My thoughts on the iPhone and the keynote…
This posting, and $4.00, will get you a latte at Starbucks. Except the one Steve called, the barista’s a bit backed up.
I was blown away. Once again, Apple (with the help of Steve and Johnathan Ives and their mighty crew of elves) figures out how to walk into a new market and not only become a player, but redefine it.
They made sure that it matched Blackberry functionality — so the phone-erati have no excuse to not buy it.
They made it — sexy — to the phone-erati will want it.
They changed the rules of the market; not completely tearing the market open (as an unlocked phone would imply), but by working with Cingular to bring out a “no compromise” networked phone, it works for both sides. True, Cingular won’t be able to create funky charges ($2.00 for bad access to MySpace, $1.50 for this crappy ringtone, etc), because the phone is outside the walled garden. Instead, Cingular will happily let all the data geeks buy unlimited data packages and pocket the money. Instead of the cable-TV model, they’ve decided to make money off the plumbing: the Akamai model.
It’s clear Cingular saw the writing on the wall, and Steve likely helped a lot: the walled garden model was going to fail and die away sooner or later. That leaves a company two choices: embrace change, and use it to suck as much life out of the competitors as you can before they catch up again, or fight and hold on to the old way, an increasingly expensive prospect with increasingly bad returns, and no exit strategy. Cingular obviously wanted to be the winner here, and they’ll see a lot of people coming over. Sprint’s in trouble, so is T-mobile. The business strategy has been shot in the heart…
No, we didn’t go all the way to unlocked phones and blow it up completely, but the important part, the crippled phones and the walled garden with extra charges, that part’s served a mortal blow. I’ll take it.
I was frankly curious how Apple was going to avoid leaks on this puppy (yes, I’d heard enough “stuff” to feel pretty confident the iPhone was in the cellars somewhere). Answer: just not let it out of your hands until announce time. This is one of the visible side effects of the rumor sites, folks, and their ability to play with trademark databases, FCC databases, etc. Apple’s starting to shift from “isn’t this neat? avaiable today!” to “wow! but avaialble soon…”, because, as Steve noted, he didn’t want the FCC doing the announcement for him. For toys that have to go for certification, you’ll start seeing more delays between announce and ship. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing.
the one significant weakness? This version doesn’t allow for adding other tools — or perhaps I should add “— yet”. I expect that’s clearly in the cards, ti’s more a matter of when. for a first gen product, while they figure out how to get the functionality for syncing into iTunes and the development tools scaled up? I’m okay with that. If you aren’t, wait for the version that brings it. That’s okay, too. (and lack of significant upgradeability didn’t kill the Hiptop version1….)
Will I buy an iPhone? I’m really tempted, honestly. but laurie and I are due to upgrade phones now, and hers can’t wait, and I’m not sure I ought to. So right now, we’re planning on going for a pair of Blackjacks and one year deals, and this time next year, look at moving to the iPhone V1.1 (or whatever it is then). so the answer is — yesbut. Yesbut, not in June. More timing than anything else.
Re: Apple TV — like it. gonna buy one. Since I fully believe the move to IP based video (IP TV) is now in full force, Apple now has a good starting setup for moving video into and around the house. (one thing that hasn’t gotten a lot of notice: the New York Times company just sold off all of their TV stations, to focus on the newspaper/Internet parts of the business. If you understand how the TV business operates, the thing MOST at risk to a move to IP-based TV is the network affiliate. And once networks are willing to start dismantling their affiliate networks for direct via DBS or Cable of a regional feed, and once prduction houses start selling direct through iTunes and other shops instead of selling to networks in the first place, what’s the value of a plain-old broadcast TV station when it’s not one of the top 2-3 in a city like LA? mostly of nothing….)
New airport. I like the airpots because they’re easy; It’s nice to see them upgraded. I’m not so sure of the price. I’m looking at upgrading to N in the house soon; I’ll probably do it with some other device than the new Airports. (hint: a little birdie warned me not to buy any unit that can’t be upgraded to final -N, because upgrades are going to be needed….).
Overall: damn. And to be honest, I missed the adrenalin of keynote day. Being on the outside was weird. But I love the iPhone and what it represents. Rarely is a first gen product THAT good. And that’s something we need to remember. this is just the beginning — and Apple expects it to be from a $0 to a $500-600mm a year gross revenue business in the first year.
Wow.
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