load. (A temperature so high that the processor is at risk of malfunctioning.) Rather than addressing the problem of the shoddy workmanship, documented not only by those who purchased Apple’s $2,500 laptop but by Apple’s own service manual, Apple is trying to silence those from the Macintosh community who are trying to help other Mac users fix Apple’s mistake.
Maybe I’m slow on the uptake and everyone else has already twigged to this, but never has the persona of Apple’s advertising seemed so cynical, so corporate.
(I don’t usually do opinion pieces on Hawk Wings. Others do it better. But gradually over the last twelve months, as I read all the RSS feeds from which Hawk Wings is gleaned, this one has been gathering steam inside my head. It was time to get it out.)
Tags: advertising, Apple, corporate culture, legal, MacBook Pro, public relations, Think DifferentRelated posts
May 5th, 2006 at 3:34 pm
Sorry, but I don’t buy your and Gizmodo’s interpretation (in this case at least).
The manual *is* proprietary information created by Apple. The manuals are used by their certified service techs. Apple runs a certified tech program so that they can ensure that the people working on the hardware have received a certain level of training. That way people don’t claim to be Apple service techs and Apple gets blamed when someone fries a motherboard. If a certified tech does it, I’m sure there’s some insurance policy that covers it.
As far as I can tell, Apple is the sole provider of training, and the testing is run by Prometrics and maybe some other companies. (Go to the Apple Store and search for “training.”) So Apple is protecting something alright: they’re protecting a revenue stream for themselves and their partners; they’re also protecting their reputation and their customers’ purchases and wallets. The last training class I took (not an Apple one) had copyright notices on every page of the textbook.
If Apple were to allow pieces of the manuals to be published, without challenge, then they could not prevent publishing of the entire manual. Even if you argue that one page is not the same as the entire manual, what’s to stop 200 people from each publishing one page of the manual, thereby releasing the whole thing to the world. Someone could then read the manual and claim that they are now able to service Apple hardware. The first time they damage a computer though, the customer is going to blame them, but they’re also going to blame Apple.
Apple is behaving like a corporation, it’s true. But I highly doubt that something as exotic a manufacturing defect coverup is behind this. Apple is sometimes slow to rectify defects, but I think (could be wrong) that true defects are acknowledged and addressed. Hope this is some food for thought.
May 5th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
It is. Thanks, Shawn.
May 5th, 2006 at 8:40 pm
Think Different!
Apple designs their laptops to be quiet. The Something Awful article points out that less paste results in a noiser laptop. The laptop with less paste is cooler because the fan runs longer.
This is what is known as an engineering tradeoff, not a manufacturing defect. It might also be called a trade secret, as it is covered by a Non-Disclosure Agreement.
Apple Legal is currently in court defending their ability to protect their NDAs in the Think Secret case. They would weaken their case if they didn’t do something about every public violation brought to their attention.
May 7th, 2006 at 4:28 pm
I think your post is right-on. There is an exception to copyright, and that is fair use; which seems to be how the service manual was used in this case.
Apple should have restraint with monolithic responses like “cease and desist,” because enough will reach a tipping point in people’s minds, and there will be a backlash. Apple enjoys a loyalty that is rare in the computing industry, and it could be damaged if it is cavalier with its legal doings.
May 7th, 2006 at 8:32 pm
I did notice that the legal head of Apple has just resigned
, but I don’t know if that signals a rethinking of the heavy-handed legal approach.