The Giddy Social Whirl: Apple's just not that into you

Kate Williams ponders the world of social media, and today asks: is our relationship with Apple just a little dysfunctional?


If Steve Jobs’s emotion-receptors hadn’t been decommissioned during his last upgrade, he’d doubtless have been experiencing crushing embarrassment this week, after it emerged that the new iPhone 4 – whose launch had attracted the kind of wild hyperbole usually reserved for…well, every other Apple launch - stops working if you look at it a bit funny.

For those of you who’ve not been paying close attention to the unfolding drama, it appears that this device is rather sensitive, in that it loses reception when you hold it with your, um, hand. Specifically, your left hand. If you’re left-handed, this is a bummer.

A brief experiment at Social Towers reveals that holding an iPhone in one’s least-dextrous hand is both uncomfortable and annoying. In the absence of a claw-like iPhone-holding implement, or a perhaps a Heath Robinson-esque head-brace, you’d be disgruntled. And indeed, many were.

As you may already know, Steve Jobs has recently taken to responding personally to customers who email him directly - an idiosyncrasy which seemed both cute and excitingly World 3.0 for a while, but whose giddy novelty must now be wearing a little thin for all concerned.

His first pass at customer relations in this matter is best described as “maladroit", consisting as it did of the instruction to “just avoid holding in that way”. He didn’t actually articulate the implied corollary ‘stoopid!’ - but you can bet your bottom dollar he did the ‘stoopid’ face.

Now this is the kind of advice which, for a left-hander, must rank as high on the offensive chart as ‘oh FGS, give it back here and I’ll scrape the ham off” does for a vegetarian - and which, for me, vividly recalls the time an international retailer of Scandiwegian homewares told me I had broken a rug by walking on it.

It’s the kind of thing which turns a displeased but still receptive consumer into a fiery ball of stuttering fury, who will be quite happy to spend the rest of his days dissing you, your products and the benighted barque which first brought both you and them to these accursed shores. Perhaps realizing the scale of his error, Steve Jobs eventually changed tack - but with little improvement. This time he told a customer: “There is no reception issue.”

Now a class action suit has been launched, which amongst other things accuses Apple of the thrillingly machiavellian-sounding "Fraud by Concealment”. This may (or of course may not – I’ve as firm a grasp of The Law as I have of The Plumbing) relate to a directive which was sent to all Applecare employees, and which seems to imply that Apple have been aware of the antenna problems for a while.

In the light of which, Steve’s ‘there is no reception issue’ comment begins to seem suspiciously like an attempt to reconfigure our reality. Like in those films where the bigamist-husband tries to send his second wife mad by moving around all the furniture, and subsequently denies it to her face while staring very hard into her eyes.

Finally, a string of emails between Jobs and another weepy customer came to light on Thursday; emails in which Jobs – in tones which will be eerily familiar to those of us who have experienced episodes of romantic disharmony - tells his increasingly frustrated correspondent to “calm down”, swiftly followed by the frankly enraging “it is just a phone."

Could it be that some of that lustrous shine is about to be rubbed off Apple’s organically-curved, sits-gorgeously-in-the-palm (of your right hand) reputation? Are we all about to discover that, while Apple, you know, digs us and all - it doesn’t actually adore us like we adore it?

If so, will we keep on mooning after it anyway, evincing shockingly low self-esteem, if not mild self-loathing - or might we say ‘pah!’ to dysfunction, and begin to look around for someone who maybe isn’t quite such a hunk of gorgeous, but who treats us real nice - and loves us, warts and all?


Till next time, mes cheris!

For more social media snippets, follow @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.