Inside Apple and Steve Jobs’ awkward relationship with Latin America
After Steve Jobs’ passing, Apple’s relationship with Latin America remains a complicated tale of unilateral love. (Getty Images)
By SANDRO MAIRATA
Channel: Media
The passing of Steve Jobs last week created a global stir, resonating perhaps most loudly on social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Orkut. Mourners the world over shared their thoughts and feelings about Apple’s founder and driving imaginative force, further solidifying his status as one of the most important technological minds of the past century. However, although Jobs’ death was likewise mourned throughout the region, Apple’s relationship with Latin America remains a complicated tale of unilateral love.
Apple-lovers in Latin American countries may be as loyal as those in, say, Palo Alto, but so far Apple has shown a minimal amount of interest in going any further than operating its company like a franchise similar to MacDonald’s, where any local businessman applies for one, it gets the green-light, and it’s good to go.
“Apple created markets, not only products,” said Erick Iriarte Ahón, one of the earliest Internet advocates in Peru, now specializing in digital law. “It makes perfect sense that they kept their business that way, but many would have expected to see a more relevant presence in our region,” he told Univision News in an interview.
Not everyone has had such a forgiving outlook on the situation. “For Apple, Latin America doesn’t exist,” Leo Prieto, the Chilean founder of Betazeta Networks, Aardvark Labs, and ImageMaker, told Univision News. “We lack the full features of iTunes, for starters. They find it easy to handle Europe as a cohesive market bound by the Euro, than to deal with the differences and specific challenges of our countries. That’s why the rest of the world moves forward with Apple and we remain last in line.”
Prieto became something of a celebrity within the techie community in 2004 when he received a personal response from Steve Jobs to his complaint about the similarities between the Dashboard feature in the Tiger operating system, and another program called Konfabulator. (“Excuse me,” read the brief email from Jobs, “but Mac OS 9 had desktop Widgets long before Konfabulator did. Apple was the first to use the term Widgets as well. We never complained when the Konfabulator guys ‘ripped off Apple’ and I think it’s a bit unfair for them to be claiming we ripped them off now. Steve”)
Back in 2007, Prieto received a rare interview with Carlos De Vries, the former CEO of Apple Latin America, after complaining – again – in his blog FayerWarer.com (one of the most popular Spanish-speaking blogs in the world) about Apple’s supposed disregard for Latin America. With Mexico and Brazil as exceptions, Apple has no physical corporate presence in Central America, South America, or the Caribbean. De Vries - now currently working for Microsoft - was something of an anonymous figure to most Apple users for many years, handling all operations from Miami through a well-established network of business managers, local distributors, and resellers. In the interview with Prieto, De Vries acknowledged the limits of only having corporate offices in Mexico and Brazil, and promised, “as we’ll grow, we’ll expand.”
Clearly things never turned out that way.
What’s more, Apple doesn’t even have a single corporate spokesperson for Latin America. Univision News contacted Apple’s headquarters in California but the public relations officer for Latin America, Christina Caballero, referred us to external consultants to speak about the company.
“We do not have any spokespeople in the markets that can speak to press,” the PR officer wrote in an email.
One of these external spokesmen is Mauricio Jaramillo, editor of Enter.co, an influential Colombia-based digital news service. Jaramillo, an Apple user since 1989, has covered Apple for many years, and is amused by Univision News’ surprise as to Apple’s lack of presence and representation in Latin America.
“Apple has a very different culture,” he said. “No current Apple employee talks. Now that Steve Jobs has passed away, not even former employees dare to talk without permission.” (A video version of the interview De Vries gave to Prieto was pulled off the Internet after De Vries allegedly received direct orders from Apple headquarters to do so.)
For the 2011 third economic quarter, Apple’s revenue has been disclosed as $10.126 million in the Americas, with no further details. “We do not provide sales figures by country, we actually release our sales figures by region,” the PR officer wrote.
“In Latin America all we have is resellers, not real Apple Stores,” said Juan Carlos Luján, a Peruvian veteran in computing journalism. “There’s only one so-called ‘iStore’ for all of Peru, which mimics the look and feel of an Apple Store, but it’s not even recognized as such on Apple’s web site. It’s only a reseller.”
In August, it was discovered that 22 “fake Apple Stores” operated in the Chinese city of Kunming.
“The only difference in Latin America between [the Kunming situation] and our reality is that those guys go to the extreme of selling their own Chinese iPod clones,” said Chris van der Henst, founder and director of a Hispanic online community called MaestrosWeb. Van der Henst says if Apple treated us any better, “we wouldn’t be so in love with them.”
One of the main selling points for die-hard Apple fans is the “universal warranty” provided by the company. This is said to cover any repairs, no matter where you bought your Apple product, even if you bought it from a reseller.
“People don’t know it only applies to MacBooks,” said Van der Henst. “If your iPod gets broken, you may get a new one, but no one will fix it for you.”
“You buy an Apple product, you buy status,” said Iriarte. This status comes at quite a cost though. Frequently, Apple products in Latin America do not include full features in the iTunes Store, and the 3G-system depends on each local carrier’s capabilities. What’s more, in some markets users may end up paying an additional 5%-7% surcharge for each unit due to import taxes and other fees. Hugo Morales, the Chilean editor-in-chief of Wayerless.com points out that Siri, the vocal-recognition feature on the new iPhone 4GS, doesn’t have a Spanish version.
No matter how mistreated all the experts and fans interviewed for this article may feel, they nevertheless remain devoted to the Apple brand and to Steve Jobs, the driving force behind it.
“I think the secret behind the devotion of the Apple fanatics and Apple evangelists, is that these products always fulfilled what they promised,” said Jaramillo. “That’s basically the key to it.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: The article, as originally published, erroneously stated that Carlos De Vries was still the CEO of Apple Latin America. He is actually now working with Microsoft. Thank you to @jirah for pointing that out.
