As I wrote above, I did change my home page. In at least 5 years of Mac/Safari-use I have never bothered to change my home page before, even though I don't particularly care for seeing Apple advertising every time I open a new window. I'm just lazy that way. But having music (even beautiful music) play unbidden through my speakers every time I open a new window has forced me to make the change. Naturally (being lazy) I'm not going to change it back tomorrow, either.
And that's precisely the point I'm making: no matter how classy the video is, this is a minor mis-step for Apple, because I'm surely not the only one who will be annoyed enough to change my homepage.
And each person who changes their homepage as a result of this is one more person who won't see what Apple wants them to see every time they open up a browser window.
You know, I opened Safari this morning and, while I was startled by the music suddenly blasting through my speakers with no warning, I watched the video through to the end. It was nice, I enjoyed it.
But EVERY TIME I OPEN A NEW SAFARI WINDOW IT STARTS PLAYING AGAIN. Sound and everything. Couldn't they have set a cookie for "already watched"?
The annoyance this occasioned was the final push I needed to go into the preferences and reset my Safari home page from the default Apple page -- actually, I just chose to have new windows open empty -- but Apple has now lost the chance to advertise to me every time I open a new browser window.
Nonsense. About 85 million iPhones have been sold in the USA to date. $5.9 billion would be $70 in repair costs for each and every phone sold. In my experience, it costs about $50-$150 to repair a (reparable) iPhone, so this would suggest -- conservatively! -- that approximately one in every two phones is repaired. I call BS. They're probably counting replacements, many of which would happen anyway. For example, I didn't bother to fix a slightly cracked screen on my 3G, but simply waited until the 4 came out and upgraded then. This "study" would probably regard the entire price of the new iPhone 4 as the cost of the damage to the 3G, but of course I would have upgraded even if the 3G had been pristine.
And that's precisely the point I'm making: no matter how classy the video is, this is a minor mis-step for Apple, because I'm surely not the only one who will be annoyed enough to change my homepage.
And each person who changes their homepage as a result of this is one more person who won't see what Apple wants them to see every time they open up a browser window.