After years of Business Insider writing jerky linkbait headlines in order to sell the idea that Apple was doomed, you’ll never guess what happened next.
“Apple is now an existential threat to Android” (tip o’ the antlers to Rajesh)
So, Jim Edwards, who warned that Apple would become “the Blackberry of 2014” and then dreamed up 14 Apple doom scenarios is now playing Apple as the dastardly destroyer of Android.
When does Business Insider simply get rebranded as some kind of performance art?
For the first time ever, sales of Google’s Android mobile devices have gone into decline—an astonishing defeat for a product that is given away free to manufacturers.
Defeat. Because Android is now defeated. There’s no middle ground, apparently, only absolutes. If only there were some quote from a truly terrible movie about the kind of person who deals in absolutes. It’s probably just as well there isn’t because the Macalope wouldn’t want to be accused of going Obi-Wan Kenobiwin.
Wait… Qui-Gonwin. That’s better.
Apple’s iOS operating system for iPhone and iPad is trampling all over the Android world right now.
So now the story must change. It’s no longer about how Apple’s failing, it’s about how horrible it is that it’s winning.
In the official playbook, the iPhone is the phone of the rich, that handful of Western countries where $700 isn’t a month’s wages. Android is for everyone else—the poor, the working class, the ordinary people.
Yes, so sorry to rain on the parade of cheap over-generalizations—their colors do run so when they get wet—but it turns out all classes of people buy Android phones and all classes of people buy iPhones.
Android’s mission is a noble one, too.
Right, Google’s just doing it out of the goodness of its heart and jamming a bunch of ads down your throat and gathering your data as the Lord’s work.
iPhone was for the 1%.
But Android was The People’s Phone.
More like the People’s Republic of Phone, what with all the data collecting, amirite?
The People, however, appear to have had other ideas.
Counterrevolutionaries! The philistines don’t appreciate the gift that Google has handed down to them, Prometheus-like. Send them to be re-educated!
Seriously, this is so bombastic it’s hard to parody. Edwards has included a picture of George Armstrong Custer with the caption “Android’s last stand? Not yet.” Not really a great way to be on the right side of history.
One hesitates to write Android’s obituary, of course.
And believe Edwards, the editors at Business Insider don’t like hesitating to make ridiculous overstatements one bit. That’s not going to look good on his annual review.