In Mild Defense of Bob Keefe

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on August 10, 2007

One of the lowlights of Tuesday’s Q-and-A session between Apple execs including Steve Jobs and reporters in Cupertino was one that has been widely ridiculed. As noted by Dan Moren at MacUser, it apparently came from Bob Keefe of Cox Newspapers.

Keefe asked Jobs why Apple doesn’t put “Intel Inside” stickers on its packaging and on the computers themselves. The response in the room was classic Apple-insiderism. Anyone who knows Apple and the Steve Jobs way knows why: The stickers would mar the experience, the message, and the look of the machine. Owning an Apple product isn’t about being reminded every minute whose chip is inside the thing, as that fact is more or less irrelevant to getting things done.

But, at least it’s not a completely unreasonable question: Every time you see that logo, that’s Intel’s marketing money helping pay for advertising from Dell, or Hewlett-Packard or Toshiba or someone else. It’s so hard for a company to turn down, that a Toshiba executive once called it the cocaine of the computer industry. Maybe it was easy to turn down at Apple, since it has always advertised its own product and borne the expense happily, and produced some of the most successful advertising campaigns in history.

But cut Keefe some slack. Maybe he’s not a Mac user, or maybe new to the Apple beat, or was filling in for someone who normally covers Apple for Cox. The sillyness of the question may be widely apparent now, that the iPod and iPhone and iMac and their minimalistic looks and stylized carefully crafted image have been on the cultural scene for a few years. But it wasn’t always so. I once publicly pondered the same topic myself. How was Keefe to know a simple question the inner workings about Apple’s strategic business choices and the marketing choices that derive from them would trigger laughter in a room full of reporters? Nor what questions may be better asked with someone from Apple PR in a private phone conversation, and one that is best asked of Steve Jobs in the glare of a widely watched press conference.

Jobs and Apple VP Phil Schiller gave the answers you’d expect. (Hear audio of the exchange here.) But I like this answer better: Apple does something for Intel that Dell and HP and Gateway can’t. Apple makes Intel look cool.

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