The Apple brand has been resurgent in the last five years and is one of the most respected and recognised brands globally. This has a lot to do with the success of the little white MP3 player that could. In the intervening years, Apple has expanded its fiercely loyal fanbase as the halo effect from the iPod was translated into increases in the sale of the Mac line of personal computers.

The Apple brand is synonymous with design, elegance, superior experience and quality. It continued to raise the bar in consumer electronics and personal computing with exciting new product releases that blew its competition out of the water. These releases are usually announced to rapturous fanfare usually preceded by weeks of rumour mongering on the blogosphere. 

But the problem of late is that these products have been hampered by a series of product defects that one does not usually associate with the Apple brand. Quality seems to have taken a back seat and this is increasingly eroding the brand value that has been built up over the years. Two high profile examples of quality issues - the first generation iPod nano was found to be extremely prone to scratching and the first generation white Macbook was found to be prone to discolouration. Do you notice a trend ? "First generation ..". 

More recently, the online iPod community has been up in arms about the video quality of the recently released iPod touch. Early adopters of this revolutionary iPod found that dark videos and photos are rendered with a reverse video effect making it incredibly difficult to view. Gizmodo has a good photo illustrating this problem.  While this issue has received loud online complaints, few media outlets have picked this up. Though the word is slowly starting to spread with Walt Mossberg from the Wall Street Journal picking it up in his recent review of the iPod touch. The iPod fan site, iLounge , even went as far as to give the latest iPod a B- rating. 

In all the recent cases where the product defects have surfaced, Apple has been very slow to respond to these claims. It was typically after weeks of online chatter before Apple would grudgingly admit that manufacturing defects were the cause. Apple still has not publicly responded to the iPod touch video issue though it would appear that the latest batch of iPod touch (the so called "week 38" version) does not suffer from this problem.  Perhaps Apple has quietly addressed whatever the root cause was for this video issue. But that doesn't help the early adopters stuck with the defective units.

There are really two broad issues that Apple needs to address. Firstly, they need to reclaim excellence in quality control and manufacturing. Secondly, they need to manage the fallout a lot better. It is far better for Apple to transparently address concerns about quality than to leave the issue to fester on online discussion boards. There is really only so much that the adoring Apple fan base will put up before their brand value suffers. Just take a look at Sony's decline from their preminent position in consumer electronics. It was not too long ago that Sony was de rigueur for gadgets and consumer electronics. 

Apple has succeeded in capturing the imagination of the world, let's hope they don't screw that up with bad execution.  

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