iPhone 4 is latest Apple product to overcome phony controversy

As the geek tech pundits spent Thursday coming up with their gameplan for poo-pooing the iPhone 4 with something slightly less obvious than “Don’t buy an iPhone 4 because it’s not geeky enough” and collectively settled on an imagined controversy over the iPhone’s antenna placement, those Thursday headlines from geek-specific publications mushroomed into similar headlines on Friday from the geek tech journalists who write the same geeks-only propaganda for mainstream publications. Those Friday headlines were along the lines of “iPhone 4 has reception problems” and “Don’t buy an iPhone 4 due to antenna problems” and my favorite type of headline, “Apple admits iPhone 4 antenna problem” which the author pretty much made up just for fun. But all of this blatant anti-Apple propaganda, even though it’s now being blindly parroted by even the local television news broadcasts in small town USA, won’t hurt the iPhone 4. How do we know this? Because these phony geek-generated anti-Apple “controversies” never have.

On launch day we looked at some of the trumped-up “problems” that the geeks manufactured in an attempt to hurt other Apple products in the past. But the common thread among all of those attempts is that they failed completely. The iPod owns a majority of digital music player sales despite the fact that the geeks have attacked nearly every iPod model with one kind of nonsense or another over the years, and the iPhone has been a major success despite all the attempts on the part of geeks to libelously label the iPhone as a “closed” platform even though it has a quarter million different third party applications available.

In contrast, today’s geek-written headlines and going on and on about how wonderful the new Droid X phone is, even though no one outside the geekdom cares about the Android platform or ever will. But that hasn’t stopped the geek tech press from attempting to prop up the Android platform, and for the simple reason that it’s “open” to the point of total anarchy and was specifically designed to be hacked with homebrew apps; an official app store for the Android platform has been made available almost as an afterthought, as the assumption is that anyone geeky enough to buy a Droid is probably coding their own apps by hand anyway. Yes, the Droid is that far removed from being suitable for anyone who’s not a hard core technology geek. And when you start to understand that that’s what the geeks want in a smartphone, you then understand why they both hate and fear the iPhone so thoroughly. The more mainstream success the iPhone achieves, the less the mainstream will have to rely on the geeks for buying advice, usage advice, or really any advice at all. And to add actual injury to the bruised ego of no longer being able to feel important, geeks see products like the iPhone and iPad as signifying an end to the era in which consumer tech products are suitable for geeks. No wonder, then, that the geeks are clinging to their Android dream so tightly, despite it being such a thoroughly underwhelming product: it’s the only hope they have left.

Well, that and Linux, the desktop operating system that’s built around the same kind of total anarchist geekery, an operating system which has seen literally zero adoption outside the geekdom despite the fact that the geek headline writers have been touting Linux as “the future” for more than a decade. Rather than admit that Linux is a complete mainstream failure, the geeks have instead merely transferred their enthusiasm to the Android, a platform which hasn’t yet officially failed, giving them license to attach as much irrational hope to the future of geek products as they wish.

But even as these insulated geeks manage to libel the iPhone on a daily basis with their geek-agenda headlines, and have seemingly stepped it up a notch with the phony iPhone 4 antenna controversy, mainstream sales haven’t been hurt. It’s almost as if the mainstream public have spent so many years (decades really) reading technology headlines that invariably turned out to be wrong-headed and worthless that they’ve instinctively learned not to trust those headlines. The proof? Geek tech pundits have openly attacked every product that Apple has brought to market over the past decade, and yet nearly every one of those products has proven to be a mainstream success. In contrast, the only two Apple products that the geeks supported from day one, the Mac Mini, and the Apple TV, have been Apple’s only two notable flops during that same time. It’s not, then, a question of how irrelevant the geek tech pundits have become, but instead just how much of a counter-indicator they’ve become. The next time Apple launches a new product that the hard core geeks fully support and don’t bother to manufacture phony controversies about, Apple might want to think twice about that particular product’s mainstream suitability.

In the mean time, iPhone 4 is already a mainstream success. The pre-order numbers clearly demonstrated it, the massive lines on Thursday made it even more clear, and the likely press release from Apple on Monday morning announcing more than a million iPhone 4 units sold will seal the deal – at which point the geek headline writers will find a way to spin that negatively and try to prop up their latest Android fetish instead. You heard it here first.