The day Apple jumped the shark

Apple has just launched a really badly designed product for the first time now in over a decade and a half. This follows some significant foot-in-mouth manoeuvring where it decried and swore it would never make a bigger iPhone, or iPad, never create a ’netbook’ category product and certainly not entertain a stylus as an input device.

Steve Jobs criticised and ridiculed competitors for doing what Apple actually later copied itself. At the end of the day though, he was a business man as well as an aesthete and realised that businesses have to go, to a degree, where their customers’ requirements take them. For someone as design-centric as Steve was, it would be deemed wholly impossible that he would have approved the new ugly, humpbacked ’iPhone 6s Smart Battery Case’. It is so smart, that the charge indicator light is on the inside of the case - meaning that when (as expected) it is wrapped around the phone, this light is totally invsible! It seems incredibly poorly conceived, equally poorly designed - and for definite Jony Ive did not sign this off either - it’s just too awful and underpowered. The only smarts really is that you get a separate battery life bar in the phone settings and on the notifications screen - where companies like Mophie use 3 or 4 indicator lights to show charge levels.

Mophie and similar case products are far more elegant, carry more juice, and have a button feature which allows you to control when you use that extra charge. The Apple case has no such function. Apple usually prides itself on over-enginneering and over-charging in the cost stakes. This time it’s beyond taking advantage of its more gullible consumers. Apple has been fleecing its customers for so long, it now believes it can pretty much get away with anything - including a monstrously ugly looking case which totally disfigures the fine lines of its rather beautifully designed phones.

It also puts paid to the idea that those smaller 6 series phones weren’t underpowered in the first place. Apple swore that all their phones contained ample juice to see you through a typical working day. By officially sanctioning its own snap-on power-pack, Apple is admitting it lied all along, and that the smaller phones were in fact underpowered all the time.

Apple still does a fair amount of innovating, but it is also notorious for under-specifying a lot of its products too. And where companies like Samsung load their devices with all the latest technologies and features, Apple typically leaves out one or two significant ones to force / encourage you to keep buying the next iteration of whatever product line you are subscribed to.

I have a lot of Apple devices, they are my principal computing devices, but I have been criticising Apple for its profiteering ways for almost the whole time I’ve been a customer. Apple routinely charges you $39-ish for an adaptor / connector / lead / whatever which other premium vendors would not deign to sell at even half that price. Apple’s coffers are overflowing, but very little is coming back to reward its loyal customers, and now it has the temerity to sell them this hunchbacked lemon of a case which is comparable to the unsightly bulge of a rat trapped under your lounge carpet - no effort has been made to blend in or assimilate the battery in an elegant fashion - a task easily achieved by the vast majority of power-pack cases already on the market!