The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines hubris as “exaggerated pride or self confidence”. Dictionary.com defines it as “overbearing pride or presumption”. I’ve been thinking about this word more and more lately, applying to a company that I once loved (if it is possible to love a corporate entity) as I watch them make mistake after mistake. That company is Apple.

It may be hard to believe now, but way back in the last century, Apple Computer Inc was in danger of going out of business. They released one horrible product after another and found themselves in a downward tailspin, until they rehired one of their founders, Steve Jobs, and starting producing a series of powerful products beautiful in design and elegant in simplicity.

And then – ta-daa! – the iPod and iTunes. One piece of hardware, one piece of software, and everything changed.

As someone who travels a lot, I’ve always struggled with how to take as much music as possible with me on the road. And I’ve always been the first to try out anything portable related to music. The original cassette-playing Walkman was nice, but obviously cassettes were a nightmare. Portable CD players were good, except before every trip I would stand in front of my wall of CDs, trying to select just 20 from 5,000, a losing proposition every time. It was all so 20th century.

I think it was a nondescript Korean company that came out with the first portable MP3 player in around the year 2000 and called it the Personal Jukebox. It had a 5-gigabyte hard drive and a clunky interface and was the size of a hardcover book. And I bought it. It wasn’t great but it was a start.

In October, 2001, Apple released the first iPod. It only held five gigabytes and only worked with Apple computers. Two years later, Apple released iTunes for Windows, and sales of the iPod exploded. By the beginning of 2007, Apple had sold 100 million iPods. iPod sales represented 32% of Apple’s gross revenues and the iTunes store became the biggest distributor of digital music in the world. And it was clear that sales of iPods were driving increased sales of Apple computers as well. Overall, Apple’s marketing put them in a position of being perceived as the good guys locked in an eternal struggle with the forces of darkness, aka Microsoft.

Let’s step back for a minute and look at another company that used to drive innovation in the area of consumer electronics – Sony. They were the first with both the cassette and CD Walkman, yet they’ve been all but shut out when it comes to MP3 players – all their attempts to break into that space have been miserable failures. Why? The simple answer is they bought Columbia Records and all their consumer electronics releases were focused around Digital Rights Management (DRM). ATRACS? Sounds a lot like 8 track and you know how successful that was. They released products that made the executives at Columbia happy but did nothing to address consumers’ needs.

Now, back to Apple. It is 2007. After years of rumours of an iPod phone, after a misbegotten beast from Motorola best forgotten, we were given the iPhone. Again, the design is gorgeous: look at it and you have to have it. Apple is great at design and great at marketing. Initially it was only available with a contract from AT&T in the United States and people in Hong Kong have been paying up to $16,000 to get their hands on one. (The price has now dropped to around the $5,000 range.)

But here’s the thing. The iPhone is a closed box. There’s no expandable storage and no way to install additional applications. It is meant to be an internet appliance: you need to do something, you go find a suitable app on the net that does it. So why did Apple lock in an exclusive arrangement with AT&T, the mobile company that has the worst internet connections of any mobile service in the US? It turns out that Apple is getting 40% of subscriber revenues from AT&T, a groundbreaking deal (at least to my knowledge) that proves Apple doesn’t really care about how much you like using the hardware they have sold you. Shockingly, it turns out they are just another corporation, primarily concerned with how much revenue they are making.

The $200 price drop on the iPhone within two months of its release is another indicator. You can’t tell me Apple was taken by surprise by the howls of protest from the hundreds of thousands who had bought an iPhone in the previous days and weeks at the higher price, yet it was only after an uproar in the media and on the internet that they begrudgingly offered a $100 store credit.

But for me, the most cynical move on their part concerns ring tones. On my last five phones, I’ve been able to take any song off any CD I own and turn it into a ring tone. You can’t do this with an iPhone. You’re going to have to spend 99 cents to buy a song on iTunes and then another 99 cents to convert that song into a ring tone. And forget the workarounds and hacks that users came up with to circumvent this. Apple is releasing new versions of iTunes almost daily to defeat those hacks. Like Sony, they’ve become more interested in protecting other corporations than their user community.

Although the iPhone is a thing of beauty, I’m not buying one, even though I could easily pick one up in Wanchai or Mong Kok now. Aside from the fact that I need a 3G phone (because I travel frequently to Japan and Korea) and that eight gigabytes isn’t anywhere near enough storage for the music I need when I travel, I’m not going to spend that kind of money for something that might turn into a shiny brick on the next release of iTunes.

Now, let’s look at the iPod Touch. By the time this column appears, the Touch will be in stores and, I confess, I’ll have one. I’m just as much a sucker for good marketing as anyone else. Yet one has to wonder what they were thinking when they came up with this. Apple certainly had to know what product consumers wanted; there were certainly enough blog posts and Photoshopped mock-ups on the net to tell them. Most people were basically asking for an 80-gig iPod with a wide screen. I never saw anyone say, “What I really want is the iPhone without the phone or the camera, with limited storage and a worse screen.” I never saw anyone write, “What I need is a PDA that won’t allow me to do the most basic functions like update contacts or schedules when I’m away from my desk.” But that is what we are getting.

Which brings us back to ‘hubris’. Apple has gone from the little guy to the 800-pound gorilla. And that means they now think they can do whatever they want, consumer be damned. That’s the classic definition of hubris, isn’t it? But if history is anything to go by, it also means they’ve opened the door for some company no one ever heard of to come along and eat their lunch. And since I don’t own any stock in Apple, there ain’t gonna be any tears in my beer when it happens.