Saturday, July 07, 2007
A sum of destructions
"A picture used to be a sum of additions. In my case a picture is a sum of destructions."-- Pablo Picasso
I took the plunge and bought an iPhone last week on opening day. When I woke up Friday morning I knew I would not be able to fight it.
I've been entranced since Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone earlier this year. Actually, before that. I've been looking for something like this since rumors began to swirl a a couple of years ago that Jobs was on a phone project.
Some people thought the Motorola Rokr that included iTunes signaled that Jobs had thrown in the towel, but that looks more like a shot across the bow, or something to buy time.
I even had something of an actual need for this device, since I was regularly slogging three devices around: a Treo 650 for Internet access and email, a Razr as a cell phone (a client complained about the voice quality on the Treo and disinvited me to a conference call once because of it), and an iPod to get me through a session at the gym (while texting on the Razr and browsing and checking email on the Treo).
So off I trudged to my local AT&T store Friday, to get to about 35th in line. (Behind a friend, an otherwise solid and stable heart surgeon my age who I also once bumped into in the Apple store in New Hampshire, 90 miles away, one weeknight a few years ago when both of us were simultaneously coveting the first generation iPods). I was clumped with a group of middle-aged folks who laughed nervously at our reflection in the first folks exiting the store with iPhones in hand, who were more geeks than hipsters.
I showed an unusual amount of discipline when the person right in front of me snapped up the last 8GB model. I walked away. On my way home, I dialed the AT&T store at the mall and was surprised to find that they had plenty of 8GB models left, and no line. Apparently everyone feared the mall would be mobbed, and mobbed the two other AT&T stores in the area instead.
My experience at the mall was more Used Car Lot than Apple Genius Bar. The clerk directed me to a stand full of protective covers and told me to "Go pick out a case" as if they came with the iPhone. Since I had read everything there was to read about the phone and had not heard about an AT&T promotion, I looked at the clerk quizzically.
He answered my unasked question. "You have to pay for it," he said. "But I don't know anyone who would drop $600 on a phone and not get a case for it." Well buddy, meet your first. And that was before I saw what PC World had done to try to deface an iPhone.
In the week since, the iPhone has surpassed my high expectations. And it's not just that the glass hasn't scratched.
What Steve Jobs has figured out with the iPod, the iPhone and, to a great degree, OS X is to know what to leave out. While the geeks who make up a significant portion of the early adopters bemoan their inability to load goofy applications onto the iPhone or otherwise trick up the device, the rest of the world would like to make a call, check their email and maybe even browse the Web with a portable device that can make it worthwhile. Everything else gets in the way.
Most device manufacturers and software makers are obsessed with features. Whether that is due to marketing pressure or the fact that the people who design both are largely geeks themselves, I am not sure.
What matters is that companies are learning from Jobs' incredible success. I bet the AT&T Store would have made more margin on that protective case they did not sell me than they made on my iPhone. Everyone knows that Jobs is charging a rather large premium for three products that are all-but commodities. I can buy a cellphone and an MP3 player for less than $40 each on a rack at my local pharmacy. I have an email offer in my inbox today for a $239 computer that can run Vista from a legitimate mail order company.
Yet I am typing this on a $2,300 iMac, with a $600 phone/iPod sitting next to it.
The geeks may say that I am a sucker. While I did like flaunting the iPhone when I showed up with it Monday morning, what I am really paying a premium for is the experience of enjoying something that I have to live with (in the case of the computer and phone) and something that I can now not imagine living without -- access to almost my entire music collection (at least on my 60GB iPod).
I have had a few bones to pick with the iPhone. When it transferred my settings from my iMac, it made my wireless router its primary DNS server. My wireless router is not a DNS server, and I had to delete it from the list in the iPhone's settings before I could access anything on the Internet using Wifi. I challenge any tech support person to diagnose that problem and talk someone like my mother through the fix (even as easy as it was for someone who knows what a DNS server is, and why you need one).
I have also seen an error message or two that looked like something that could have been crafted in Redmond or Bangalore. Even some error messages that were close to plain English could be quibbled with. I am not sure that explaining that I could not connect to the EDGE network would be meaningful to me without all the hoopla about EDGE's inferiority in the days leading up to release (and I work closely with Analog Devices, which manufacturers processors and other parts for cellphones, and owned a Treo that used the same EDGE network for Internet access). How about "Could not connect to the Internet" instead of "Could not connect to EDGE"?
I have also missed a call that was forwarded from my Razr because the iPhone felt the need to tell me that the call was a forwarded call, in a pop-up message box that included a great big "Dismiss" button. Well, "dismissing" means closing a message or dialog box, but only to user interface designers and amateur translators of a typical user manual, but "Dismiss" meant "dismiss the call" to me, not dismiss the message. (There may be some financial reason to not accept a forwarded call, and therefore some good reason to alert me to the fact that the call was a forwarded call, but if I could not be bothered to learn how to voice dial, I can assure you that the intricacies of my AT&T contract are way low on my priorities list.)
Apple will fix these things. If the iPod is any lesson, our first-generation iPhones will get some great fixes in software updates. And then some great new addition will come to the phone that will not be available to us, because Apple will have completely re-engineered the innards of its next-gen device.
And I will buy it, just like 40GB iPod that replaced my 2oGB, and the 60GB that replaced the 40. Because Jobs' greatest success has not been in transforming the computer, the way we listen to music, or the cellphone. He has done all that, for sure, but what he has also done is the entrepreneur's dream mashup: He has merged the guaranteed obsolescence of the fashion industry with the whiz-bang of the technology industry. And I don't begrudge him his fortune for having done so.
I've been entranced since Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone earlier this year. Actually, before that. I've been looking for something like this since rumors began to swirl a a couple of years ago that Jobs was on a phone project.Some people thought the Motorola Rokr that included iTunes signaled that Jobs had thrown in the towel, but that looks more like a shot across the bow, or something to buy time.
I even had something of an actual need for this device, since I was regularly slogging three devices around: a Treo 650 for Internet access and email, a Razr as a cell phone (a client complained about the voice quality on the Treo and disinvited me to a conference call once because of it), and an iPod to get me through a session at the gym (while texting on the Razr and browsing and checking email on the Treo).
So off I trudged to my local AT&T store Friday, to get to about 35th in line. (Behind a friend, an otherwise solid and stable heart surgeon my age who I also once bumped into in the Apple store in New Hampshire, 90 miles away, one weeknight a few years ago when both of us were simultaneously coveting the first generation iPods). I was clumped with a group of middle-aged folks who laughed nervously at our reflection in the first folks exiting the store with iPhones in hand, who were more geeks than hipsters.
I showed an unusual amount of discipline when the person right in front of me snapped up the last 8GB model. I walked away. On my way home, I dialed the AT&T store at the mall and was surprised to find that they had plenty of 8GB models left, and no line. Apparently everyone feared the mall would be mobbed, and mobbed the two other AT&T stores in the area instead.
My experience at the mall was more Used Car Lot than Apple Genius Bar. The clerk directed me to a stand full of protective covers and told me to "Go pick out a case" as if they came with the iPhone. Since I had read everything there was to read about the phone and had not heard about an AT&T promotion, I looked at the clerk quizzically.
He answered my unasked question. "You have to pay for it," he said. "But I don't know anyone who would drop $600 on a phone and not get a case for it." Well buddy, meet your first. And that was before I saw what PC World had done to try to deface an iPhone.
In the week since, the iPhone has surpassed my high expectations. And it's not just that the glass hasn't scratched.
What Steve Jobs has figured out with the iPod, the iPhone and, to a great degree, OS X is to know what to leave out. While the geeks who make up a significant portion of the early adopters bemoan their inability to load goofy applications onto the iPhone or otherwise trick up the device, the rest of the world would like to make a call, check their email and maybe even browse the Web with a portable device that can make it worthwhile. Everything else gets in the way.
Most device manufacturers and software makers are obsessed with features. Whether that is due to marketing pressure or the fact that the people who design both are largely geeks themselves, I am not sure.
What matters is that companies are learning from Jobs' incredible success. I bet the AT&T Store would have made more margin on that protective case they did not sell me than they made on my iPhone. Everyone knows that Jobs is charging a rather large premium for three products that are all-but commodities. I can buy a cellphone and an MP3 player for less than $40 each on a rack at my local pharmacy. I have an email offer in my inbox today for a $239 computer that can run Vista from a legitimate mail order company.
Yet I am typing this on a $2,300 iMac, with a $600 phone/iPod sitting next to it.
The geeks may say that I am a sucker. While I did like flaunting the iPhone when I showed up with it Monday morning, what I am really paying a premium for is the experience of enjoying something that I have to live with (in the case of the computer and phone) and something that I can now not imagine living without -- access to almost my entire music collection (at least on my 60GB iPod).
I have had a few bones to pick with the iPhone. When it transferred my settings from my iMac, it made my wireless router its primary DNS server. My wireless router is not a DNS server, and I had to delete it from the list in the iPhone's settings before I could access anything on the Internet using Wifi. I challenge any tech support person to diagnose that problem and talk someone like my mother through the fix (even as easy as it was for someone who knows what a DNS server is, and why you need one).
I have also seen an error message or two that looked like something that could have been crafted in Redmond or Bangalore. Even some error messages that were close to plain English could be quibbled with. I am not sure that explaining that I could not connect to the EDGE network would be meaningful to me without all the hoopla about EDGE's inferiority in the days leading up to release (and I work closely with Analog Devices, which manufacturers processors and other parts for cellphones, and owned a Treo that used the same EDGE network for Internet access). How about "Could not connect to the Internet" instead of "Could not connect to EDGE"?
I have also missed a call that was forwarded from my Razr because the iPhone felt the need to tell me that the call was a forwarded call, in a pop-up message box that included a great big "Dismiss" button. Well, "dismissing" means closing a message or dialog box, but only to user interface designers and amateur translators of a typical user manual, but "Dismiss" meant "dismiss the call" to me, not dismiss the message. (There may be some financial reason to not accept a forwarded call, and therefore some good reason to alert me to the fact that the call was a forwarded call, but if I could not be bothered to learn how to voice dial, I can assure you that the intricacies of my AT&T contract are way low on my priorities list.)
Apple will fix these things. If the iPod is any lesson, our first-generation iPhones will get some great fixes in software updates. And then some great new addition will come to the phone that will not be available to us, because Apple will have completely re-engineered the innards of its next-gen device.
And I will buy it, just like 40GB iPod that replaced my 2oGB, and the 60GB that replaced the 40. Because Jobs' greatest success has not been in transforming the computer, the way we listen to music, or the cellphone. He has done all that, for sure, but what he has also done is the entrepreneur's dream mashup: He has merged the guaranteed obsolescence of the fashion industry with the whiz-bang of the technology industry. And I don't begrudge him his fortune for having done so.
posted by Tim Beidel at 7/07/2007 06:42:00 PM
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