5 Clichés About Apple Users

Owning an Apple product comes with a price; replacing my recently perished iPhone has proven this to be painfully literal, but it can also be equally figurative. Whether it’s an iPod, iPad, iPhone or a Mac computer to varying degrees your shiny piece of metal and glass cast your character in a certain light. Clichés regarding Apple’s core customer base date back to the company’s conception and the bigger the bite that Apple takes out of the technology market, the more the arguments look less like a conversation than a fully fledged cage fight. Below are cliché-drenched arguments regarding Apple’s core customer base; whether or not you agree with them or identify with them comes down to two things: how honest you are with yourself, and how much you actually love Apple.

1. “You Are Unique”

In 1984 Apple tackled Microsoft’s huge hold over the computer market with a Super Bowl advert for their Macintosh computer launch. This advertisement featured an ample bosomed hammer-throwing hottie smashing a screen in a draconian Orwellian world and freeing the oppressed masses from their Windows-induced nightmare. Since this advert (widely acknowledged as one of the most effective in history), Apple has branded itself as the company of unique thinkers that break the norm. This aggressive form of marketing helped Apple obtain a tenuous and slight hold on the market in the 80s and helped to establish the elitist credentials so commonly associated with the brand today.

In 1997 Apple ran another series of adverts that solidified their brand message with the Think Different campaign, which ran until 2003. The campaign best summed up by this advert which features some of the 20th centuries most influential characters from Gandhi and Martin Luther King to Bob Dylan and Mohammed Ali once again was a thinly veiled attack on Microsoft that encouraged Apple brand association not only with progressive and unique thinking but with risk taking and the genius it takes to break the mold. It’s slightly ironic that during this period Apple brought a product to market that changed everything. With the launch of the iPod in 2001 and its almost immediate and complete dominance of the MP3 market it soon meant that the company, which was unique and progressive, was now mainstream. iPods still dominate the MP3 market with such a ferocity that mentioning a competitor would be surmountable to namedropping a bit character in a James Joyce novel. While the iPhone is a substantial second to the cheaper and more broadly marketed Android device the two companies share a preposterous 80% of the smartphone market. Apple computers, like the Macbook I’m writing this on in an Internet café (more on that later), are more of a rarity with just over 5% of the market share compared to industry leaders HP who hold 15% – this however, is of course unless you consider the tablet a computer which would result in Apple’s market share jumping to over 20% of the market represented in the image below.

Long story short, perhaps Chuck Palahniuk’s sentiment in his seminal novel Fight Club best sums this up in the sense that, just because you own an Apple, “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.” Apple’s genius-marketing campaigns backed by the quality of their products, their now limitless bank account and their grip of markets across the technology sector ensure that your Apple product doesn’t make you a revolutionary. In fact in this very café there are seven diners; five of us have computers and four of us are using Macs. We’re all thinking different. The other two incidentally are an impossibly beautiful French girl who’s giving French lessons to a man who clearly has no interest in learning any language other than that of love…

2. “You Are Young”

Apple has always wished to represent their brands core demographic as a twenty-something trend setting social influencer. You don’t have to look much further than their Get a Mac advertising campaign which saw Justin Long calling himself a Mac in his trendy designer jeans and sneakers cast alongside a dowdy poorly tailored middle aged man who referred to himself as a PC. In hindsight, Apple should look back on this campaign (which ran from 2006 – 2009), with disdain, mainly because their adverts ended up making the company look smug and conceited, especially in the UK where David Mitchell played the roll of the PC. But they won’t, because these adverts helped them to not only challenge the PC market, but to eclipse it. In reality Apple’s core demographic aren’t those young hipsters; the four Apple users in this chic Internet café cum bar (that plays Cuban jazz music), range from around 22 to a man who is easily somewhere in his late fifties. This number bears some significant importance, as in 2006, before those ‘Buy a Mac’ campaigns started, a company called MetaFacts stated that 46% of Apples customer base were 55 or older. Apple, horrified that it would lose its cool image was quick to refute this statement, claiming that under 20% of their customer base fell into this demographic and than later released the aforementioned cringe worthy ‘Buy a Mac’ advertising campaign. However, in 2007 leading internet analysis company ‘hit-wise’ published statistics that showed that the majority of visitors to the Apple website were under the age of 45 with only 10% of web traffic being generated by those over 55. In reality, quantifying Apple’s age demographic is not an easy feat and the company obviously keeps this information close to its chest. However, we can safely assume that Apple owners are more likely to be in their 30s than their late teens or early 20s.

3. “You Drank the Kool-Aid/Joined the ‘Mac Cult’”

Apple has a devoted following that is controversially compared to naysayers as similar to that of the worshipers of the People’s Temple. In this analogy the followers of fundamental leader Jim Jones who convinced over 900 of his followers to commit mass suicide by drinking cyanide laced Kool-Aid are compared to that of the followers of Steve Jobs, the Apple brand and the belief that the company can do no wrong. The fact of the matter is that Apple has developed a core consumer base that any other company in the world would kill to have, and this following has grown to the point where it is known as the “Apple Cult.” To find out whether or not you are a member you need to ask yourself the following questions:

• Do you own any technological products other than those that the company doesn’t make, which don’t feature the Apple insignia?
• Are you an Apple evangelist, and/or have you ever called an Apple naysayer ‘jealous’?

• When your iPhone 4 wasn’t picking up reception or your iPhone 4s’ battery died after half an hour, did you ever breathe a word of your discontent?

• Have you ever stuck the Apple stickers, included in the majority of their products, on anything…anything at all?

• Do you have a shrine dedicated to Steve Jobs where you lay old Apple products, light candles and burn incense whilst listening to old WWCD conferences he led on YouTube?

Evaluate your answers, or have a friend do it if you are incapable of being impartial, and if the results (especially the last one) concern you, spend some time on this facebook page . If you’ve really drunk the Kool-Aid then you’ll be here for hours trying to start another Apple-inspired flame war and as half of this page’s fans are Apple devotees who have come to praise the brand anyway, you’ll get a surprising amount of support. However, none of this is your fault as according to brand agency Millward Brown, who have composed a list of the worlds most valuable brands 2011 marked the year that Apple surpassed Google as the world’s most valuable brand; so if the Kool-Aid tastes good, drink away.

4. “You Have a Superior Operating Machine”

The big question and perhaps the one that causes the most controversy: does owning an Apple mean that you have a superior operating machine? Without getting too much into the specifics of shells, materials and the iOS platform, we can look at this argument on a product-by-product breakdown based on what the industry experts think. Cnet rates the Macbook Pro as the best mainstream laptop and the Macbook Air as the best 13” laptop. PC Advisor rank the original iPad and the iPad 2 as numbers 1 and 2 respectively in the tablet market.  The iPod market doesn’t really bear mentioning as Apple’s 70+% market share really illustrates that there isn’t much else you need to think about. Then, of course, there is the iPhone, and while the iPhone 5’s release will cause mass hysteria, the competition has become so fierce that Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak says that he prefers his Android device and leading technology website techradar cast the 4s as a paltry number 3 in their top 20 mobile phones of 2012.

Apple is an industry leader and an innovator and year after year they set the standard in the technology market. The simple answer to this question is that if you have the most up-to-date Apple product, with the exception of the iPhone (at least until the iPhone 5 comes out), more often than not, you have the best technology available to you.

5. “You’re Pretentious”

As I mentioned before, I am sitting in an Internet café/bar full of mainly Mac users in London’s Old Street. Lets get a few things straight; I am not a poser, I am not pretentious, this is not a Starbucks, I am not drinking a Frappuccino while munching a vegan muffin hoping that the apple shaped glow on the shell of my machine will catch the eye of distractingly très jolie French girl giving ‘lessons’ opposite me. They do unlimited coffee refills for £1.50 and also sell alcohol, which I am consuming a combination of in equal measure. I am wearing a flat cap but I am doing so as I am in dire need of a haircut. I am not carrying an ornamental copy of Nietzsche with a crack free spine and using Pirate Bay to download the latest indie-trance tune whilst wearing a pashmina. Nor have I spent the last two hours here on Facebook and YouTube commenting on the latest disturbing Miami Zombie video (two people here are actually doing these things).

All Apple products include apple shaped stickers; their advertising has been elitist ever since 1984 and the name itself…well, the biblical reference to the birth of human knowledge couldn’t be more pretentious. According to a computer loyalty study done by Hunch in the USA, a website that makes recommendations based on user preferences, of 388,000 respondents PC users were more likely to wear casual clothes, eat tuna fish sandwiches, drink white wine and read USA Today, while Mac users were more likely to wear designer clothes, eat hummus, drink red wine and read the New York Times. But this isn’t fair, perhaps the best polarity I have ever seen regarding Mac’s vast consumer base is in this article, where a thirty-something Mac devotee camps outside the Covent Garden Apple Store for six days prior to the new iPhone’s release and meets a homeless guy whose only possession in the world is a Macbook Pro. The guy even offers the Kool-Aid drinking camper his last slice of bread. Apple’s ideal customer is someone in their early twenties to late thirties who is media centric and willing to shell out the cash for a better user experience. Someone who considers themselves creative and, judging by their very own adverts, a progressive and slightly conceited hipster. Someone who makes the rules and doesn’t follow them… Sorry, I have to go, for the first time tonight the French girl has been left by her Blackberry using companion and I’ve rehearsed the perfect Voltaire line to snare her number under the pretense of learning a language I have a moderate grasp of. I’ve even got the perfect iTunes playlist on my £1,500 Macbook Pro that we can listen to at the close of our first date…

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