Being a market leader certainly has its ups and downs. There’s a level of scrutiny, a public expectation of quality and responsiveness, that market “underdogs” are not subjected to near as much as the “top dogs”. However, once you ascend past market leader to monopoly status, you can pretty much throw anything out there and the sheer inertia of the hegemony carries you through the murkiest of waters.

Apple’s computer market share has been very low (but making progress upwards) for some time, and Apple certainly enjoys the fruits of their underdog status when it comes to the complete lack of viruses and other forms of malware infecting and affecting their Mac OS X operating system.

By the way, let’s be perfectly clear. You may read articles in tech and consumer magazines mentioning that Mac OS X is “mostly” or “relatively” virus-free. Last time I looked, “mostly” means “almost entirely” or “on most occasions”. Let’s not mince words. Zero viruses, spyware, adware, Trojans, or worms affecting Mac OS X. Zero is not “relatively” small compared to Symantec’s (the Windows antivirus software maker) reported 10, 866 new Windows worm and virus variants in the first half of 2005. It’s zero.

On the iPod side of the house, however, where Apple enjoys an almost-Microsoft-like stranglehold on the personal digital music player market, they don’t enjoy underdog anonymity. This last week reports of flaws in the tiny color screen on Apple’s new iPod nano started to surface. Others reported that the screen (and other parts of the iPod nano) scratched easily. One internet tech pundit even referred to the nano as Apple’s next Cube, which had an industrial design way ahead of its time, but suffered from high pricing and reports of cracks in its translucent case.

Anyway, this week Apple issued a statement that described the problem as, “a real but minor issue involving a vendor quality problem in a small number of units… it is not a design issue”. Apple went on to say, “this issue has affected less than one tenth of one percent of the total iPod nano units that we’ve shipped”. Although there are no published sales numbers, if you look at the iPod sales numbers from last quarter (2 million units), you could extrapolate that to be 2000 out of 2 million units.

Next time we’ll discuss how to protect your iPod, and learn what happens when you drop it out the window of a speeding car!

© 2005 Peter F. Zimowski