iPhone: Everything Apple Conglomerated (and More!)

Today's big technology announcement came from MacWorld, the not-entirely-unexpected (Steve Jobs himself has been looking forward to the announcement for two and a half years) announcement of the "iPhone."

Three Products in One (and more!)

The iPhone is said to be three revolutionary products of the type that "change everything" all rolled into a single device:

• a widescreen iPod with touch controls
• a revolutionary mobile phone
• a breakthrough Internet communications device

These descriptions don't tell us much, certainly. The new "Multitouch" technology that lets you navigate using your fingers could well be a significant advance in usability of hand-held devices. Especially if it "ignores unintended touches" and "supports multi-fingers gesture" as Jobs announced.

Clearly, the ability of any device to do these things well is a function of hardware, measurement accuracy, and analytic software. As one who has worked for a very long time in the realm of data acquisition and automated identification and interpretation of data signals, I can tell you the features Steve Jobs is promising in the iPhone are not easy to accomplish.

So, I Can Only Use iPod with iPhone?

Certainly, the iPhone sounds like an interesting device. My personal first complaint would be that it appears to lock me into Apple's iTunes/iPod if I want to listen to some music.

After listening to years of complaining from a great many successful companies about Microsoft, it really irks me that Apple seems to care nothing about "openness" when it comes to putting some music MP3's on a device.

We use Rhapsody for our downloadable music. Why? Because the primary user in the house likes to listen to hundreds of new songs each month, and likes to be able to have over a thousand songs on her MP3 player, changing them all the time. And a subscription service like Rhapsody is much more economical for that kind of user than iTunes/iPod ($15/month versus $100+). And even if you choose to buy the Rhapsody songs permanently, you can do so for about the same price iTunes charges. So, in terms of economics, why would anyone who wants to listen to lots and lots of songs ever choose iTunes/iPod?

But can I get our MacBooks to connect to Rhapsody and download new songs to our iRiver MP3 player? Only if I use BootCamp to boot directly into Windows XP with Service Pack 2. In other words, I have to "exit" Apple technology, because Apple technology is not open enough to permit me to use their USB interface and their operating system to run the Rhapsody client that downloads and refreshes the licenses of music MP3s on our iRiver device.

So, yes, to me this is a problem. A device that locks out my favorite MP3 music technology is one that will make me feel like I'm wasting dollars if I buy it, since I'll be paying for technology I'll never use. iPhone will run Mac OS X, so I don't expect to be able to plug in my iRiver and see anything happen.

Is Technology Conglomeration Advancement?

Another point: combining somewhat related technologies into a single device is something that has been and will be tried and tried again throughout history. It always seems so convenient. But, often real consumers don't want it.

If you look at the actual patterns in the history of technology, the progress is really most often in the opposite direction from conglomeration. A technology that is desirable and hence becomes successful usually develops and splits into multiple strands, scatters in different directions, each specialized to address a specific desired functionality. Hence, we have multiple types of cars, computers, operating systems, mobile device architectures, etc. Whereas products like all-in-one car/boat/planes haven't really gone anywhere.

I'm certainly not going to sit here and proclaim that the iPhone won't be a very successful and profitable product for Apple. They do have a marketing genius. But, in terms of technology, what are you really gaining by combining the iPod, phone, and Internet communications into a single device? A shared screen and user interface. I mean really, loading a few circuit boards and a selection of programs into a new hand-held device? Where's the revolutionary advance there?

But There's Hope: That Novel UI!

But when I start thinking about what is being promised in that intelligent, digit-driven user interface, which sounds so incredibly novel -- that could indeed be wonderful, a real advance in sensor technology, data acquisition, data reduction and analysis, and application of software that applies artificial intellegence to interpret human motives based on sequential and simultaneous data inputs.

If they've accomplished that, then the iPhone will indeed have made a lasting contribution to the history of technology. And when the day comes that the new UI is sold on devices that don't assume you're an iPod user, I'll run right out and purchase mine!

-- Kevin Farnham
O'Reilly Media