Poor Tim Cook – from the fiasco of the Apple Maps launch to this week’s problems with iOS 8 updates, he is greeted with a chorus of ‘it wouldn’t have happened under Steve Jobs’. The fact that mistakes did happen under Jobs, and that Cook is dealing with a far tougher competitive landscape, and intense pressure to get new functions out rapidly, is forgotten when Bloomberg quotes a frustrated iPhone user complaining “I just wish Tim Cook had a better handle on things”. It’s hard to imagine an irritated Samsung customer saying the same about Oh-Hyun Kwon.
However, the Apple cult, in whichms of its users feel they have a personal connection to the CEO, is part of its differentiation, even if Cook is less equipped to shine under that spotlight than his predecessor. And it is certainly true that there will be CEO-level questions asked about the iOS 8 update, which has cast a dark shadow over the first week of sales of the new iPhone models. Having sold a record 10m new iPhones at the weekend, Apple was immediately faced with multiple problems with iOS 8.0.1, and pulled the update completely on Wednesday, after it caused some users to lose cellular service altogether.
The storm of social media fury was only intensified by complaints that some iPhone 6 Plus devices could bend when users sat on them or applied too much pressure. All this was a massive PR blot on what had previously been portrayed as Cook’s finest hour as CEO, the event at which, for the first time, he unveiled devices, and a new iOS release, which were created under his watch and offered genuinely new functionality.
Cook will need to take a long hard look at Apple’s processes and whether they can ever be foolproof enough to live up to a level of expectation which no other handset maker sets. After the launch of deeply flawed mapping software in 2012, last year saw him having to apologize for warranty and repair policies in China.
Apple said in a statement on Wednesday that it had devised a workaround for iPhone 6 users who lost voice service or other functions and would release a new version, iOS 8.0.2, in the next few days. “We apologize for the great inconvenience experienced by users,” the firm said.