Apple Board Member Caught Using A BlackBerry

Millard Drexler, member of the Apple Board of Directors and the CEO of J.Crew, was caught committing the most heinous of crimes: Using a BlackBerry. In public. In front of cameras. May God Have Mercy On His Soul.

In a revelation that is potentially something of a non-story, Drexler was spotted using a BlackBerry Bold 9900 during an interview about J.Crew operations. Naturtally, one might expect that a member of the Apple Board would be toting around the latest and greatest iPhone, but photos don’t lie (well, maybe that photo of Keanu Reeves does, but you get the idea).

It’s easy for those of us who look at an incident such as this and interpret it as meaning anything from a dumb mistake to outright betrayal (oh, the drama!), but for a Board Member (who is personally responsible if Apple loses money), it probably makes for bad PR, but not much worse. iMore downplays the impact but also asks important questions about the implications:

To be fair, Apple also had Eric Schmidt on their board of directors for a long time, and Schmidt was an Android BlackBerry user. Besides, the founder of mobile design company TAT, now RIM Sweden and one of the company’s biggest assets, is still using an iPhone. In any case, there are plenty of people on either board of directors from outside companies that are hardly beholden to remaining personally loyal to the brand.

Probably the biggest impact of this mutinous sighting is that some Apple Fanboys may pick up some torches and pitchforks, but we’re still looking at 200,000,000 iOS devices out in the wild. Apple can probably withstand this pinch of negative publicity, but I wouldn’t want to be Drexler next time he shows up at a board meeting.

Source: iMore

 

Corey has been been a tech journalist with a focus on Apple since 1998 and has written for The Loop, MacHome magazine, and as games contributor for The Mac Bible, and co-hosts the iGame Radio Podcast. He works as a corporate consultant and professional musician in Ottawa, Ontario.