My how far you have come, Apple.
youtube.com
youtube.com
These products are impressive, but they don't seem in any way like they're aimed at rebels or rule-breakers.
Interestingly, this approach (consumer -> corporate) is precisely the opposite to RIM's approach with the Blackberry. It almost seems too crazy-bold to have been planned from the early days of the first ipods, but it does seem to be slowly working out.
Huh? Since when does apple even exist in the corporate market?
Last time I checked you'd not find many of them outside of design departments and hip startup offices.
That's exactly the response the ad was designed to invoke. Wasn't grounded in reality then either. As Apple has become more successful it's increasingly difficult for them to play the underdog/outsider role and their advertising has changed to reflect that. I don't really see much of a difference in the company other than the fact it's more successful and that success has largely come from their consumer electronics products. The Mac/OSX side of Apple hasn't changed much at all.
So when did Apple actually cross over into badness? Or whatever-ness would make running ads about rebels a deliberate imposture? Before Steve came back? Between then and now?
I saw my first Mac in the store in 1984, just before I graduated high school, and I loved it on sight. The cute little face! The crisp graphics! I had precisely zero dollars, but I looked into a developer's kit. There was exactly one. Apple sold it. It was $1200 or something - an incredibly high bar. Unattainable for me, of course, but even at the tender age of 17 I had the impression that couldn't bode well for the Mac.
The IBM PC wasn't nearly as attractive, but within a year of its release there was software to do anything you wanted, and the Mac still didn't have anything to speak of, except for what the big boys had written for it.
So my answer: Apple balances Jobs yang with Woz yin. And lately, there's been no Woz yin. It's all about controlling the experience - a media thing. They talk about being rebels, but it's the rebelliousness of, say, Twilight.
Their customers love them. They're still perceived as incredibly innovative. They bring new technologies to mass market with unparalleled success. Even the vast majority of iPhone developers are incredibly grateful for the opportunity the App Store provides them.
It's just a vocal minority here on HN that has decided that Apple is evil. Outside the echo chamber they're still rebellious, disruptive, innovative, pioneering, etc.
I still have to give Apple credit for the modern smartphone revolution.
Users (and "the product") are more important than your developers, more important than vendors, and more important than business partners. Apple gets this, most other companies don't.
Why not?
I think it isn't necessarily Apple that has changed. The change might be the perspective of our times. I think any company attempting to sell that iconic revolutionary anti-establishment sentiment today will come off as disingenuous, pretentious, naïve, or all three. Maybe it's the medium: you can't get this message across when people expect their video in HD with 5.1 dolby surround sound, and so YouTube, the blurry pictures with the simple voice will seem like fake nostalgia.
They still make amazing products, they still use and contribute a huge amount to open source. So they have their phone OS locked down, there are reasons for that, and they mostly revolve around the best experience for most users. (read not you)
Get over it already.
But that said, Apple has done a lot. They push design and refuse to let feature complexity compromise the beauty and simplicity of their machines. Arguably the iTunes music store single-handedly pushed the music industry to drop DRM. The Webkit project has led to a highly advanced and open-sourced HTML5 platform. And Apple has focused their build and packaging process to be more environmentally "friendly".
They are not infallible, and I'm sure many people here would argue that their contributions to the good are far outweighed by the bad, but the point is that it's easy to forget these positive things amongst all the bad press.
Apple is thinking different.