Apple’s newest product: Complexity
Adam Lashinsky
@adamlashinsky
JUNE 1, 2014, 6:54 AM EDT
Recently a friend I consider tech-savvy was trying to figure out how to share an audio file with his colleague. The file, an hour-long recording of a business meeting, was too large to attach to an email or text message, the only options his Apple iPhone presented to him. So he plugged his phone into his laptop, loaded up iTunes, and tried to drag and drop the file from his phone to his desktop. No dice. He right-clicked in search of a “Save to …” or “Export” function and came up empty-handed. After 10 minutes of ducking in and out of labyrinthine menus and byzantine screens in search of — well, anything of relevance — he finally gave up and searched the web. “iTunes automatically syncs voice memos to your iTunes library when you connect iPhone to your computer,” someone cheerily wrote on a message board. Not that anyone would be able to find them. “It was ridiculous,” my friend said. “I’ve been using iTunes for 10 years. It shouldn’t be this hard.”
Historically, Apple AAPL -0.27% products just worked. If you installed a printer, you didn’t need to worry about drivers to make it function. If you wanted to back up your files, you didn’t need to worry about when or how; Time Machine would automate the entire process. And perhaps most important, you didn’t need to read an instruction manual to use an Apple product. A seamless out-of-the-box experience was the company’s signature. Exhibit A: The “Get a Mac” ad campaign in the late 2000s. That simplicity allowed it to charge premiums for devices that largely used the same components as its peers. Apple’s late co-founder and chief executive, Steve Jobs, deserves credit for much of this uniformity. Without his singular vision and autocratic rule Apple might well have devolved into Microsoft-like internecine warfare.
Today Apple still doesn’t include an instruction manual with its devices, and its user interfaces have less clutter than the competition. But its products are beginning to show that they come from one of the largest technology companies in the world, one with 80,000 employees. iTunes, iPhoto, iCloud, and other Apple software and services have grown confusingly complex, woefully outdated, or both. If you try to add a device made by another company to the mix, things can get a little hairy. (Woe to the benighted customers of devices running Google’s Android mobile operating system hoping that their Apple and non-Apple products will happily commingle.) Even Apple’s corporate structures mirror the increased complexity on the user experience side. Though its tax havens in Ireland and treasury operations in Nevada are not new, they now have the sheen of opacity that formerly held the allure of mystery. Apple, once the epitome of simplicity, is becoming the unlikely poster child for complexity. Read more of this post
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