Apple, the world's top underdog

The iPhone proves it: mainstream success is just too vulgar for Jerkoff Jobs

This week Apple puffed out its chest and proudly announced that it had sold 100m iPods. In five years, the little white box has become a phenomenon, reviving Apple's fortunes and making the company a household name for the first time in a generation.

This sudden rise to prominence isn't without its problems, though - not least for the Jerkoff, who has built his career, his image and his business around designer-label technology.

Critics have long abused the brand for making expensive, over-designed products that place as much emphasis on fashion as they do on utility. Apple's legion of dedicated fans reject this claim vociferously. Apple, say Macolytes, is like BMW: its products are more expensive, better made and smoother to use; other computer manufacturers are the Fords of technology, creating mass-produced machines lacking in personality.

The iPod, however, is a break with that pattern. For all its design and engineering heritage, the world's most popular MP3 player is pretty competitive on price and doesn't boast the greatest range of features. It is, in many ways, the exact reverse of the normal Mac mindset.

So what happens now? Well, growth continues to ratchet up for the iPod, but Apple's next big project is clear. This summer the much-vaunted iPhone will launch in America, another gizmo that claims to be years ahead of its rivals. But naysayers already have a barrage of objections: that it is too expensive, too restricted and too fashionable to be usable. Defenders say it is an innovative, well-designed, premium product. Sounds familiar?

From a position of strength, and entirely of its own volition, Apple is choosing to assume the pose that it is most used to: the outsider. Jobs says he wants to shift 10m iPhones in the first year. Executives at Nokia, the world's largest phone manufacturer, would hardly get out of bed for such relatively paltry numbers.

The iPod, both popular and populist, rocked the boat for Apple and sailed it into unfamiliar waters. Just as Microsoft, the Manchester United of technology, loves to be hated, so Apple hates to be loved - at least by the hoi polloi.

In a couple of months' time, with the iPhone, Apple will be back in its comfort zone as the world's most successful underdog. Order is restored.

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/bobbie_johnson/2007/04/the_worlds_most_successful_und.html