I’ve heard countless complaints over the past week about iOS6 and the new iPhone.  The main things that stick out are the complaints over the lighting connector and their related shortages as well as the big one, Apple Maps.

Apple has received some heat due to shortages on iPhone supply as well as the delay on the lightning converter that allows you to use your new iPhone 5 with existing accessories.  Under Jobs reign, this likely wouldn’t have happened because Jobs never pandered to shareholders and he wouldn’t have released the iPhone 5 for another month when everything was ready.  Looking back a year, Apple released their iPhone 4s on October 14th 2011 which means they missed out on Q3 sales of the iPhone unlike previous years.  Because the 4s was launched in Q4, analysts and investors roasted the stock making it drop a whopping 10% after Q3’s earnings announcement.  Fast forward to this year, the iPhone 5 was released three weeks earlier than the previous year giving Apple a solid week of iPhone sales to inflate Q3’s numbers and appease Wall Street.  This is leadership under the Cook era.  It’s not worse(especially for me as a shareholder), it’s just a different way of doing business.

As for the complains related to Apple Maps; Apple didn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars buying three mapping companies over a three year period to give you a bad experience.  As you may know, this is the five year anniversary of the iPhone and in iOS6 both YouTube and Google Maps have disappeared.  The casual observer might say that Apple is being selfish.  Look at it a different way and perhaps a five-year contract ran out and Google and Apple were unable to come to an agreement moving forward.  Google Maps has had turn by turn directions on Android for years, but Google has denied iOS users this feature.  The new YouTube app built by Google now comes chock full of ads, something Apple was likely uninterested to include into the native YouTube app.  Why should Google make money on an Apple built app on the Apple platform?  As for the quality of the maps itself, I’ve had no trouble.  Most of the people I know that have used the new maps prefer it to Google’s, but perhaps the silent majority is being drowned out by those that tweet every single negative emotion.

Users are aggressively focusing on the negatives while ignoring the fact that the new iPhone has proved almost indestructible in countless drop tests vs its counterparts.  Yet again, mob mentality takes over and shines a magnifying glass on the bad while ignoring the good.