It is?
> In iMovie, you can take your professional looking photos and stitch them together with the Ken Burns effect. The name says it all right there.
So you acknowledge that iLife is a counter to your point, and your only refutation is that there is a Ken Burns effect? I don't get it.
The premise of this very short article seems to be that, because Apple includes some professionally-made templates and used stock photos in a keynote, they don't get amateur content. iLife is the biggest counter to this argument. Apple does try to make sure that amateur content doesn't look or sound too shitty, but how does that mean they don't understand amateur content at all? It just means they're removing the boring work for the average user who doesn't want to spend an hour making a theme look good. Apple totally gets amateur content. They want every kid with an iPad to be recording music in Garageband.
The amateur content argument is weak and doesn't support the social argument. As for Ping, I never understood the hatred for it as it was always clearly just a way to see the music people were buying and not some major social network competitor. I've used it to browse a few people and found new albums I liked. It did its job in my case.
Facebook was the clean, professional-looking, easier-to-use alternative to the chaotic and amateurish MySpace. The idea that Apple must embrace amateur chaos just doesn't make sense to me and seems like it would be the wrong thing to do. Apple is the kind of company that is often a few years behind but eventually releases something so polished and easy to use that it's successful anyway.