Is something rotten at Apple? - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

An excerpt from a Slate article earlier this week

What's troubling, though, is Apple's tendency to milk this advantage—when it does screw up, it prefers secrecy over full disclosure, and it expects customers to quickly forgive any slight. Its response to the MobileMe meltdown was a classic example. For several days after the site's rocky launch, Apple refused to disclose what had gone wrong. It wouldn't say why MobileMe was down, and it wouldn't say when MobileMe would be fixed. Only after the New York Times' David Pogue and the Wall Street Journal's Walter Mossberg published critical columns did Apple change its tune. Two weeks after MobileMe's launch, the company put up a blog documenting the service's status. Last week, it gave all users a credit for two months of MobileMe service.

Apple is dealing with iPhone problems in much the same way—grudgingly. Apple-focused blogs recently reported that Jobs fired off one-line e-mail replies to two different customers upset about iPhone difficulties; in each case, he said Apple was working on the problems. And an Apple spokeswoman told USA Today that Apple would issue a software patch to improve "communication with 3G networks." But that's it: The company won't say why the phone's failing to load apps or connect to 3G, it won't say how serious the problems are, and it won't say what, if anything, customers can do to resolve the problems until it issues a fix.

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