Letters to the Editor
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What about battery life?
The iPhone sounds like my dream gadget--but I'm not shelling out $500 to get my heart broken watching the battery capacity drain as fast as it does with iPods.
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yesterday was the beginning of the 21st century
In all seriousness, yesterday was the beginning of the 21st century.
The entire industry devoted to those crummy mini-browsers in current cellphones? Gone. Erased.
Who wants to develop customized content for that platform now? Who wants to use standards designed for matchbook displays and tincan/wire technology?
Indeed, the entire Windows CE / Palm / Blackberry / Symbian ecosystem will wither under the onslaught of demand for future OS X embedded devices.
This is only the beginning. Cingular has the exclusive for the initial iPhone, but which carrier will snag the iPhone Nano?
Imagine an iPhone that is NOT an internet device or e-mail platform. Imagine an iPhone that is just an iPod and cellular phone.
Indeed, imagine the next iPod that is NOT a phone! Imagine the next Mac Book!
The weight and momentum of what was left unsaid yesterday has the kinetic energy of a bullet.
The iPhone we saw yesterday is the Mac Pro quad Xeon processor of cellphones. I am looking forward to the Mac Mini version.
There will be endless variations of consumer gadgets using the rock solid OS X platform. Guess what the hot devlopment environment / platform of the 21st century is going to be? Hint: It's NOT brown.
Make no mistake, Apple has vaulted far ahead of Microsoft and the others with their implementation of 'embedded' OS X.
Microsoft will try to shoehorn a bloated Vista into the new market for super intelligent devices that was created singlehandedly yesterday by Apple.
Vista Media Server for the home? More like Zune on steroids - and everyone knows that steroids make you swollen and stupid.
Apple has become the next Google. Pundits and skeptics will look askance, but the smart money will ride OS X all the way to the megayacht marina.
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How much did Apple pay you for that commercial?
The begining of the 21st century, huh? The iPhone seems to be aimed squarely at the Sidekick or Helio market segment. Since the upcoming iPhone doesn't appear to support business apps, corporate users are very likley to stick to Windows/Palm/Blackberry environment.
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no business apps?
The iPhone runs Mac OSX, a stable, experienced, and versatile operating system. In terms of the applications that'll run on these phones, there's just about no limit. It's a simple job to port a program.
This is the coolest gadget to be created by the human species to date. All y'all who think it's not going to be the most popular new product of 2007 (and probably of the next 5 years) are sadly nearsighted.
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KStone, let me spell it out for you
What we saw yesterday was only the primal, initial version of what is to come.
The OS X operating system is completely scalable. It can run on almost any microprocessor. What does that mean?
Developers who want to run their software effortlessly on multiple hardware devices and platforms can develop for Mac OS X, then with little effort, port their software everywhere.
Connecting to Microsoft enterprise servers and networks will be just as easy as connecting to Yahoo and Google, but the consumer product space is infinitely larger than the business market. Obsessing over corporate connectivity misses the big picture.
Patents will prevent competitors from easily duplicating Apple's elegant efforts. Apple has learned a lot of lessons from its bruising battles with Microsoft. This time, all of their bases are covered.
I can't say it enough: Apple possesses a stable, scalable, portable, flexible, visually compelling, universally applicable and DESIRABLE user interface that is light years ahead of any so-called 'competition'.
Software systems designed for OS X can run on cellphones, if Apple wants to allow it. Or an intelligent portable DVD player. Or an intelligent digital video camera. Or a handheld gaming device. Or a console gaming device. Or a microwave, fridge, dishwasher or dryer.
Or, please lord, an intelligent universal remote control.
Why would I want to run Mac applications on a universal remote? I wouldn't want to run entire applications, but it will be great to have a stable, consistent, robust platform to deploy pieces of applications and make connections to existing applications and systems.
Imagine if, when you buy some new gadget, you could 'add buttons' to your universal remote by merely downloading software updates, instead of throwing away a plastic device and buying a new one.
Heck, if it only costs me $1 every time, I would probably go for it. No physical product changes hands, just data. And money.
Imagine an intelligent digital still camera with the power of Adobe Photoshop in a form that the common man could use effectively.
The blinking LCD clock on the VCR is very 'last century', the epitome of technology possibilities unrealized.
Unrealized possibilities like crackberry keyboard buttons and matchbook sized web browsers and $3 ringtone downloads and crashing Windows CE devices and punching '4444466666' in the proper sequence on your cellphone keypad just so you can text message 'hi mom'.
What this announcement is about is finally implementing intelligence in devices across the consumer gadgetry spectrum.
The bar has been raised. Nobody will be satisfied with less.
Watch the keynote video. http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/jan/j47d52oo/m_8848125_350_ref.mov
Consider that no one can possibly begin to predict the infinite ways that this technology is going to affect common people's lives.
Will Apple make mistakes? Sure. Are they going to be in the driver's seat? You bet.
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An engineering masterpiece!
Wow!
I was blown away by the demos of the phone on the Apple site:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/
If you haven't seen it already, take a second to watch the iPod functionality demo for the phone.
Coincidentally, I played with a Zune for the first time today. Poor Microsoft - Steve Jobs ate their lunch on this front this time around.
With only 4GB or 8GB and the $500 price tag, this first iteration of the iPhone is far from perfect. It has the potential of being the coolest multifunction electronic gadget ever.
It's hard not to get excited about the possibilites this platform might provide.