Apple Announcement: Will The Backlash Continue?

Apple will hold a press announcement today at 10am PST. Will it make or break the percolating Apple backlash?

In today’s Apple announcement Steve Jobs faces two stiff challenges, both of which could play into the Apple backlash that came to a boil earlier this spring.

It all started with Gizmodo unveiling the iPhone 4, lost in bar in California and sold to the tech site for $5,000. It was the first time in Apple’s history that the company’s famously secretive operations leaked in advance of an official press announcement. Whether it was causal or coincidental will remain a mystery, but from that moment the public’s long-standing honeymoon with Apple began to sour.

There was the rumor that after having first been offered the phone before it was given to Gizmodo and dismissing it out of hand as a hoax, that Apple’s legal team belligerently demanded the phone from Gizmodo as stolen property. Then California law enforcement smashed down Gizmodo blogger Jason Chen’s door and seized his computers and a credit card, and searched him on the spot.

It wasn’t a good look, and it got worse when the iPhone 4 was finally released. It was the first technically faulty hardware the company had ever sold, breaking a long record of infallible trustworthiness. The problem, of course, was compounded when Apple first denied complaints about the device had any merit, then admitted there may be some problems but insisted consumers were wrong to complain so vociferously, and only after what had become a painfully deep PR wound offered purchasers free rubber cases to fix the problem.

This was not the Jobs we knew and loved—the Jobs who had single-handedly launched us into the future. This was a new, Evil Jobs, the Jobs of the Gizmodo law-enforcement break-in, who would take our money and sell us buggy products. Who had he become, Bill Gates?

The second current Apple swims against today is its sheer track record of innovation. Having all in the last decade reinvented the way we listen to music, talk on the phone, and—hell, we’re still figuring out what he invented with the iPad—Apple has set the bar almost impossibly high.

Speculation has run rampant over the last months that Apple will again fundamentally change the way we consume music—and with good reason. Apple’s function in consumer culture has been to keep one step ahead of our imaginations on new technology. But in the near decade since it launched iTunes, the technology for cloud computing and streaming services has greatly advanced. Apple is now in the position where its customers’ imaginations for new products are out in front of its technological offerings. And that’s not a good place to be.

One commenter on the music blog Hypebot said, “I am wishfully thinking about an end-to-end solution..artist profile page on the web >> right through to distribution >> streaming >> downloads >> all the way to the consumer’s pocket >> recommendation included.”

If Apple’s announcement today falls short of reinventing the way we consume media by utilizing cloud capabilities that it’s currently not taking advantage of, it will only disappoint consumers, furthering the backlash started this spring and cementing the idea that he company’s heyday has likely passed.

If Apple is to mend its relationship with a once-adoring consumer base, it needs to get back to the business of dreaming up what we want faster than we can conjure it in our own minds.

If they can do that, buyers will forget about the Gizmodo debacle, the iPhone 4 problems, and anything disparaging Jobs might have said along the way.