How can anyone not see that this will forever change the landscape of technology?
1. This is NOT just an iPod cell phone.
All those various fake mockups we’ve seen the last few years have basically been that- a combo cell phone/ music player. Luckily Apple had the vision to go (way) beyond that goal.
So what is it? This is the first genuinely marketable iteration of a smartphone/teleputer (George Gilder- interview at Inside Digital Media) for a mass audience. This IS the teleputer version 1.
(and forget whether it’s 3G or Edge or carrier-restricted or whatever- all those concerns will go away sooner than later with new iterations.)
2. So why is the iPhone such a huge leap?
Simple- User experience (also known as User Interface.)
The first question of course should be, ‘What does it do?’ But the second question must be ‘How does it do it?’
It cannot be emphasized enough how much the basic initial design choices- fullscreen display, fingertouch interface- fundamentally changes the entire design of this product (both software and hardware.) Apple understands this, and that is why they have done such a tremendous job.
By going with a largely context-sensitive interface geared around its core functions, Apple has significantly reduced the number of steps it will take for the important stuff that people will actually be doing with this phone. It will beat the Zen of Palm (or Treo) in this regard. No need to take out a stylus, tap on a drop-down menu, etc. This cannot be emphasized enough for a smartphone geared for a large market. It’s not that the Treo did a bad job, but this product will totally redefine expectations for UI in handheld devices.
What difference does it make if the HP iPaq 9857 can do everything the iPhone can and more, if no one wants to learn/ doesn’t actually enjoy using/ will never buy such a phone? The UI is much much more than flashy icons and lickable buttons, it defines the user experience.
And here the little things (demo by Phil Schiller) DO matter- like the visual voicemail, or the tight Google Maps integration- why didn’t anyone else think of that? Because only Apple truly sweats the UI details.
That’s exactly why companies like Microsoft fail in these markets- they figure 90% is good enough for something like a smartphone or a music player. (I’m not talking about market share, I’m talking about their internal design goal for a product.) There’s been numerous discussion about how Palm or WinMob or anyone can increase sales of PDA’s/smartphones/handheld devices. Well, here’s the answer.
10 years from now, people are going to see the introduction of the iPhone (and this is just the first step of several) as significant as going from command-line to GUI.
3. Welcome to the real world (not the social)
Take a look around on any busy city block, and you will see one thing- people not just talking on their phones, but playing around with them. Cell phones are now the new toy for people to play around with while alone- waiting in line, walking alone somewhere, etc. How much fun can you possibly have playing around with a regular Moto phone? They’re fine as phones, but for anything else they suck.
Just wait til people get their hands on the iPhone. Steve Jobs said at his keynote that he could play with this phone all day, and that’s what people are going to do. When people see other people with this thing, they are all going to want one too.
4. Expandability- yes, no, maybe so?
So far we’ve heard that the iPhone is going to be closed to 3rd-party development, which is in general a bad thing. But that doesn’t mean no additional applications will be available.
If Apple releases a large collection of widget-type apps, and some sort of document viewer with the same functionality of Preview (OS X app), most people aren’t gonna care that they can’t buy or install 3rd party apps. It’s that same old mantra about Palm apps again (where did it come from anyway?), about 95% of Palm owners never installing a 3rd party app. You can be pretty sure Apple took this sort of market research into account.
Apple is probably going to gear additional functionality towards connectivity, not handheld computing. A document viewer would still fall into that category though, since people get these docs via email. Otherwise, widget apps to handle stuff like weather, Wikipedia, Myspace, Ebay, Youtube, etc., are mainly what people are going to want to do on this thing. And they’re going to be able to do it on the iPhone.
I personally will have serious reservations about getting this phone without software expandability, but I don’t think we will have the full picture for a few months yet.
5. But the price!
The original iPod came out in 2001, and offered a black and white screen in a relatively chunky body (though not at the time) with 5GB of storage for $399.
The current iPod starts at 30GB of storage, with better battery life, color video, and assorted other functionality, for $249.
That’s a lot of progress in 5 years. The iPhone will have an even more accelerated evolution, due to competition, the exponential growth rate of technology, and the importance of this product to Apple. This product is more important to the future of Apple than either the iPod or the Mac, perhaps even more than those 2 combined (simputer, remember?)
At launch, Apple is going to make every single unit they can sell. By next MacWorld, Apple is going to up the specs and drop the price, and they will continue to sell every unit they can make. Repeat that process for a few years, and Apple will have no problems hitting that 1% market share Jobs talked about (~ 1 billion phones a year.) They do that, and Apple will have hit a home run revenue-wise.
The big question is what kind of upper ceiling exists for such a product- 3%? 5%? 15%? No matter what, Apple (and ultimately, everyone who uses a cell phone) wins.
6. Apple has already succeeded- literally.
6 months before the first iPhone sells, Apple has already succeeded. How? Apple has already redefined expectations of what a cell phone/ smartphone can be. Steve Jobs specifically said this in a CNBC interview, and it’s about an apt a statement as you can make about the iPhone.
Other companies have set out to meet people’s expectations for this type of product (with varying success), which is why Apple has eclipsed them all in a single keynote. Just wait and see what new products everyone is going to announce and show off the next few years- they will all have been influenced by the iPhone.
(BTW, no one has managed to successfully copy the iPod or Mac OS X after many years. The iPhone combines Apple’s expertise with both (which is why only they could have created this), and will be even harder to successfully copy.)
It won’t be perfect, and there will need to be improvements and price drops in future iterations. And there are some issues- how well will the touchsceen work, software expandability, future pricing. But this product redefines what people will expect from smartphones (or whatever you want to call it, doesn’t matter) from now on.