Since I’ve talked a bit about Apple TV, it’s also worth saying a few words about the iPhone. I can almost pretend this is related to the subject of this blog by talking about the recent announcement that YouTube will be on the iPhone, but the truth is that there hasn’t been a lot of blog-worthy Red news lately, so you’re getting Apple commentary instead.

The situation with the iPhone is very interesting. At first glance, in this market, it appears that Apple is going up against well entrenched, serious competitors. Upon further examination, however, one realizes that most of the players in this space are, frankly, amateurs compared with Apple.

Am I crazy? No. I’m completely serious. Apple’s established competitors in the cell phone market (or the vendors they license software from) mostly have backgrounds building simple embedded software systems for very limited devices. A company that has been developing operating systems for desktop computers for a few decades is in a far better position to tackle the challenges of building a real platform for today’s mobile devices, which are no longer all that limited.

Does anyone really see Nokia or Motorola or even Palm developing a platform that can match OS X? Creating and maintaining a desktop-class OS is not at all trivial. None of Apple’s competitors really has any serious experience with it except for Microsoft, and Microsoft has its own problems.

The iPhone provides by far the best user experience of any handset on the market. As a desktop operating system developer, Apple brings far more to the table on this front than companies which have previously only designed UI for simplistic embedded devices.

I’m using a four year-old Nokia Series 60 phone simply because I don’t particularly consider anything I’ve seen recently to constitute much of an upgrade. I’ll probably be buying an iPhone.

The people who sit around counting the number of bullet points on spec sheets are seriously missing the point, just as they did with the iPod.

Apple’s major recent successes practically all revolve around taking technologies that are out there, but that regular consumers don’t quite get, and turning them into mass market technologies. They played a fairly large role in doing this with WiFi, and they did it with the iPod. Apple didn’t do anything in these instances that was technically much different from what others were doing. What they did was package the technology to make it palatable to regular people, and create a use case for it that regular people understood.

The analysts complaining that the iPhone doesn’t support syncing with Exchange mail servers are completely out to lunch. This isn’t a device for business users or geeks. It’s the first smart phone for the iPod demographic, which is a far larger market.

It’s really dangerous to underestimate Apple here. In many respects, those underestimating Apple are making the same mistake those who underestimate Red have made. As I posted about back January, Red is doing things that people didn’t believe could be done, by bringing a sort of IT mindset to a market which hasn’t yet adopted one. In many respects, by bringing a few decades of desktop OS experience to the smart phone market, Apple is doing something similar, and the consequences for the market are likely to be similarly significant in the long run.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 25th, 2007 at 01:12 PM and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.