Is Apple losing the plot?

Apple hardware goes boom. Apple management doesn't seem to care

Apple is known for a lot of things: being overpriced, having nice design, attracting fanboys who religiously believe that Steve Jobs is a Messiah. But for years the build quality of the gear has never been questioned.

Now it seems that Apple has reverted to the days of the Apple II which used to catch fire even if you looked at it in a funny way or did something to place the electrics under pressure... such as turning it on.

Recently a laptop and an Ipod Touch have gone up in smoke, last year we were reporting about laptops that bent thanks to heat problems.

Apple does what it usually does and denies that it ever happens, deletes user complaints from its bulletin boards and sticks its fingers in its collective ears and goes 'la la la'.

When there are enough complaints, Apple admits it is a problem which effects only a 'small number of users'. If everything is so bad that it really has to do something about it, it will wheel out Steve Jobs to admit that the outfit has made a mistake. Needless to say, that does not happen very often.

So why is Apple, which used to make good expensive hardware, starting to turn into a company that sells expensive but shonky gear?

Recently the fire problems have been caused by faulty batteries. Fanboys will rush to tell you that the batteries are not made by Apple and so its hands are clean. However, if you open the back of Apple hardware you would be hard pressed to find something that is not made by one of Apple's Asian partner chums. Apple has done this to keep the price of its products down.

This is all well and good if you were not paying over the odds for your gear. If you are paying for a Rolls Royce you don't expect a Datsun engine jacked under the bonnet.

Most Apple people don't think about the technology they have bought. They certainly don't want to worry about which bit of gear might have been made in an anonymous Chinese factory and might explode. Once the bonnet is shut, in their minds, they have bought an Apple.

The fact that Apple will not let them open the bonnet without voiding the warranty is cause for concern.

In the case of the battery, the buck stops at Apple. It needs to have more control over its manufacturing partners to make sure its standards are being met.

But what about the other things that are going wrong at Cupertino? The 3G Iphone which kept reverting to 2G, faulty mail programs, or distorted laptops. Why, when you pay so much for your Apple kit, does it want to roll back consumer protection laws so that they do not apply to its gear. Why did they design a laptop which requires you to take it to the shop when it needs a replacement?

The answer is that with the consumer department taking up all the senior members' attention, the quality is being lost. The Iphone is a good seller, replacing the Ipod as Apple's cash cow but, either way, the fruit dream factory is hitting a wall because people can't check the software and hardware in the way they used to.