Here’s a great story of Jami getting her bike stolen last night in Brooklyn. Wait, why is that great? Because, thanks to some internet sleuthing, a lot of luck (!!!), and solid police work from Brooklyn’s finest, she had it back by 11:30 this morning!
While we’re on the subject of bikes, according to a recently filed patent, Apple is looking at making a smart bike. I look to the future and I see 1) Consternation that Apple has signed an exclusive agreement to release the bike on Trek frames only for a period of 3, 4, or 5 years depending on which rumor you believe. 2) Several media stories crediting Apple for popularizing the riding of bikes. 3) Several media stories criticizing Apple for claiming they popularized the riding of bikes, even if they didn’t.make that claim, 4) Much rejoicing 3 weeks after release of the bike when someone has figure d out how to jail break the phone into a fixed gear. 5) 250 posts from John Gruber refudiating predictions of iBike failure. I look forward to all of it.
Lastly, on the topic of bikes. My friend Chris Piascik is drawing all the bikes he’s ever owned. This wouldn’t be a big deal for most people, Chris, however, has owned a gazillion bikes. The drawings are accompanied by vignettes on the bikes and I think the project will end up being more of a memoir than Chris originally anticipated. (Disclosure: If I had to name a favorite artist, it’d probably be Chris, and I post his art often on UW.)
1. a creation myth highlighting the counter-cultural origin and emergence of the Apple Mac as a transformative moment; 2. a hero myth presenting the Mac and its founder Jobs as saving its users from the corporate domination of the PC world; 3. a satanic myth that presents Bill Gates as the enemy of Mac loyalists; 4. and, finally, a resurrection myth of Jobs returning to save the failing company…
On Twitter, Tim Carmody adds that Apple’s problems are increasingly theological in nature — “Free will, problem of evil, Satanic rebellion” — which is a really interesting way to look at the whole thing. (John Gruber the Baptist?)
** The Antennagate being, of course, the hotel where Apple Inc. is headquartered.
If the Mac was so great, why did it lose? Cost, again Microsoft concentrated on the software business and unleashed a swarm of cheap component suppliers on Apple hardware. It did not help either that suits took over during a critical period. (And it hasn’t lost yet. If Apple were to grow the iPod into a cell phone with a web browser, Microsoft would be in big trouble.)
Then again, a few footnotes later Graham writes:
I would not even use Javascript, if I were you; Viaweb didn’t. Most of the Javascript I see on the Web isn’t necessary, and much of it breaks. And when you start to be able to browse actual web pages on your cell phone or PDA (or toaster), who knows if they’ll even support it.
Apple is holding a press conference today, which will presumably address the antenna problems that few actual customers seem to be having on the still-selling-like-hotcakes iPhone 4. I have a number of sources at Apple and based on my conversations with them, here’s my prediction on how today’s event will play out:
Steve Jobs will come out on stage and will sit in front of a large olde tyme cash register. He will immediately begin taking questions from the assembled journalists and bloggers. As the first-question scrum begins, Jobs will start madly ringing up purchases on the very loud register while pointing to his ears, shaking his head, and shouting “gosh, I’m sorry I can’t hear you guys over the sound of the register”. This will continue for several minutes and then the press conference will be over.
Someone on Apple’s board suggested a more conventional press event but Jobs quickly wrote an email back saying that they were not going to “hold it that way”.
I have to think (and experiment) every single time I want to decipher one of these keyboard “shortcuts”. Why is it that only the command key (⌘) actually has the symbol printed on the key itself? And what’s up with the symbol for the option key (⌥)?
Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy takes on Steve Jobs’ claim that iPhone 4’s pixels are too small for the human eye to see individually. I have confidence in Plait’s conclusions:
I know a thing or two about resolution as well, having spent a few years calibrating a camera on board Hubble.
He may as well have pulled Marshall McLuhan out from behind a movie poster.
The recently announced iPhone 4 includes a feature called FaceTime; it’s wifi videophone functionality. In Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace wrote that within the reality of the book, videophones enjoyed enormous initial popularity but then after a few months, most people gave it up. Why the switch back to voice?
The answer, in a kind of trivalent nutshell, is: (1) emotional stress, (2) physical vanity, and (3) a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech.
First, the stress:
Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural-only conversation […] let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi-attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine-groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone-pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign-language-and-exaggerated-facial-expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided.
[…] Video telephony rendered the fantasy insupportable. Callers now found they had to compose the same sort of earnest, slightly overintense listener’s expression they had to compose for in-person exchanges. Those caller who out of unconscious habit succumbed to fuguelike doodling or pants-crease-adjustment now came off looking extra rude, absentminded, or childishly self-absorbed. Callers who even more unconsciously blemish-scanned or nostril explored looked up to find horrified expressions on the video-faces at the other end. All of which resulted in videophonic stress.
And then vanity:
And the videophonic stress was even worse if you were at all vain. I.e. if you worried at all about how you looked. As in to other people. Which all kidding aside who doesn’t. Good old aural telephone calls could be fielded without makeup, toupee, surgical prostheses, etc. Even without clothes, if that sort of thing rattled your saber. But for the image-conscious, there was of course no answer-as-you-are informality about visual-video telephone calls, which consumers began to see were less like having the good old phone ring than having the doorbell ring and having to throw on clothes and attach prostheses and do hair-checks in the foyer mirror before answering the door.
Those are only excerpts…you can read more on pp. 144-151 of Infinite Jest. Eventually, in the world of the book, people began wearing “form-fitting polybutylene masks” when talking on the videophone before even that became too much.
At 1pm ET, Steve Jobs is scheduled to take the stage at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference and announce some new stuff. Rumored so far: iPhone 4.0, some kind of magic trackpad, Safari 5, and a new version of AppleTV.
Last week, Mike Davidson put up a post about Apple discussing the idea that having a ruthless company making great products is a good problem to have (compared to a ruthless company making so-so products). It got picked up by DF, but I flagged it in my RSS because of a section close to the bottom. I haven’t seen this theory about Apple discussed before.
What’s the best way to avoid becoming a monopoly? Make sure you never get close to 100% market share. What’s the best way to temper your market share? Keep prices a bit higher than you could. Keep supply a bit lower than you could. Keep investing in high margin differentiation and not low margin ubiquity…They are fighting hard right now to make sure they are one of the two or three that will continue to be relevant in 5-10 years, but their goal is clearly not to be at 100% or even 90%…It’s scary to people because they remember the harm other companies have done when they reached monopoly status, but with Google, Microsoft, Nokia, RIMM, and now HP all keeping the market healthy with different alternatives, there is no excuse for not voting with your feet if you’re unhappy. Apple’s not going to take over the world because — if for no other reason — the laws of the United States won’t let them.
Until we see that the iPhone is as thoroughly entangled into a network of landscapes as any more obviously geological infrastructure (the highway, both imposing carefully limited slopes across every topography it encounters and grinding/crushing/re-laying igneous material onto those slopes) or industrial product (the car, fueled by condensed and liquefied geology), we will consistently misunderstand it.
A letter from Steve Jobs about why they don’t allow Flash on iPhones, iPods, and iPads. (Notice he specifically uses the harsher “allow” instead of the much softer “support”.)
Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript — all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
Jobs sort of circles around the main issue which is, from my own perspective as heavy web user and web developer: though Flash may have been necessary in the past to provide functionality in the browser that wasn’t possible using JS, HTML, and CSS, that is no longer the case. Those open web technologies have matured (or will in the near future) and can do most or even all of what is possible with Flash. For 95% of all cases, Flash is, or will soon be, obsolete because there is a better way to do it that’s more accessible, more open, and more “web-like”.
After posting the Apple stock purchase vs. Apple product purchase thing this afternoon, I thought, hey, Microsoft’s stock went up a bunch after Windows 95 came out so I’ll figure out how much the software’s purchase price would be worth in Microsoft stock today. The answer was not very exciting as you can see from this graph courtesy of Google Finance:
Since the Windows 95 launch, Microsoft’s stock has only (only!) quadrupled in value while Apple’s stock has increased by more than 24 times. 24 times! That kind of growth is remarkable for a company that had already been public for 15 years and, everyone assumed, had already been through their boom time. Of course, what goes up can easily come down…
I stuck Google in there for good measure. It doesn’t show as much growth as you’d think because GOOG’s IPO-day closing price made it a very large company from the start…the chart hides Google’s pre-IPO growth in value. But still, look at how much Apple’s stock price has grown in comparison to Google’s since the latter’s IPO. (For fun, add Yahoo into the mix and dial the graph back to 1996.)
In 2001, a PowerBook G4 would have set you back $3500. Suppose instead that you had purchased $3500 in Apple stock instead of the computer…that stock would now be worth about $110,000. Even an original iPod’s worth in AAPL ($399) would be worth almost $12,000 today.
Writing for the New Yorker, Ken Auletta surveys the ebook landscape: it’s Apple, Amazon, Google, and the book publishers engaged in a poker game for the hearts, minds, and wallets of book buyers. Kindle editions of books are selling well:
There are now an estimated three million Kindles in use, and Amazon lists more than four hundred and fifty thousand e-books. If the same book is available in paper and paperless form, Amazon says, forty per cent of its customers order the electronic version. Russ Grandinetti, the Amazon vice-president, says the Kindle has boosted book sales over all. “On average,” he says, Kindle users “buy 3.1 times as many books as they did twelve months ago.”
Many compare ebook-selling to what iTunes was able to do with music albums. But Auletta notes:
The analogy of the music business goes only so far. What iTunes did was to replace the CD as the basic unit of commerce; rather than being forced to buy an entire album to get the song you really wanted, you could buy just the single track. But no one, with the possible exception of students, will want to buy a single chapter of most books.
I’ve touched on this before, but while people may not want to buy single chapters of books, they do want to read things that aren’t book length. I think we’ll see more literature in the novella/short-story/long magazine article range as publishers and authors attempt to fill that gap.
Lorem iPad dolor sit amet, consectetur Apple adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua Shenzhen. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud no multi-tasking ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip iPad ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor iPad in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse CEO Steve Jobs dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Windows 7 ha ha ha. Excepteur sint occaecat battery life non proident, iPad in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Morbi erat justo, magical in semper posuere Jony Ive, molestie eget ipsum. Praesent eget erat no camera. Apple a erat sit amet ante pretium just a big iPod touch bibendum a at magna. Suspendisse Flash, sem sed tempor gravida, dolor mi auctor HTML5, vel feugiat justo metus nec diam. Maecenas quis iPad volutpat augue.
You know, by people who have actually used the thing for more than 5 minutes at a press event. Walt Mossberg from WSJ:
It’s qualitatively different, a whole new type of computer that, through a simple interface, can run more-sophisticated, PC-like software than a phone does, and whose large screen allows much more functionality when compared with a phone’s. But, because the iPad is a new type of computer, you have to feel it, to use it, to fully understand it and decide if it is for you, or whether, say, a netbook might do better.
The simple act of making the multitouch screen bigger changes the whole experience. Maps become real maps, like the paper ones. You see your e-mail inbox and the open message simultaneously. Driving simulators fill more of your field of view, closer to a windshield than a keyhole.
Also from Pogue, an interesting tidbit on how you buy access for the iPad through AT&T:
But how’s this for a rare deal from a cell company: there’s no contract. By tapping a button in Settings, you can order up a month of unlimited cellular Internet service for $30. Or pay $15 for 250 megabytes of Internet data; when it runs out, you can either buy another 250 megs, or just upgrade to the unlimited plan for the month. Either way, you can cancel and rejoin as often as you want — just March, July and November, for example — without penalty. The other carriers are probably cursing AT&T’s name for setting this precedent.
The most compelling sign that Apple got this right is the fact that despite the novelty of the iPad, the excitement slips away after about ten seconds and you’re completely focused on the task at hand … whether it’s reading a book, writing a report, or working on clearing your Inbox. Second most compelling: in situation after situation, I find that the iPad is the best computer in my household and office menagerie. It’s not a replacement for my notebook, mind you. It feels more as if the iPad is filling a gap that’s existed for quite some time.
The first iPad is a winner. It stacks up as a formidable electronic-reader rival for Amazon’s Kindle. It gives portable game machines from Nintendo and Sony a run for their money.
Maybe the most exciting thing about iPad is the apps that aren’t here yet. The book-film-game hybrid someone will bust out in a year, redefining the experience of each, and suggesting some new nouns and verbs in the process. Or an augmented reality lens from NASA that lets you hold the thing up to the sky and pinpoint where the ISS is, next to what constellation, read the names and see the faces of the crew members, check how those fuel cells are holding up.
I like it a lot. But it’s the things I never knew it made possible — to be revealed or not in the coming months — that will determine whether I love it.
The iPad does perform tasks — it runs apps and has the calendar, e-mail, Web browsing, office productivity, audio, video and gaming capabilities you would expect of any such device — yet when I eventually got my hands on one, I discovered that one doesn’t relate to it as a “tool”; the experience is closer to one’s relationship with a person or an animal.
Companies who target the middle of the market (Sony, Dell, General Motors) are losing customers to companies like Apple & Hermes at the high end and Ikea & H&M at the low end. From James Surowiecki:
The products made by midrange companies are neither exceptional enough to justify premium prices nor cheap enough to win over value-conscious consumers. Furthermore, the squeeze is getting tighter every day. Thanks to economies of scale, products that start out mediocre often get better without getting much more expensive — the newest Flip, for instance, shoots in high-def and has four times as much memory as the original — so consumers can trade down without a significant drop in quality. Conversely, economies of scale also allow makers of high-end products to reduce prices without skimping on quality. A top-of-the-line iPod now features video and four times as much storage as it did six years ago, but costs a hundred and fifty dollars less. At the same time, the global market has become so huge that you can occupy a high-end niche and still sell a lot of units. Apple has just 2.2 per cent of the world cell-phone market, but that means it sold twenty-five million iPhones last year.
I straight-up loved this movie. It’s a fascinating look at the creative process of a team with strong leadership operating at a very high level. The trailer is pretty misleading in this respect…the main story in the film has little to do with fashion and should be instantly recognizable to anyone who has ever worked with a bunch of people on a project. Others have made the comparison of Anna Wintour with Steve Jobs and it seems apt. At several points in the film, my thoughts drifted to Jobs and Apple; Wintour seems like the same sort of creative leader as Jobs.
The pessimistic dig on Apple, says Gruber, is that it’s a supremely well-organized company organized around one irreplaceable guy. The optimistic view is that Jobs has structured it to run like his other company, Pixar, which manages to turn out hit after hit, year after year, without a charismatic celebrity leader.
David Heinemeier Hansson has some thoughts on “quality control without the quality part” nature of Apple’s App Store.
In fact, lots of software has lower quality because of the App Store process. Developers can’t easily get bug fixes out and they certainly don’t release new versions as often as they otherwise would. This harks back to the era where software was really cumbersome to release on CDs, so you did it much less frequently.
If you don’t like the prices in Apple’s iBook Store, just use Amazon’s Kindle app on the iPad.
No 3G? No contracts? (Might be saving this for last/later.)
I’m looking on the photos of this thing and there doesn’t seem to be a camera, video or otherwise.
The iPad appears to be a device that you use sitting down. Can you type on it while holding it standing up?
Ok, there’s 3G. $15/mo for 250 MB of data. $30/mo for “unlimited”.
iPad is unlocked. International SIM cards “will just work”.
Price: $500. Boom. That’s for the low-end model with no 3G.
Ooh, keyboard dock. If they could outfit that with a hinge and some sort of latching device, I wonder what that kind of thing would look like? (Will the keyboard work with the iPhone — er, iPad nano — as well?)
Will there be an iBook Reader/Store app for the iPhone?
Oh, from earlier: Jobs repositioned Apple as a “mobile devices company”.
Right at the end, Jobs showed a street sign marking the intersection of “Technology” and “Liberal Arts”. I guess that means that kottke.org is now in direct competition with Apple, Inc. YOU’RE GOING DOWN, STEVE!
The iPad makes the Kindle look like it’s from the 1980s.
Amazon’s stock price is up…it dipped a bit when the iPad’s price was announced but recovered shortly after. I have heard more than a few people say that the Kindle is “dead”. But one minus in the iPad column is that readability in the outdoors is not going to be so good…the iPhone in the sunshine might as well be a stone for how useful it is.
If you watch the video on Apple’s site, there are now (at least) three different keyboard interactions people need to know to use Apple products. There’s 10-fingered touch typing on analog keyboards, thumb typing on the iPhone keyboard, and (about 2:30 into the video) the really odd 4-fingered no-thumbs way of typing on the iPad.
Thinking ahead to the iPad 2, they’ll add a video camera, right? What else?
Whoa, the zooming on the Google Maps apps (@ 3:45 in the video) looks incredible. The page flipping animation in the iBooks app though? Super cheesy. It’s like in the early days of cars where they built them to look like horse-drawn carriages. Can’t we just scroll?
The orientation on the keyboard dock is wrong…it should be horizontal, not vertical.
Gruber gleefully reports that there’s no Flash on the iPad. Which is a genuine bummer because this thing is perfect for playing all the (free!) addictive Flash games that I so love.
iPad is not a good name. Too close to iPod for one thing. But mainly just blah.
If the iPhone is any indication, this thing is going to be great for kids. Ollie likes playing games and looking at videos on the iPhone but the larger screen size of the iPad allows for more collaborative play…one kid + one adult or two kids using it together. The iPhone is for solitary use; the iPad can be collaborative (or at least collective). Later: Sippey calls the iPad the family computer:
It looks like a great machine to travel from the living room to the kitchen to the kids room to the bedroom. We’ll search the web on it, read the news on it, the kids will do email on it, play Brushes and Bejeweled on it, and it’ll be the perfect complement to the Sunday afternoon TV football ritual. We’ll use it to control the music in the house, and do some quick bet-settling during dinner. I’m sure we’ll eventually enjoy some multiplayer “board” games on it, or read a book on it, or watch a TV show on it. And the kids will argue with each other over who gets it next. (Dad will.)
As usual, several media outlets will bring you breathless coverage of Apple’s shiny new thing, in this case, some sort of tablet-y device/service. The event starts at 1pm ET; you can follow along on Ars Technica, Engadget, gdgt, NY Times’ Bits blog, or Gizmodo (which is often irritating).
I don’t know if these two photos depict the rumored Apple tablet or not, but I *do know* I want 5000 words from Errol Morris that attempt to answer these two seemingly related questions in an attempt to determine their authenticity:
1. Which photo was taken first?
2. Why was the tablet moved between photos?
Allow two classes of apps in the App Store: those approved by Apple and those not approved by Apple. The unapproved apps would only be accessed through direct searches (they would not appear in top 10 lists or be featured on the front page), would carry cigarette-grade warnings that it might kill your phone and cause cancer, and maybe Apple would take a slightly larger cut to incentivize developers to get apps approved. Non-approved apps could still be pulled from the store by Apple at any point for blatant violations of Apple’s guidelines. That way, if developers want to skirt around all the headaches of Apple’s approval process and if users want to gamble on an app to run on their own hardware that Apple won’t or can’t approve in a timely fashion, they can.
Like the Lisa, it uses a hand-held “mouse” — a small pointing device which enables the user to select programs, and move data from one part of the screen to another. Also like the Lisa, Macintosh uses a black and white display screen whose resolution is so high that it can quickly draw detailed pictures while at the same time display crisp and readable text.
Few technology and device-making companies probably realize it, but they are in direct competition with Apple (or soon will be). How did this happen? Well, the iPhone1 does a lot of useful things pretty well, well enough that it is replacing several specialized devices that do one or two things really well. Space in backpacks, pockets, and purses is a finite resource, as is money (obviously). As a result, many are opting to carry only the iPhone with them when they might have toted several devices around. Here is a short list of devices with capabilities duplicated to some degree by the iPhone:
Mobile phone - All the stuff any mobile phone does: phone calls, texting, voicemail.
PDA - The iPhone meets all of the basic PDA needs: address book, calendar, to-dos, notes, and easy data syncing.
iPod - The iPhone is a full-featured music-playing device. And with 32 GB of storage, the 3GS can handle a huge chunk of even the largest music collection.
Point and shoot camera - While not as full-featured as something like a PowerShot, the camera on the iPhone 3GS has a 3-megapxiel lens with both auto and manual focus, shoots in low-light, does macro, and can shoot video. Plus, it’s easy to instantly publish your photos online using the iPhone’s networking capabilities and automatically tag your photos with your location.
Personal computer - With the increased speed of the iPhone 3GS, the 3G and wifi networking, a real web browser, and the wide array of available apps at the App Store, many people find themselves leaving the laptops at home and using the iPhone as their main computer when they are out and about.
Nintendo DS or PSP - There are thousands of games available at the App Store and if the folks in my office and on the NYC subway are any indication, people are using their iPhones as serious on-the-go gaming machines.
GPS - With geolocation by GPS, wifi, or cell tower, the Google Maps app, and the built-in compass, the iPhone is a powerful wayfinding device. Apps can provide turn by turn directions, current traffic conditions, satellite and photographic street views, transit information, and you can search for addresses and businesses.
Flip video camera - The iPhone 3GS doesn’t shoot in HD (yet), but the video capabilities on the phone are quite good, especially the on-phone editing and easy sharing.
Compass - Serious hikers and campers wouldn’t want to rely on a battery-powered device as their only compass, but the built-in compass on the iPhone 3GS is perfect for casual wayfinding.
Watch - I use the clock on my iPhone more often than any other function. By far.
Portable DVD player - Widescreen video looks great on the iPhone, you can d/l videos and TV shows from the iTunes Store, and with apps like Handbrake, it’s easy to rip DVDs for viewing on the iPhone.
Kindle - Amazon’s Kindle app for the iPhone is surprisingly usable. And unlike Amazon’s hardware, the iPhone can run many ebook readers that handle several different formats.
With all the apps available at the App Store, the list goes on: pedometer, tape recorder, heart monitor, calculator, remote control, USB key, and on and on. Electronic devices aren’t even the whole story. I used to carry a folding map of Manhattan (and the subway) with me wherever I went but not anymore. With Safari, Instapaper, and Amazon’s Kindle app, books and magazines aren’t necessary to provide on-the-go reading material.
Once someone has an iPhone, it is going to be tough to persuade them that they also need to spend money on and carry around a dedicated GPS device, point-and-shoot camera, or tape recorder unless they have an unusual need. But the real problem for other device manufacturers is that all of these iPhone features — particularly the always-on internet connectivity; the email, HTTP, and SMS capabilities; and the GPS/location features — can work in concert with each other to actually make better versions of the devices listed above. Like a GPS that automatically takes photos of where you are and posts them to a Flickr gallery or a video camera that’ll email videos to your mom or a portable gaming machine with access to thousands of free games over your mobile’s phone network. We tend to forget that the iPhone is still from the future in a way that most of the other devices on the list above aren’t. It will take time for device makers to make up that difference.
If these manufacturers don’t know they are in competition with the iPhone, Apple sure does. At their Rock & Roll event last week, MacWorld quotes Phil Schiller as saying:
iPod touch is also a great game machine. No multi-touch interface on other devices, games are expensive, there’s no app store, and there’s no iPod built in. Plus it’s easier to buy stuff because of the App Store on the device. Chart of game and entertainment titles available on PSP, Nintendo DS, and iPhone OS. PSP: 607. Nintendo DS: 3680. iPhone: 21,178.
The same applies to the iPhone. At the same event, Steve Jobs commented that with the new iPod nano, you essentially get a $149 Flip video camera thrown in for free:
We’re going to start off with an 8GB unit, and we’re going to lower the price from $149 to free. This is the new Apple, isn’t it? (laughter) How are we going to do that. We’re going to build a video camera into the new iPod nano. On the back of each unit is a video camera and a microphone, and there’s a speaker inside as well. Built into every iPod nano is now an awesome video camera. And yet we’ve still retained its incredibly small size.
“I’m sure there will always be dedicated devices, and they may have a few advantages in doing just one thing,” he said. “But I think the general-purpose devices will win the day. Because I think people just probably aren’t willing to pay for a dedicated device.”
In terms of this competition, the iPhone at this point in its lifetime2 is analogous to the internet in the late 1990s. The internet was pretty obviously in competition with a few obvious industries at that point — like meatspace book stores — but caught (and is still catching) others off guard: cable TV, movie companies, music companies, FedEx/USPS/UPS, movie theaters, desktop software makers, book publishers, magazine publishers, shoe/apparel stores, newspaper publishers, video game console makers, libraries, grocery stores, real estate agents, etc. etc….basically any organization offering entertainment or information. The internet is still the ultimate “there’s an app for that” engine; it duplicated some of the capabilities of and drew attention away from so many products and services that these businesses offered. Some of these companies are dying — slowly or otherwise — while others were able to adapt and adopt quickly enough to survive and even thrive. It’ll be interesting to see which of the iPhone’s competitors will be able to do the same.
[1] In this essay, I’m using “the iPhone” as a convenient shorthand for “any of a number of devices and smartphones that offer similar functionality to the iPhone, including but not limited to the Palm Pre, Android phones, Blackberry Storm, and iPod Touch”. Similar arguments apply, to varying degrees, to these devices and their manufacturers but are especially relevant to the iPhone and Apple; hence, the shorthand. If you don’t read this footnote, adequately absorb its message, and send me email to the effect of “the iPhone sux because Apple and AT&T are monopolistic robber barons”, I reserve the right to punch you in the face while yelling I WASN’T JUST TALKING ABOUT THE IPHONE YOU JACKASS. ↩
[2] You’ve got to wonder when Apple is going to change the name of the iPhone. The phone part of the device increasingly seems like an afterthought, not the main attraction. The main benefit of the device is that it does everything. How do you choose a name for the device that has everything? Hell if I know. But as far as the timing goes, I’d guess that the name change will happen with next year’s introduction of the new model. The current progression of names — iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS — has nowhere else to go (iPhone 3GS Plus isn’t Apple’s style). ↩
Among the questions voiced by video game executives: How can Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft keep consumers hooked on game-only consoles, like the Wii or even the PlayStation Portable, when Apple offers games on popular, everyday devices that double as cellphones and music players?
And how can game developers and the makers of big consoles persuade consumers to buy the latest shoot’em-ups for $30 or more, when Apple’s App store is full of games, created by developers around the world and approved by Apple, that cost as little as 99 cents — or even are free?
I recently upgraded to a new MacBook Pro from a two-year-old version of the same model (more or less). It’s sturdier, faster, has a more functional trackpad, and has a much larger hard drive than the previous model, making it well worth the ~$2700 purchase price because I use my computer for more hours in a year than I sleep. Three weeks ago, my first-generation iPhone broke and rather than pay for a straight-up replacement, I upgraded to a new iPhone 3G (and promised AT&T my spare kidney in the process). Again, totally worth it…the speed and video camera alone were worth the upgrade. On Monday, I upgraded the OS on my MBP to OS X 10.5 Service Pack 1 Snow Leopard. Not sure whether it was worth it at this point or not, but it was only $29 and promised much.
The upgrade process in each case was painless. To set up the MBP, I just connected it to my Time Machine drive and was up and running about an hour later with all my apps and preferences intact. The iPhone took even less time than that and everything from my old phone was magically there. Snow Leopard took 45 minutes and, aside from a couple of Mail.app and Safari plug-ins I use, everything was just as before.1 Past upgrades of Apple computers and iPods have gone similarly well.
Which is where the potential difficulty for Apple comes in. From a superficial perspective, my old MBP and new MBP felt exactly the same…same OS, same desktop wallpaper, same Dock, all my same files in their same folders, etc. Same deal with the iPhone except moreso…the iPhone is almost entirely software and that was nearly identical. And re: Snow Leopard, I haven’t noticed any changes at all aside from the aforementioned absent plug-ins.
So, just having paid thousands of dollars for new hardware and software, I have what feels like my same old stuff.
Deep down, when I stop to think about it, I know (or have otherwise convinced myself) that these purchases were worth it and that Apple’s ease of upgrade works almost exactly how it should. But my gut tells me that I’ve been ripped off. The “newness” cognitive jolt humans get is almost entirely absent. I don’t know if Apple is aware of this (I’d guess yes) and don’t know if it even matters to them (because, like I said, this is the way that it should work…and look at those salesfigures), but it’s got to be having some small effect. People want to feel, emotionally speaking, that their money is well-spent and impeccable branding, funny commericals, and the sense of belonging to a hip lifestyle that Apple tries to engender in its customers can only go so far. [Apple Tablet, this is your cue.]
[1] Merlin Mann’s upgrade did not go well. Not only did Merlin not get the “newness” cognitive jolt, his new stuff worked worse than his old stuff. Although, Merlin, upgrading five (five!) computers while “writing a book on deadline” probably wasn’t the best idea. ↩
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