Was Journalist A Jerk For Asking Apple About 'Intel Inside'?Was Journalist A Jerk For Asking Apple About 'Intel Inside'?

Sometimes stupid questions are important to ask.

As a consultant, I often find myself asking questions that, on their face, may seem stupid. That's because terminology varies so much in organizations. When I say, "What do you mean by branding?", it's not because I don't know what the word means, it's because I want to know what the client thinks it means.

It all kind of reminds me of Columbo. If you're too young to remember, it was a detective show where a bumbling detective catches the bad guy because everyone generally thinks he's too dim-witted to do his job. Keefe should hang a photo of Columbo in his office after his sticker question.

To the Apple faithful, sure, it was dumb. But a PR event is not for the faithful (that's Macworld), it's for the rest of the world. And to the world at large, it's not a dumb question at all. Why does Apple get a pass when every other PC manufacturer has those awful logos all over their products? And to a reporter doing a story on the Intel Inside program, getting Steve Jobs to comment on it is pure gold. You can bet it made some hearts at Intel skip a beat.

"What can I say? We like our own stickers better." (big laugh from the crowd) "Don't get me wrong - we love working with Intel. We're very proud to ship Intel products in Macs, they're screamers. And combined with our operating system, we've really tuned them well together, so we're very proud of that. It's just that everybody knows we're using Intel processors, and so I think putting a lot of stickers on the box is just redundant, and we'd rather tell customers about the product that's inside the box and they know it's got a great Intel processor in it.

Another person, whose voice I can't identify but who is presumably an Apple executive, adds:

"It's not just about 'Intel Inside.' When you buy any off-the-shelf PCs, the boxes are covered with confusing logos and messages and icons. If you open it up, there's stickers to peel off displays and keyboards. They're all over the place. And then you start it up and you find junk laying all over your desktop and in your menus ... trying to upsell you on [additional software]

"We try to give you a great product that you're going to love and you don't have to peel stuff off to make it look better."

"We put ourselves in the customer's shoes, and say 'What do we want stuck on our product when we take it out of the box, and the answer is - nothing.'"

Also, call me old-fashioned, but I am personally of the opinion that after a lengthy presentation, the most appropriate questions to ask of the presenters are ones that clarify information from that presentation. A few reporters asked questions about Apple TV and iPhone, and Jobs was very careful to point out that this was a Mac-related event and that he didn't want to spend time asking questions that weren't about the Mac.

Yes, access to Jobs is limited. So I can see why a reporter like Keefe would use the opportunity to ask Jobs a question and get a quote for a story he was working on. It's not something I think I would've done, because to me it's a selfish act that makes everyone in the room subservient to one writer's deadline and story idea.