The backlash against Apple is reaching gale force. Wags from LA to New York to London are convinced that the iPhone 4 is somehow the Edsel of mobile phones, and the elite of the paste-eaters are insistent that Android is just the thing to bring down dictatorial empire of Jobs. Which begs the question: uh, LOLWUT?
Apple’s explosion into mobile telephony has been a circus hitched to a tornado and no mistake. Over the last three years, Apple has made more profit off the iPhone than every other mobile phone maker has made on their entire product line. That’s an innovation right there, to bring Silicon Valley margin to a segment that was previously fixated on providing the phone free to the user in hopes that they’d make it up on minutes. More impressive, though, is the projection that Apple’s profit on the iPhone in 2010 will be double all other US phone sale profit combined – on 3% market share. Clearly, they’re making crazy paper, and people are willing to pay for their goods.
So why the nerd backlash? I suspect it’s got a lot to do with the fact that the iPhone *is* popular and is the face of the smartphone revolution, while simultaneously being a relatively tight ecosystem. It’s not “open,” it’s not “free,” it’s not got root access and the ability to load your own operating system ROM and and and and… well, you’ve still got to “jailbreak” many if not most Android phones, and in the case of the Droid X circumvent hardware protection. Let’s also remember that somebody did remotely delete applications off their phones, and it wasn’t Apple. And the platform itself is fragmenting in all directions, with multiple versions of Android in the wild and different UI layers over the top – and that with the end of the Nexus One, you can no longer go out and buy a phone running the latest version of the Android OS on the retail market. If Apple were killing off phone models after seven months, revving the OS every three and obsoleting hardware barely halfway through its contract, the Slashdot gladiators and Gizmorons would be losing their shit.
The problem for the paste-eaters is that the iPhone’s not meant for them, and it’s successful. Most people don’t care about being able to install this widget they wrote themselves. Most people couldn’t give a shit about having “root access” to the phone. And I guarantee you that most people haven’t even considered the developer model behind their phone. All they know or care about is that they like it and it works.
And this is why Apple has succeeded so far, and why the iPhone 4 issues are the biggest problem yet: Apple has blown off the usual laundry list of specs and features in favor of one criterion – user experience. The reason why the original iPhone didn’t have 3G was because the coverage was so bad and the power demand so high, there was no way to make it work without sucking. The reason why the first two iPhones didn’t do video capture is because cellphone video at the time was, at best, 320×240 and maybe 15 frames per second, and that sucks. Full-motion VGA in the 3GS, 640×480 at 30fps, didn’t suck, and that’s why you didn’t get it until then. Video calling has been around for years, and it sucked, and that’s why Apple didn’t offer it until they had an implementation that was easy to explain and simple to use – and didn’t suck.
UE.
Thus the issues with the iPhone 4, and the consternation at Apple. Reading the papers, you’d think the iPhone 4 couldn’t get a signal anywhere, and any attempt to pick it up causes it to implode. Patently not the case – I was in an elevator yesterday, bridging the antenna gap with a damp finger on both sides, and I still had 2 bars of 3G and the call sounded unimpaired. But if people think the phone is terrible, that’s all it takes – which is why Himself was so crabby at that presser. He knew what had to be done, and he did it, but he didn’t like having to answer for a problem that was nowhere near what it was being made out to be. But ultimately, I think he’ll be fine, because there’s still a waiting list for new iPhones (at least as of yesterday at the Apple Store in Palo Alto) – and people don’t line up to buy something they think sucks.
And so we fall back on the oldest of nerd tropes: that the people buying Apple are sheep, are morons, are fanboys who will eat whatever shit is shoveled out of Cupertino, that only an idiot would pay for an iPhone when you can get this amazing thing with an 8 MP camera and a 4-inch screen and 4G and a kickstand and it’s got video calling too and it’s open and you can root it and and and and…
Message to my fellow geeks: there are a lot of regular donks out there. They do not have the same priorities. They want something else, and Apple is apparently willing to give it to them. Ever since 1997, one thing has been true at Apple: the nerd market is not, cannot be, and will not be the focus of their attentions, because that’s not where the money is.