Is Apple Boring?

“Steve Jobs’ death is soooooo last year.”

Are people saying that? Has the unthinkable happened, where iPhones, Barack Obama, and New Mexican ponchos aren’t cool among the college crowd anymore? We can barely remember Apartheid, so why should we waste our time with these ridiculous trends?

Business is a cycle, and legends fall and come and go and come again (hence, Jobs), but is Apple really boring?

Has it become not cool? Is it lame? (How many other 15-year-old Mean Girl-isms can I rattle off?)

Ben Woods of ZDNET certainly thinks it’s a possibility. After all, you’re hearing more from Android phones and Google than you are Apple right now. The iPhone is like a passing fad, a sign of artistic commercialism – but, commercialism, nonetheless.

Of course, we can’t take Woods that seriously. As he admits, he’s never bought an Apple product. Doesn’t own one. Couldn’t care. That puts him into that odd group of people who, for whatever reason, brag about how they didn’t fall into the trap of certain trends or cliches.

Apple. LaCoste. Starbucks. Obama. Twitter. Or, wait, that one’s sticking around, isn’t it? Better get an account and sign up for Buzzword 101 at your local community college!

Listen, we get it. Companies all suffer the same fate, or the same rise. The same fall. Same death. Same afterlife. Or, same success.

Woods’s article is more about Apple’s products, and how none of them have wowed us in a while. Man, we’ve come a long way since Stephen Colbert was teasing Jay Z for not having one of those iPad do-hickeys.

But, the source to Apple’s coolness may not be its products. The source to Apple’s coolness is whether or not it can remain Apple. Microsoft was always for nerds and businessmen. Apple’s advantage was that it was the alternative, like WestJet or Menchies. It was cooler. The not-dominant one.

But, now that Apple has taken over, is it still cool? Is it still alternative? Is it boring? (There’s two yes’s and a no in there.)

The main question is: Has Apple un-Appled itself?