Steve Jobs Versus Chelsea Isaacs

The Long Island University received a decent educational discount on a load of iPads. One of its journalism students had three questions for Apple regarding the purchase so that she could finish her assignment. The three questions have yet to be revealed; but what has been revealed all over the web is that Chelsea Isaacs felt entitled to no less than Apple’s help in writing her little paper. Of course, she received no response from Apple media relations. This should come as no surprise to a journalism student who should know that there are far bigger players than Little Miss Isaacs who meet with the same silence. On the eleventh-hour of her deadline she decided to email Steve, knowing full well, by Steve’s reputation, that if he replied, it would be both terse and newsworthy - and it was: “Our goals do not include helping you get a good grade. Sorry.” Then later, “Please leave us alone.”[1] It was probably not the smartest thing for Steve to type out to a proto-celebrity like Chelsea.

Within twenty-four hours, her pouting pretty face was all over the news. She got her fifteen minutes (perhaps it was less) on ABC's Good Morning America Young Chelsea played the victim in front of the cameras, with a generous helping of purring and cleavage.[2] Then her career really took off. With the help of her buddy and his camera, she did a YouTube video on an iRobot press event in New York. She received a warm welcome from the hall packed with geeks who enjoyed her adorably clueless purring questions, her high boots, and her other assets. Her piece de resistance occurred when Chelsea mispronounced iRobot CEO Colin Angle’s name. She pronounced ‘Colin’ like ‘colon’.  Microsoft invited her to the Windows 7 launch in New York under the pretence that she had “won” the opportunity through a competition.  At the event, Chelsea declared that she is “still going to look at things objectively... I have very strict values." She sounds just like a real grown-up journalist. In the next breath, she fumbled the ethical ball, "I wouldn't be comfortable giving [Apple] a dime."[3] She was seen at the event using her Macbook.

TechCrunch did a background check and found she had written a glowing review of herself on Wikibin – a website where Wikipedia entries go to die: “The most desirable hand model in the United States and Canada” – thirteen years ago "...an electric presence with an extremely evolved sense of the human psyche... a Renaissance Woman". After TechCrunch found the Wikibin listing, the entry attracted thirty very creative derisory comments, including this gem:

Chelsea,

We here at Yapple computers in California can't stand yammering yentas. My public relations people are all too busy watching the company stock price to actually do any work. Those who aren't watching the the stock price, eyes fixed to monitor, are out buying BMW's, Botox, boob jobs, or contimplating giving money to poor mexican villages in the hopes that only the good ones come to California to work for less than minimum wage cutting lawns and cleaning thier homes. [4]


So please Chelsea (or Yammering Yenta), leave us alone....

Steve

To celebrate her entitled stardom, Chelsea did so much clubbing that she scored a job writing a nightlife column for newyork.com. Early one bleary morning, a hung-over Chelsea uploaded a video diary entry to her Facebook account. She flirts with her imagined geek fans, plays with her hair, and lectures about society and ethics. "People are taught that they are smaller than The Man… you should feel entitled to getting what you want," she slurs wantonly.

Chelsea can’t complain too loudly considering she still got a B/B+ on her paper.

Why dedicate so much page space with this flake? There is a need to illustrate that Steve’s customers are a reflection of his own entitled misbehaviour. The spoilt and deluded customer culture of Apple is a mirror of the brat who resides in the company’s head office.

No other CEO is so personally engaged in the building of his company’s product. He has laid out some lovely toys in the market for us. Steve doesn’t hold a gun to our head and make us pay the inflated price tag. There are always cheaper, and sometimes better, options for us to choose if we don’t want to pay for the apple mystique; but people line up to buy Apple anyway. Their hope is that these products will somehow enrich their lives and social standing. The downside to customers putting a company on a pedestal is that it’s a long way to fall when the customer turns on you. For example,

The MacBook Air received a mixed response after some fans — who were hoping for a touchscreen-enabled tablet PC — deemed the slim-but-pricey subnotebook insufficiently revolutionary. Fans have a nickname for the aftermath of a disappointing event: post-Macworld depression.[5]

Just as Steve switches opinion of his acolytes from zero to hero and back again, so too do his customers swing in their regard of him. Some of these customers are entitled brats who love to abuse the free press for their own gain.

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[1] Walsh, S. (2010, September 29) Steve Jobs' 'frenemy' strikes back. CNN Tech. Retrieved from http://articles.cnn.com/2010-09-29/tech/steve.jobs.frenemy_1_e-mail-address-customer-tech-media?_s=PM:TECH

[2] abcnews.go.com. (2010, September 21) Steve Jobs to Student: 'Leave Us Alone' [Video file]. Retrieved from http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/steve-jobs-student-chelsea-isaacs-leave-us-alone-11688144)

[3] Fried, I (2010, October 13) Student in Jobs spat sours on Apple, not journalism. [Blog]. From Beyond Binary. cnet.com. Retrieved from http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20019467-56.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=statusnet

[4] Wikibin (2010) Chelsea Isaacs. Retrieved from http://wikibin.org/articles/chelsea-isaacs.html

[5] Kahney, L. (2008, March 18) How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong. Wired Magazine.