Complaints have begun to circle on both Web logs and Apple’s own support forums surrounding an issue with the polycarbonate plastic that covers the front of the iPod Nano. Some users claim the player scratches extremely easily, enough that it makes the screen difficult to read.
The problems have even led one anonymous Nano owner to set up a Web site to gather complaints of defects surrounding the diminutive player. flawedmusicplayer.com, was registered September 21 by Matthew Peterson of Hazel Park, Michigan.
(via betanews)
It’s a testament to the power of the Apple brand, that they can get away with practically any crap product that they produce. Remember the similarly-cracked G4 Cube? Or how they rushed OSX to market too early and it ended up not being able to read DVDs, couldn’t run Photoshop and had to come bundled with OS9 so that people could actually use software on it?
These are the kind of mistakes that would have run other companies into the ground, but Apple’s power isn’t that they make the best hardware in the world, it’s that they’ve convinced everyone that they make the best hardware in the world. Which in most cases, is more than enough.
(Please note that I am not writing this because I’m bitter or I resent Apple’s position. I lick the dirt off Steve Jobs’ boots, but it behooves me to point out that in the business world, perception is simply more powerful than reality.)
[ UPDATE: Macworld reports that Apple is now offering to replace all the scratched nanos for free, and claims that the scratching was a vendor-related problem and not a design issue. This may be one of the reasons why Apple has managed to weather these bouts of bad-publicity; they're pretty up-front with their customers and if their product has a tendency to suck (even in "1/10 of 1%" of the cases), at least they don't lie about it. ]