BW Online | January 29, 2003 | What's with the Hassles from Apple?

BW MAGAZINE Get Four Free Issues Register Subscribe Customer Service

ONLINE FEATURES Book Reviews BW Video Columnists Interactive Gallery Newsletters Past Covers Philanthropy Podcasts Special Reports BLOGS Auto Beat Bangalore Tigers Blogspotting Brand New Day Byte of the Apple Economics Unbound Eye on Asia Fine On Media Green Biz Hot Property Investing Insights Management IQ NEXT: Innovation NussbaumOnDesign Tech Beat Working Parents TECHNOLOGY J.D. Power Ratings Product Reviews Tech Stats Wildstrom: Tech Maven AUTOS Home Page Auto Reviews Classic Cars Car Care & Safety Hybrids INNOVATION
& DESIGN Home Page Architecture Brand Equity Auto Design Game Room SMALLBIZ Smart Answers Success Stories Today's Tip INVESTING Investing: Europe Annual Reports BW 50 S&P Picks & Pans Stock Screeners Free S&P Stock Report SCOREBOARDS Hot Growth 100 Mutual Funds Info Tech 100 S&P 500 B-SCHOOLS Undergrad Programs MBA Blogs MBA Profiles MBA Rankings Who's Hiring Grads

BW EXTRAS BW Digital BW Mobile BW Online Alerts Dashboard Widgets Podcasts RSS

RSS Feeds

Reprints/ Permissions Conferences Research Services

JANUARY 29, 2003

BYTE OF THE APPLE
By Alex Salkever

What's with the Hassles from Apple?
Surprise charges. Annoying .Mac pop-ups. Hijacked e-mail preferences. Apple's overzealous drive to sell may create a user backlash

STORY TOOLS

Printer-Friendly Version

E-Mail This Story

Byte of the Apple Archive

POLL INSTANT SURVEY >>

PEOPLE SEARCH

Search for business contacts:

PREMIUM SEARCH
Search by job title, geography and build a list of executive contacts

Tech White Papers

Most Recent

Most Popular

Time was, you bought an Apple, and you knew what you were getting. The hardware rarely failed. Sure, you might need to buy Microsoft Office or AppleWorks to do some basic computing stuff, but you could get by with Microsoft Outlook Express and a cheaper text editor. Every two years, you paid $100 to buy a system upgrade. It was easy. The overall cost of owning an Apple was very low. More important, the hassle factor was minimal. Now, though, in its mad dash to diversify revenue streams, Apple is steadily upping the hassle factor. Let me count the ways.

Recently, I logged onto Apple.com to catch a streaming video of Steve Jobs's keynote address at Macworld. But because I had Apple's QuickTime installed as my default media player, I recevied a snarky notification telling me I would have to upgrade to QuickTime Pro for $29 to view the higher-resolution version of the stream, although a lower-resolution stream would work with standard QuickTime.

I watched the low-res stream for a minute, but it was jumpy and hard to watch. So, I switched my preferences to a different, free, player. But it really bugged me that Apple would ask me to pay $29 to watch a high-res feed of what's essentially a nice infomercial. (Yes, I know QuickTime Pro has other nifty features -- they just don't happen to be the kind I would use very often.)

BAIT AND SWITCH? Item No. 2: When I purchased my iMac six months ago, I understood the digital-hub strategy to mean that Apple would provide me with decent software to edit movies, set up a digital jukebox, and organize digital photos. Cool, I thought. No need to deal with the hassle of keeping track of expiring product licenses, and downloading new versions should be a snap with OS X's Software Update feature.

Then Apple decided it wants to charge $49 for its iLife package of digital-hub software. Jobs and company will sell iLife as a package but allow Mac users to continue downloading iMovie, iTunes, and iPhoto for free. That means those paying for iLife are really just paying for iDVD. Apple used to charge $29 for this anyway, unless you bought a machine equipped with a DVD SuperDrive, in which case it was free.

Some Macheads say thats not a bad deal for people who used to pay $29 for iDVD or $49 for iMovie upgrades. For my part, I'm just confused about what I will and won't be paying for in the future, in light of Apple's zigging and zagging. As an Apple user, I hate uncertainty -- it's why I bought a Mac. Equally important, will Apple's otherwise handy software-update function stop bugging me about these updates if I decide not to pay for them?

Then there's the infamous .Mac ploy. It started out as a free e-mail service, but Apple started adding extra features like online storage -- and then announced it would charge. I can understand that Apple wants to build a nice community of folks around its services. And I would gladly pay, say, $20 a year for a permanent .Mac e-mail address and the features it offers. That's about what Yahoo! is charging for a similar product. But do I want to pay $100? Hardly. I don't like trusting Apple with my backups. And I don't want to pay Apple for antivirus protection that I've already installed on my machine to guard my other e-mail accounts (show of hands, how many Macheads really only have a .Mac account?)

PULLING A MICROSOFT. Yes, .Mac can also sync my calendars and let me publish to the Net. Both are things that Yahoo either already offers or will offer soon -- for far less cash. In short, I don't want to pay $100 per year for something I would hardly use, the same way that I don't want to pay for a package of additional cable channels that I would never watch.

With .Mac, too, Apple has managed to pull a Microsoft as far as annoying pop-up alerts go -- as well as software that takes control of your preference settings. I've had to go in and rebuild my e-mail preferences several times to pull out settings for a .Mac address I don't have anymore. It just keeps coming back from the dead. And whenever I reset my preferences, Apple assumes I want to set up a .Mac mail account.

Like Microsoft's alerts, Apple's never really go away. I call it .Mac pollution, and it has the other unpleasant side-effect of fouling up my outgoing e-mail on a semiregular basis. That in turn requires time spent fixing the problem -- it's almost enough to make me miss my PC.

With all these moves, Apple's new-revenue efforts are slowly but surely making it harder to own and manage a Mac. All the hassles I've mentioned are the kinds of problems I had hoped to avoid in buying a Mac. Do I still love my Apple? Absolutely. And I like much of what Jobs & Co. is doing in software. Can't argue with the hardware progress, either.

EASE IS KING. Still, Apple has traditionally thrived by maintaining an obvious relationship with its customers. When Jobs returned Apple to health, he did so by clearly demarcating product lines and communicating with the Mac's loyal fan base. Now, those lines of connection have snarled. None of the Mac faithful mind paying for something they want. But most would rather get fair warning that cool new services will be free for only a limited time -- rather than getting used to the features, then having a charge sprung on them.

And few want to buy something they already have, such as most of the .Mac package. Witness the service's anemic sign-up tallies of less than 300,000, despite worldwide Jaguar (OS X version 2) penetration of 5 million units. Most of all, Macheads want things to run smoothly. If all the selling gets in the way of ease of use, then Apple will have a serious backlash on its hands.

Salkever is Technology editor for BusinessWeek Online. Regular "Byte of the Apple" columnist Charles Haddad is on temporary leave
Edited by B. Kite

Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds. XML

Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed.

Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video.

To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here.

Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page