10 Jan 2007 2207H

My take on the Macworld Keynote

Well, by now everyone’s seen, read, or heard about about the two hours of Macworld’s annual Steve Jobs show coverage yesterday, which featured two major products, the expected Apple TV and the iPhone. These yearly events have almost become, for me, the computing world’s equivalent of a Terence Koh gallery show, replete with the artist’s own gold-plated excrement for sale, and yet, I’m always much more excited about the possibility of buying Jobs’ Apple-branded excrement. Let’s give the major points a quick run-down.

The Apple TV launches as a wireless box, likely using the 802.11 draft-n standard (which means you’ll have to get the new draft-N compliant Airport wifi cards and the base station). The box, which has a form factor much like the Mac Mini, syncs content for both Mac and Windows, sports HDMI, and is equipped a puny 40GB drive (yes, it’s hard to believe 40 GB could be considered puny now).

It’s simply a box for streaming content (meaning, really, iTunes Music/Movie Store) to the big screen/entertainment center, and there was no mention made of HD content, possibly because it may be too early and that’s not a big item in Apple’s blue water strategy.

It does seem a little underwhelming in the typical Apple way of doing things. I think that the real test will be to see if the open source community will be able to engineer some kind of solution that can work with the Apple TV, like say, the VLC player or the Myth project, or for Apple to leverage or acquire that kind of functionality. That would be most useful: some kind of DVR function that could take the hundreds of gigabytes of content that many people have and connect it seamlessly to their home entertainment systems, but I didn’t hear anything of the sort yesterday. Perhaps Steve just wanted to get to the iPhone.

That’s where Apple’s spent most of its time both in the keynote and during the last few years. As I saw the first few shots off macrumorslive.com, I distinctly recalled seeing both a patent for multi-touch gestures filed under the Apple name and also a Chinese-manufactured prototype for what had been speculated to have been a widescreen iPod, about the time of the 5G iPod announcement, and it’s clear now that these were all parts of the iPhone. The phone/iPod convergence device is actually a pretty compelling idea. It builds on Apple’s existing strengths in creating compelling, memorable, pleasurable user experiences, and all the work that was done creating the applications for OS X. The usability factor alone was compelling enough to have most users at scrolling, as Steve said. I think this will be an area that mobile companies will be smacking themselves in the forehead for years to come. They could have owned the user experience, but could not think too wildly outside the box. Apple will reap the rewards for this risk: the wide color screen — which automatically detects orientation, great feature — enables a whole new level of rich featured interactivity that simply wasn’t capable before, the resolution of the touchscreen is quite nuanced, and since it is of a sufficient size and ease-of-use factor, this means the usual time to learn to use the device will likely be much shortened, with a much broader user appeal.

As exciting as the device is in and of itself, the real excitement isn’t in the device. The iPhone now brings together capabilities that will make previously-dreamed-about services feasible at last. For instance, now that we have the capabilities, you could create a much richer business-driven internet experience, where you could receive HTML email, then click the button to get to the site. The site will use IP tracking to locate the nearest stores, restaurants, or other services near you, stream Flash video to the user through the EDGE network for the browsing experience, and then the browser will enable you to purchase it, perhaps including just-in-time fulfillment so you could pick it up from the store during your lunch break. And that’s just the tip of it when you think about what social networking applications could spring forth from having all these capabilities, either for business or for casual use.

And that is truly revolutionary, in ways that, say, the Segway was not despite its early, designed hype. Remember the announcement from John Doerr, that entire cities would be designed around the Segway? That will be true of the iPhone, insofar as whole services will be designed around the iPhone. And it’s inevitable that other mobile companies are now going to sink their resources to capitalize on Apple’s hard work.

There is a little risk associated with announcing a product so early, but I can’t imagine any part of it that would cause the FCC to jump up and shake a finger at the iPhone. Still, with a launch date of June, is it possible that a manufacturer like Nokia or Motorola could jump on that so quickly? Motorola has been hiring a lot of designers out of IIT D-School lately, so it may be possible. But, realistically, I think that no organization has the flexibility to overcome the challenges in a concerted way that Apple has already dedicated several years to doing. I’d speculate that everyone else is about a year, maybe two behind, and only because they can now just blatantly copy the interaction design patterns that Apple’s already sunk so much work into discovering.

It’s almost too much to absorb. Yet, there will be those who will still ask, where was the ritual One More Thing announcement? In all the post-iPhone excitement, it went almost unnoticed. Apple’s taken a pretty big step here: they’ve dropped the Computer out of their corporate name. Since computing is ubiquitous now, explicitly saying computer seems altogether vague, limiting, and increasingly quaint. It’s just Apple, Inc. now. I like that change. As companies move away from products towards services, this seems a step long overdue. I wouldn’t bet on IBM changing its name anytime soon though. . .

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