You’re Missing the Point

Unless you’ve been living under some kind of rock, you’ll know that the big news today (and yesterday, for us) was the announcement and demo of Apple’s iPhone. The Web is up in flames talking about it. It seems to me, from my reading of comments on tech websites (Apple and non-Apple), response has been divided into mostly two camps: 90% in the “give it to me now or i’ll have a stroke” camp, the rest with “what’s so great about that?” (figures pulled out of the air)

What I really want to know is this: how can anyone belong to the latter?

Regardless of your relationship with (or hatred for) Apple, what they have produced is simply astounding. There are some guys on the tech boards who won’t rest until they’ve put Linux in everything, from toasters to phones. Others yet believe that you can get a better phone with better specs at a better price. We — the “fanboys (and girls)” — know this. But we’re still going to choose this over a beefed up, cheaper phone with “more features”, and here’s why: the experience.

Assume that all phone designs are equal (which they’re not). Even if the iPhone looked the same, the interface on the iPhone still blows everything on the market out of the water. Apple is the one company that truly understands the user experience, and it shows in all their products. It’s not enough to have a robust operating system with Unix underpinnings, they’ve also made OS X “insanely great” by giving thought to details like where each button should be, the placement of the “Yes” and “No” in dialog boxes, minute details like that which are the signature of a truly polished product that’s hard not to get philosophical or romantic about. Apple’s not interested in defining new markets, which is why they will probably never make a tablet. What they’re very good at, however, is to take a product which already exists, and to make it “insanely great”. They did that with MP3 players — in the early days I had several Creative MP3 players, including the Nomad Jukebox, as well as some early Korean ones; the hardware was alright, some of it was even good, but the user interface was a nightmare (remember this was circa 1999-2000). Even for a techie like myself, I hated them with a passion. They just didn’t make sense. Then the iPod came along, and everything changed.

It’s the same with phones. If you’ve only read about it on websites and blogs, do yourself a favour — watch the “video”:http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/j47d52oo/event/, and come back and say you don’t want one. Assuming the phone is in your pocket. You take it out. You unlock it. How? By taking your finger, and drawing a stroke across to the right. No more accidental phone unlockings (which make it necessary for people like me, people whose names start with A and are always first in phone books, to have free incoming call plans).

Then you download email, and it has pictures attached to it. You want to zoom in. Instead of hopelessly pressing a number of buttons to zoom and pan, you take your fingers — just as you would eat Indian food with your hands — and you pinch the photo. Pinch and release. As easy as rice and dhal. The photo zooms in and out, and pans, just like that.

There are no buttons, so that the keys can change according to the application. Oh, and it’s also an iPod. That’s also a phone. You tilt it, and it goes into landscape mode. There are ambient light sensors so it knows when to light and dim, for energy conservation. There is a proximity sensor so that you don’t accidentally activate the touchscreen with your ear.

On top of an already great user experience — the phone runs OS X! Possibly a stripped down version, but with the underpinnings of OS X, you can be sure that the best user experience on the computing platform is coming to a 3.5″ screen near you. Everything about it is phenomenal, and it addresses an important shortcoming in existing phones: applications are not “baby apps”. They are real, full-fledged (though not full sized) desktop apps. If you know and love OS X — you’d be shitting in your pants like me right now, knowing it will power the phone (in some variation).

Sure, you could buy a phone with better specs — but is it a better phone? What does “better” mean to you? Can you recreate this experience?

In an “interview”:http://youtube.com/watch?v=SX1Lz8PDgg8 with CNBC earlier, Steve Jobs (a.k.a. God) talks about how they made it because it was something they wanted for themselves. At the core of Apple Inc is this diverse pool of passionate people who are very good at disparate things, like industrial design, usability, hardware, and software.

And that’s why they make insanely great products. They have soul.

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