I was having a conversation the other day about the state of Apple. My friend’s point was the greed element has become quite evident and my own perspective is that Apple’s success is causing it to become arrogant. At the centre of this is, of course, the iPhone. I had promised myself that I wasn’t going to blog about the iPhone, but in a way, here it is.
Since the iPhone’s announcement in January that dominated Macworld, it was clear that Apple’s focus was shifting. Up until then, things like the iPod and iTunes were accessories to the Mac and, for Windows users, represented the Apple experience, but in a single stroke the Mac was sidelined.
Further confirmation arrived with Leopard’s announced delay earlier this year. I think various posts on the web confirmed at the time that developers saw the 10.5 release not only as not ready, but as having stalled. Things only picked up after WWDC, although many people have been disappointed and even mystified by some of Apple’s design decisions demonstrated publicly back then.
Apple was quite honest in explaining the delay to Leopard: the iPhone had stolen all the talent. Sensibly, it appears Apple didn’t hire scores of new developers to work on the iPhone to address the delay (that stuff never works out) and as a result Leopard got behind. When Adobe made that strange announcement about not having enough time to test its apps on Leopard the other day, I took it to mean that, with Leopard having been so unfinished for so long, Apple is already cutting it too fine for them.
At WWDC the phone was everywhere. You could barely attend a session without someone picking one up and rotating it so the video went widescreen to audible groans from the attendees, as this would often be accompanied by the message that we should “develop web applications” for the iPhone. The irony being that you couldn’t do many of the fancy tricks Apple was so keen on demonstrating in a web browser. We were there to learn about Leopard and we weren’t learning much that was new at all.
If you find yourself underwhelmed or disappointed by the new OS, you don’t need to be a genius to work out why.
It’s understandable that Apple couldn’t just release the phone and open it up to third party development simultaneously. Despite being based on OS X, it is obviously a very different beast with more constraints than the desktop OS. Such development would need proper tools, methods of testing, documentation, etc and once open, would place a further burden on Apple to maintain compatibility while evolving the functionality. It’s very early days.
The iPhone launched very successfully and that’s well-deserved, but at the phone’s UK event a number of things became clear. Apple was not going to give iPhone hackers an easy ride, which is one thing (no point in creating extra work to support the unsupported) but nor would it, as was hoped, turn a blind eye to the phone being unlocked.
Like many people, I questioned why Apple needed a single network partner with the phone. It doesn’t seem subsidised and as “the best iPod ever” it could sell just as well under its own steam. In the UK, where phones are usually subsidised to the point of being free with a contract, that is exactly what is happening.
Of course, features like the visual voicemail require changes on the network’s side and the unlimited data plans, while not new or unique, certainly made sense. Look a little deeper though and you can see that activating the phone through iTunes was not so much an advantage of integration as Apple being in control. It suddenly became much clearer that Apple is getting a slice of the subscription pie. While negotiations are ongoing around the world to ape that model, Apple flexes its muscles with the latest iBrick update. Maybe.
It is surely no coincidence that the rumoured and announced network partners for the iPhone so far seem to be all related to the former national phone companies. These tend to be the ones that really lost out domestically when mobile networks removed the need for cables to be run into homes, because of their own arrogance. So, these days such companies are willing to accept unusual terms in order to carry the phone. In this respect, where competition is nullified and there’s some desperado running the network, it’s hardly a great deal for customers.
Also at the UK event, it seemed implied that, even if Apple does open up the iPhone, it may control what apps get onto it, much like the iPod’s games. And while I’m on the subject, to say the pricey iPod touch is like training wheels for the iPhone seems almost insulting.
Hubris, hubris.
Apple’s success to date comes down to the compelling nature of the iPod with iTunes and the breath of fresh air that Mac OS X brings to the personal computing experience. However, in the same way the iPod produced a halo effect for Apple and the Mac itself, the business practices associated with the iPhone could do the opposite, although it may take a while for the effect to set in. Apple probably doesn’t care what is said in the online world, because it is insular and irrelevant to the public at large. The risk is that it will be too late before Apple comes to its senses and stops chasing the absolute power and greed that will corrupt it absolutely.
For hardware, there isn’t much hope of Apple gaining serious competition soon. The MP3 player market is packed with woeful offerings and bad iPod clones. Now, the same seems to be happening in the mobile phone market, which at the high end was already starting to look like a mirror image of the Windows world. Companies run by suits and geeks rarely understand what the rest of us want. And look at history: the reason Sony couldn’t reinvent the Walkman for the digital age was its overbearing emphasis on its own technologies; Microsoft annihilated the competition, not just for its OS, but its applications, first by producing stuff that was actually good and then by playing dirty.
There is some light on the horizon though. Amazon MP3 does what people have always wanted. It’s early days, US-only and yet to be tested, but Amazon of all companies could really make a start at changing the landscape. In an instant, the iTunes Store looks not only restrictive but pricey. For devices, it seems Palm has poached the guy who headed up the iPod division and immediately showed a turnaround of common sense by dropping that Foleo thing, though we’re probably years away from seeing anything remarkable from Palm again.
The computer market hardly matters in this, except that Apple must not allow itself to neglect the Mac. It is the areas in which Apple is dominating that it needs some worthy competition. Until recently, Apple has been pretty good at doing the right thing, but once they signed that deal with AT&T that was no longer true. As much as I hate to say it, I believe we have to think differently about Apple these days.
