And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I remember seeing the iPhone unveiled and thinking "It's cool, but will people really buy such an expensive phone?". I think it was $600. That was pretty expensive at the time. I also remember thinking about how they wanted all apps to be web-based. A disaster for certain I thought. The phone market was all over the place and brand loyalty was in short supply. I'd seen compaq go from dominating PDAs and nosedive off the cliff. Motorola took their brand loyalty (remember how many people had Razrs?) and went into hiding. Time and again I'd seen phone platforms rise and fall. I was skeptical.
All I knew was one thing - I certainly wasn't going to buy one.
Years later and I now program for iOS a lot. Everyday pretty much. I'm a full blown Mac convert and I'll be honest, the iPhone was what caused it. I bought my first iPhone at version 4. Then I specifically bought my first Mac so I could use the SDK for that phone. I fell in love with the platform, in all its insane glory.
I might move to another platform one day, but I can honestly say I never imagined this is what I would be working on.
This will be Apple's saving grace. They're already entrenched several generations deep. For every kid getting an i-pod touch or i-pod nano today, in a few years, it's such a seamless jump to an iphone. Nothing to learn, no additional software to learn, no new interfaces to spend time getting familiar with. It's the same device, just with more functionality.
For me this is the most brilliant thing Apple has achieved. Being able to move a consumer from platform to platform with ZERO new investment on the users part? Genius.
I'm sure that when the time comes, Apple will be prepared to throw away the UI and start over with whatever suits the next form factor.
Just a few years before, people flocked to buy $599 Motorola RAZR flip phones on two years contracts. I saw the hordes lined up, myself. Next to that, the iPhone seems like a bargain
The cover flow blew my mind and it quickly became apparent this device was lightyears ahead of anything else on the market.
This was around the same time the HTC Magic came out, although it was clearly a copy of the iPhone, it was a toy in comparison.
Now that Android has come a long way and even old ladies are carrying iPhones, it looks as if we had modern smartphones for ages :).
Sold it all, bought a single MBPr. Haven't looked back since. It literally took me 3 hours to become full familiar with it. Imported all my documents, installed my apps, good to go.
I love articles like this, even though the people who need to read them the most don't have the attention span for them :-)
A lot of the stuff Apple had problems with is almost certainly routine for the big existing phone players like HTC, Samsung, Nokia... I mean, Jobs and Ive didn't even realise that metal cases block radio waves, which is basically common knowledge. Many of their problems seem self-imposed in general - for example:
"Even people within the project itself couldn’t talk to one another. Engineers designing the electronics weren’t allowed to see the software. When they needed software to test the electronics, they were given proxy code, not the real thing. If you were working on the software, you used a simulator to test hardware performance."
Apple could apparently get away with this, but I expect their development techniques would have killed lesser companies. Maybe, in some alternative universe where things worked out just a little differently, the iPhone killed Apple too rather than being their biggest success.
Building buildings is always difficult, but if you've done it ten times before, you know a lot of the caveats. If you're doing it for the first time, you'll go slower due to more learning-by-doing.
Sometimes it takes an outsider to come in and build with no preexisting design or engineering prejudices (or even overt knowledge) to change the world.
Yes, this is probably the main reason why Apple was willing to spend extra time and effort reinventing the wheel rather than hire some experienced smartphone engineers. This decision may have been influenced by the experience of the Lisa project, where the influence of engineers from HP has often been blamed for some of the shortcomings. (Mind you, on the other side of the coin the Macintosh barely survived the conviction that a hard disk or more than 128KiB of RAM were unnecessary, a mistake which seems to have been based in the Apple II background of the Mac people.)
(It's not a uniqutely Apple practise either. In the heyday of Japanese electronics companies, several times a firm made a successful leap into an area which was completely new to them, often into a technology which was still in a very early stage or already had strong players or both. See /We Were Burning/ http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron... .)
----- (regarding the presentation)
They had AT&T, the iPhone’s wireless carrier, bring in a portable cell tower, so they knew reception would be strong. Then, with Jobs’s approval, they preprogrammed the phone’s display to always show five bars of signal strength regardless of its true strength. The chances of the radio’s crashing during the few minutes that Jobs would use it to make a call were small, but the chances of its crashing at some point during the 90-minute presentation were high.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3821/iphone-4-redux-analyzing-...
And yet until the 5s last week, the iPhone 4 was still being sold, and selling like hotcakes. Why no problems without a redesign? It is maybe possible it was that big a deal?
when the rumours started swirling about apple launching a phone people could not believe it. like at all. apple, the ipod guys, building a phone?! no way, what a joke. you had the photoshops of ipods with a dial, etc. analysts explaining why this was completely wrong, impossible and apple was doomed.
same at the launch of the iPad. same at the launch of the iPod (less space than a nomad, no wifi, lame). what the fuck is a nomad one might say today.
those great photoshops of steve holding a giant iphone to his ear, hilarious. an iPad, buhaha, bunch of retards at apple. but now the galaxy note makes perfect sense. to exactly the same neckbeards who laughed at apple's idiocy before.
apple is indeed the most frustrating company. it somehow has defied gravity in the second jobs era and proven that large swaths of the tech world couldn't define taste and style if their life depended on it.
and perfection, like the iphone launch, is a matter of style and taste.
It's insane to think of the phone I had prior to getting an iPhone; it was either a Motorola Razr or a Samsung S-300.
Apple introduced flops as well, see apple TV
I don't know how you can consider the Apple TV a flop. The first generation one was built of OS X instead of iOS for reasons that this article makes very obvious but it hammered out a clear path for the future Apple TV. Much like the MacBook Air, it's really only a "flop" if you're talking about the first generation product and not the establishing of a product line.
Neither took the world by storm, but they both launched a product category that was ill-defined at the time and Apple sells millions of both. There were internet connected set top boxes and ultraportables before the Apple TV and the MacBook Air, but there were only Smart TVs, Rokus, Google TVs, and Ultrabooks after.
Maybe it's just me but establishing a successful and profitable product line that exists to this day hardly qualifies as a flop. Just a shaky first generation. Which, keep in mind, also applies to the iPod.
IMO, the iPod can hardly be considered a flop. The iPod HiFi, THAT was a flop.
The iPhone isn't a flop. Same story, everyone I know who got it loved it.
My parents got an Apple TV, after enjoying their iPods and iPhones. As far as I know they haven't used it since the first week, and after seeing them try, I don't blame them. The problems that the Apple TV is trying to address are real, but IME it's not there yet.
I've heard similar rave reviews from 3 people over 60 about how great the Apple TV is. None of which I would position as tech-savvy.
as for real flops - very often it's services. remember ping? does anyone really care about newsstand, passbook?
they had a pretty good run hardware wise though. the cube might be a candidate. some nano iterations. but else?
By their standards perhaps, but I think some of us would like a "flop" as successful as the Apple TV!
http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/28/4374480/apple-tv-sales-13-...
"Compounding all the technical challenges, Jobs’s obsession with secrecy meant that even as they were exhausted by 80-hour workweeks, the few hundred engineers and designers working on the iPhone couldn’t talk about it to anyone else. If Apple found out you’d told a friend in a bar, or even your spouse, you could be fired."
Christ, what an asshole.
"You had me at scrolling."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE is the original, for anyone who's curious.
If anything Apple were the ones that came along after other companies had done all the hard work and piggy-backed on their work whilst claiming the credit. Companies like Nokia and Motorola literally developed the technology that made mobile phones possible, and had to build stuff like phone radios in an era where no-one had ever done it before, whereas Apple could rely on pre-existing chips, software and design experience. Then Apple sued Motorola to stop them selling phones whilst insisting they didn't have to pay Motorola for the patents they'd obtained through doing all that pioneering work.
While scenic, the 280 is certainly not 'remarkably empty'. I make the commute from San Jose to SF everyday and wish I shared the enthusiasm of the author. Apologies for commenting on something completely orthogonal to the point of the OP.
Those post-dotcom days were sad; the reason there was less traffic was the unemployment of people you knew. You felt that everywhere you went.
What is interesting is that product-demo glitches happened all the time. We went to one presentation in which Steve had to ask for people not to use the Internet because they had not enough bandwidth.
But mistakes were so "naturally handled" that people just did not care.
I think Edison said, you will not be remembered by your mistakes, but from your successes.
"The solution, he says, was to tweak the AirPort software
so that it seemed to be operating in Japan instead of the
United States."
Now obviously they could claim they shielded the Moscone center and only operated on channel 14 indoors. (The US bans channel 14 due to the frequency being used by satellite.)
I think the FCC might still fine them, if there was a clear-cut case with hard evidence.
This is both true and a horrible rewriting of history. People loved their Blackberries. The term Crackberry was invented before the iPhone was even a rumor. And don't tell me it wasn't mainstream, it had taken over most of the business and government market. It was confined to those markets, but within those huge markets it was utterly mainstream. But even before that other people loved Palm devices.
The capacitive touch screen was a clear advance - but don't tell me there was no "usable" device prior to that.
I admit I prefer the button-less form factor in many respects, but boy do I miss that well-designed tactile keyboard.
I find they're quite fast!
(I use a Das Keyboard for the IBM Model M "clicky" experience, and hate my laptop or other keyboards after getting it. I completely understand that I may be in the minority, but regardless, I loved the response of my Blackberry keyboard).
Now that everyone is on flat-rate plans, burning minutes for voicemail access is unlikely to ever cost you money. Didn't use to be the case.
1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hUIxyE2Ns8&feature=youtu.be&...
What other stodgy industry is there that Apple could easily disrupt? How about this: how does it make you feel when you use the DVR box that your cable / satellite company forces you to use, to watch tv? I know the answer for me. Seems like low hanging fruit with potentially enormous payoff for Apple.
On the technology side Apple has actually built everything necessary (AppleTV + iTunes streaming) but the problem is dealing with the content silos.
If Apple could it would simply license all the content and stream it to customers either for a standard price (e.g. $1.99 per episode of 480p programming, $2.99 per episode of 1080p) or via subscription (e.g. MLB/Netflix) or ad-supported (e.g. Hulu Plus).
The only reason AppleTV isn't TV nirvana (at least in the US) is licensing issues. (BTW you can program an AppleTV to recognize any remote, so you can seamlessly make you TV remote also control your AppleTV, without even switching modes).
In case you're wondering, the basic problem right now is that TV networks get paid about $2 (I did a bunch of back of envelope calculations, so I may be significantly off, but it's in this ballpark) in advertising per viewer-hour, so if a family of four watches an hour of TV, then the network gets about $8 in ad revenue. Apple is offering $1.40/h, and it's also messing with DVD sales and syndication so there's a big gap there.
Now, I seriously doubt that the production company that makes the content gets much of that $8, so if Apple could deal with content producers directly...
The TV channels are a different matter. They are, today, right now, happily making $2 per viewer hour, and Apple is offering them effectively $0.70 or so (let's say the average TV show is watched by two people in a household; even if it's only one, that's $2.00 vs. $1.40.) The TV networks aren't threatened by a Napster equivalent. And the people who really might benefit from Apple's business model -- content producers -- are tied up in an existing business model that's hard to wean off of.
It seems to me that it will taken people like Joss Whedon or Rob Thomas (Veronica Mars) -- the kinds of people who could Kickstart a movie or TV season -- to try their luck at selling content direct to consumers (through Apple, Amazon, etc.) to convince rightly skeptical content producers to ditch the useless middlemen.
eventually Apple will convince content producers to ditch the middlemen and go with Apple
Sure, but that won't work: the content is paid for by the cable companies.
It's, what, $30 billion per year going to content creators straight from the cable companies, up front? The content creators absolutely need the cable companies today, there's no other way for them to operate. They don't self-fund, period.
So Apple would need to pony up. If they came to the content creators and said look, we want to do this thing, here's $100 billion for the first three year, up front—it'd happen. Money talks in Hollywood. It might be the only thing that does.
Sadly, there's no way in hell Tim Cook could (or would) make that happen. He's way too conservative. Hell, he couldn't even handle Scott Forstall.
Apple certainly has the money and doesn't know what to do with it other than buy their own stock. Well, that's what they could do with it. $100 billion and you own cable television.
I would also bet they're going to try to find a way to make 4K video distribution work to have a reason to switch, perhaps building a dedicated high-speed VPN from the iTunes Store through the cable company's network where they get a cut of the price - since there's no way you could stream 4K over a wide area without dedicated QoS,.
The question is who will bite. Clearly the wireless carriers have benefitted a lot from Apple's presence - more data usage == more dollars. If Apple can do this with cable companies, they'll have a massive and eager channel to sell shiny 4K TVs and boxes through (and more iTunes content), and Cable companies will have incentive to experiment with a new a-la-carte vs. subscription content pricing model for 4K.
Here's an article for consumers on unbundling[1] I found after one Google search that says that ESPN alone receives $7.2 billion per year from US cable companies, which sounds about right to me. (They also earn money for ads, I don't know if any of that is kicked back to the cable companies. I doubt it...)
It shouldn't be surprising even if you crunch the numbers yourself. There's ~100 million cable subscribers, and the average combined bill (Internet/Cable/Phone) was $128/month in 2011.[2] So that's $153.6 billion per year. It's not hard to imagine that ~20% of that goes to the people making the content that's playing on cable. If anything, it'd be surprising if it were lower than that.
[1] http://money.cnn.com/2013/08/02/technology/cable-a-la-carte/...
[2] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020347910457712...
See press release: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/09/07Apple-Motorola-Cin...
And while that suggests some pretty deep technical savvy at executive levels, they still had heartburn over seemingly simple questions like "can you put radio waves through aluminum?"
It seems to me that the genius of Jobs was 1) to envision customer experiences based on really remarkable extensions / integrations of existing tech and 2) to judge the moment when those visions had gone from "someday" to "now".
As a former Apple fan, I actually find the iPhone's hemorrhaging of market share and Apple's uncertain future extremely encouraging. I always attributed the things I liked about Apple to their struggling underdog status. They lost that with the iPhone, and they've never been the same since.
It will be fascinating to see if some of the old Apple shines through in the years to come.
Alternatively, they might create a few more iPhone- and iPad-like successes and continue ruling new and existing product categories.
In both cases, they'll keep 'shining' for quite some time. If that stops, it'll suck for people like me who are fully invested in their ecosystem. That said, I switched to a Nexus 4 recently and it was surprisingly painless.
Within two years, non-iPhone smartphones will be niche players with partisan user bases, but the bulk of mobile development will be once again for iOS.
And further, the large mainstream bulk of consumers are never going to want luxury, high end devices. So Apple is never going to reduce the other players to a "niche". The big question is largely around whether they try to occupy the top 50% of the market or the top 25% of the top 10%. But they've made it extremely clear that they have no interest in trying to hit the top 75%, let alone the top 100% of the market.
The 5C is $100 and it can already be found for $50 in various large stores.
If this is not catering to the low end, I don't know what is.
The 5c costs over 800 usd in Europe, if that's catering to the low end, I have a bridge to sell you ;)
Absent a major schism between Samsung and Google, or the sudden rise of a competitor (Amazon?) who competes very hard at the low end, Android/GooglePlay is here to stay - it's Google's second major platform (other being Adwords/Adsense)
What is more likely is that the talk about iOS going the way of Mac because Cook != Jobs will dissipate, as Apple continues to successfully compete.
I'm pretty diehard Android fan, but I don't believe for a second that they've sured up the market for good. I think all companies involved will have to continue competing vigorously and I like that just fine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_4
Units sold 1 million as of February 2013[3] 3 million as of 2Q 2013[4]
They just released a new iPhone. It's probably fair to say that that will be a short-term bump that will flatten in good time.
I think it's seriously disingenuous to describe the 5C as a "serious downmarket move". It's a token move at best, and doesn't get anywhere near the price point a "downmarket" device would require.
As for Apple gaining market share in the US, I think what we've seen is that Android is starting to run out of feature phones to replace, so it's now in a fight for the high end space with Apple, which will probably see movement in both directions for a while. I suspect a significant portion of the iPhone market and a larger portion of the Android market is really just phones with touch screens -- these are people who don't buy apps or use most of their phones' capabilities. The "network" effects that will determine the fates of the ecosystems depend on people using their phones as computers rather than merely phones.
In Europe recently Windows phone (i.e. Nokia) is doing very well. It will be interesting to see how that plays out too.
http://9to5mac.com/2013/10/04/comscore-apple-gains-on-androi...
https://twitter.com/asymco/status/386207186801917952/photo/1
There is zero evidence of that and plenty of evidence that it's the opposite. Android is activating more than twice as many phones as the iPhone every day, it's a gap that the iPhone will not be filling for at least five years, if ever.
That's massive, and completely different from the rest of the world.
http://9to5mac.com/2013/10/04/comscore-apple-gains-on-androi...