Stand in line to beat Apple senseless

There are pageviews to be had when it's time to criticize Apple: probably as much if not more than writing about the latest iGadget. It is the same pattern over and over. First, Apple debuts its latest creation, and the press fawns. Next, a blogger or journo with an ax to grind finds some obscure problem affecting a small segment of users and makes it into a showstopping defect.

Without much thought, the rest of the media jumps on this report, and hundreds if not thousands of stories tell us how Apple's at the beginning of the end, lost its edge, blah blah blah. Same story every time -- from Antennagate, to Batterygate, and now Heatgate.

Heatgate is only the most recent of these tempests in a teacup, turned into a malestrom by the folks at Consumer Reports. In preliminary testing, CR found that new iPad runs 10 degrees hotter than iPad 2 -- as much as 116 degrees.

Here we go again.

This latest firestorm (no pun intended) is yet another unnecessary distraction for Apple. To its credit, this time Apple quickly responded to the issue by saying the iPad performs "well within our thermal specifications" in statement to Jim Dalrymple and The Loop shortly after CR's findings.

Good move Apple in cutting the issue off at the head and not letting it fester. It is probably why the conversation this time is much different, and more favorable to the Cupertino, Calif. company.

Call Us Skeptical

While Consumer Reports certainly deserves some flak here for once again taking an issue and overplaying it, the rest of the tech media does too: most of us did not take any time to verify those findings or do some research ourselves. In the age of blogs, it has become too much of "me too".

You may all find this shocking, but our own investigation into CR's (and Tweaked.net's to be fair) claims were performed by my colleague Joe Wilcox. Say what you want about his stories and alleged anti-Apple biases, Joe did smell something afoot with this considering Apple's past "gates". He pulled out his family's new iPad. While we aren't using fancy gadgets to measure the temperature, from an impartial assessment he knew right away CR's claims were an exaggeration.

In our newsroom discussions, Joe reported to us that his hands didn't burn off. "Not that I can tell", he mused over the device running any hotter. Through thinking this out, we chalked this up to places like Consumer Reports not doing their due diligence in testing across multiple scenarios. We reported it as such, even though some of our commenters still took it as a hit piece on Apple. It wasn't. In my eyes, we defended the company.

Look back to Joe's post on the Daisey controversy. He writes that we steer away from the feeding frenzies and rumor stories that pervade the tech media, which is true. This is exactly what Heatgate is: a feeding frenzy. Consumer Reports put itself in the news with a post that told half the story, and thus was a story in search of a problem.

Rerun, Rerun

Apple has now found itself over the past two years subject to at least three of these types of hit jobs. First was the iPhone 4 Antennagate. Somebody held their phone and watched the signal indicator go down, and all of a sudden the company found itself playing defense. Just to calm the ravenous appetites of the tech media and the anti-Apple crowd, Apple had to remind us how to hold a phone and on top of that, give a free case to people who can't do it right.

Next came the battery controversy with the iPhone 4S. Yes, there were some issues, but it was software related. At the time, I argued that the problems were overblown. Guess what? They're all but gone now and you don't hear a peep about it. Another story in search of a problem.

Now we've come to Heatgate. Same gist but with a different cast of characters. There's one unifying force here though, and that's pageview seeking outfits like Consumer Reports. To be fair, Consumer Reports did say on the iPhone 4S that it couldn't find evidence of significant battery issues, but it has placed itself in the middle of news stories before and overplayed them. The outfit is not the only one, but certainly is becoming the most prominent of those whoring for pageviews on practically non-existent issues.

Will it ever stop? Probably not. I've been saying this week about the situation that "it sucks to be on top". Apple is not the first company to be subject to overzealous reporters and critics. Microsoft went through the same thing over a decade ago. Every release or product was subject to such oppressive scrutiny that there was no possible avenue for success.

There's an argument here that this attitude only exacerbated honest issues at the Redmond, Wash. company and created an even more stagnant environment that Microsoft is still to this day trying to dig itself out of.

The only difference here is the 24-hour news cycle, blogs, and social media. What took months if not days to build back then can take days, weeks and even hours now to spiral out of control. Are we setting Apple up for failure just like we did to Microsoft so long ago?

I think you can say we are. It's a shame, and needs to stop.

Photo Credit: National Library NZ on The Commons