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When the subject of cool, innovative brands comes up, it’s a dead cert Apple gets a mention in the first five minutes. It’s iconic, makes beautiful products, and has a wow factor that most tech companies would give their eye teeth for. In short, it sets a benchmark. Granted, it’s been slated a bit recently for its draconian measures after one of its employees lost something in a bar, but it is almost solely responsible for tech becoming a sexy, must-have item. Each week, a new report shows that market share is up, or that its latest product is going to hit $1 billion in sales in record time–in short, that, one day soon, the world is going to wake up and there’s going to be an apple leaf poking out of the top of the North Pole.

YouGov’s BrandIndex shows that among 18- to 34-year-olds, the shine is beginning to come off the Apple brand. Since March 18, when it hit a high of 80.2 on the thumbs-upiness-ometer, it’s been slowly falling and is currently hovering around the 66% mark. The survey, which garners the opinions of 5,000 people per day.
It’s very hard to slam Apple on its hardware and software–both the iPod and iPhone–and iPad–were (and are) way ahead of their time. They had flaws–as does the first-gen version of its tablet computer–but they are incredible devices that have made Apple a household name. Five years ago, an Apple product launch would not have made the the front pages of either the online or dead-tree media. These days, every single news organization knows that anything to do with Cupertino gets page views.

But what’s getting people is their increasingly belligerent attitude to just about anything and everything that doesn’t toe the party line.
Once upon a time there was a company called the Apple Computer Co. It was small, perfectly formed, and it brought out what could only be called the first truly user-friendly personal computer.
Although more of a household name in the 21st century, Apple could never claim to have gone mass market–probably something that Steve Jobs has been itching for since the ’70s, but its cooler-than-thou niche never hurt its market share.Although the driving force behind the move from physical music–tapes, CDs, vinyl–to digital, thanks to Jon Ive’s baby, the iPod, it became a household name about three years ago, when it offered up the iPhone. And then something a bit weird happened. It still had the Mac-vs.-PC ads, portraying itself as the cute, normal, non-cubicle jockey one–a geek who could get the girl, if you like–but it also had this.