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Apple is a company that is known for its rabid, fiercely loyal customers. When it comes to computers and consumer electronics, they tend to buy nothing else.
They are extremely vocal, and will not hesitate to tell anyone how much they love their products, and why you too should own them.
iPhone 6 CPU clock performance before a battery swap.
ZDNet
On the multiple occasions over the years where Apple has done something to attract negative attention from the press, their fanbase is always ready to defend. Woe is the opinion editorial writer who either calls the company on its Reality Distortion Field (RDF) or criticizes the company about anything, even constructively.
Also: After iPhone slow-downs, Apple offers battery replacements – but it’ll cost you
This is the quid pro quo for writing about technology. You mess with Apple, prepare for hate mail and having your character assassinated in blog comments. It’s a dirty job but someone has to do it.
But I do completely understand unwavering loyalty to a brand. Big time. And companies can feel invincible and get particularly arrogant when they know their fans will accept just about anything they do and even defend their choices when everyone else is calling foul.
There are limits, however, to what a brand can pull off in terms of maintaining loyalty –particularly when it comes to the loss of trust and flat out fraud.
When you are a party to fraud as a self-appointed brand ambassador it hurts big. It goes way beyond disappointment, because when you see your favorite brand fail in this way, and others call you on it, you can become even more rabid, unreasonably so — like an animal backed into a corner.
You see, I was a party to something much like Apple’s Batterygate — Volkswagen’s 2.0L and 3.0L diesel crisis.
I loved, I mean loved, my Volkswagen Diesel. I have sung the praises about it in print and told everyone I knew about the fantastic mileage it got, the fun and torquey little engine it had, and how well it performed in the hot Florida weather.
I was a Volkswagen Diesel fanatic. The Volkswagen diesel story is so well documented in other outlets that there’s no real need to go into detail.
But as a VW diesel fanboy, I went through all of the phases of grief as I watched the events drag out over a period of two years.
I don’t even own one of their cars anymore and I am still pissed off about it.
The company lied to its customers. We bought a vehicle under the assumption that all of the claims they made about the engine performance being a “Clean Diesel”.
They were completely false. It was too good to be true.
That lie has resulted (so far) in a cost of about $30 billion in damages the company has had to pay to regulatory agencies, buyouts, and additional punitive compensation to customers in multiple countries.
It has been an utter disaster for the company’s public relations.
I for one will probably never buy another Volkswagen, Audi or Porsche product ever again. While the company is not likely to go under from this mess, its reputation is going to be permanently marred, and it will lose generations of goodwill and loyalty from its customers that were hurt by this.
It has had to commit to major management changes, including moving towards the manufacture of electric vehicles. Its diesel business is effectively dead.
Apple’s Batterygate is a bit different than the Volkswagen scandal — there’s no environmental damage here but the loss of trust the company is likely to incur might be just as significant.
iPhone 6 CPU clock performance after battery swap.
ZDNet
There will be numerous lawsuits in many countries. There could easily be billions upon billions of dollars in fines levied against the company before this is over.
But Apple has plenty of money. Even if it had to pay Volkswagen-level fines it would be perfectly fine financially. What it cannot recover from, however, is the loss of confidence from its most loyal fans.
I’ve begun to see evidence of this already. I know of life-long Apple fans with older iPhones that have recently discovered that swapping out a battery on a three and a half-year-old iPhone 6 returns the phone to pristine operation.
They otherwise would have bought a new phone, just as millions of others probably already have, assuming the new iOS 11 with new features was taxing the system.