You Can’t Fire Me, I Don’t Work In This Van

According to iLounge O’Reilly is making available it’s “rough cut” of “iPhone Open Application Development” available. I’m not sure how useful this book will be with the official SDK on the way from Apple this month, but hopefully most of the frameworks should be the same. Still cool for those that want to program for the mobile version of OS X.

So I’ll admit it. I bought MacHeist’s bundle. I needed a copy of Snapz Pro, and to be fair, I would have bought it separately. But the opportunity to sample Pixelmator was attractive. Unfortunately, the MacHeist crew isn’t making me feel too comfortable about surrendering my credit card number to them…

It all started with John Welch over at his blog. Apparently John posted something to his twitter about the whole Malcor thing, and John Casasanta of MacHeist decided to take it a wee bit personally.

I’ll spare you from having to read the actual entry by basically summing up what happened: Read the rest of this entry »

The other day Jens Alfke made news when he announced he was leaving Apple. I first met Jens at WWDC2006, where I have attended a session that he and a mutual friend were giving. Afterwards I had dinner with him and some of his team, where I got to talk with him about his history with Apple.

Jens raises an interesting concern about Apple and how they treat their engineers. Those of us who were around for the pre-OS X days might remember that in every software, in the about dialog, there was a list of engineers who worked on the project. It never felt obtrusive, but I imagine that it gave engineers a chance to show their family and friends that their name had ended up on a finished product that they had been working on for the last six months. Read the rest of this entry »

(In advance I will apologize, some images go outside the margins on this entry.)

For those who don’t know, a “hacker” who goes by Malcor is supposedly taking down Mac related notes. I’ll let you read his blog here for the whole story, the basics are that he has supposedly taken down several Mac related sites for being too shallow.

When you look at it, something just doesn’t add up. Malcor’s first target was http://www.glennwolsey.com/ , a site dedicated to misc Macintosh guides and news entries as far as I can tell. His reasoning for taking down the site is because he is supposedly a angry PC user who is mad at people mocking his PC hardware (remember this, it will be key later.)

It is infected with smugness, and more and more, the symptoms are starting to show, whether it’s the eye roll at the non-iPod music player, or the snide comments about my laptop’s lack of curves.

Read the rest of this entry »

First, let me start with saying this. I think the iPhone is the biggest thing to come out of Apple since the original Macintosh. Bigger than the iPod. Bigger than OS X.

I see a lot of people complaining about the iPhone. Some people have legitimate complaints. No sign of iChat so far, and no word on 3rd party developer support. But then I see complaints like the following:

• “It has no 3G! It’s doomed to fail!”
• “My Motosonyericsung phone can send text messages and make phone calls just fine! Apple is doomed to fail!”
• “It’s too expensive! No one will buy this over other phones! It’s doomed to fail!”

And so on.

The problem is everyone is stuck in this phone mentality. How will it compete with other phones? Why does it not work on this phone network? I know it’s called the iPhone, but during Steve’s speech, he made it clear the iPhone is three devices. It’s an iPod, internet communicator, and finally a phone. The iPhone is really only 1/3 phone. Yet, everyone is constantly talking about the phone aspects of the device, while forgetting about the other two aspects of the device.

Let’s do an exercise here. Why don’t we make a list of everything the average consumer does on a computer. If you’re a PC gamer with a 4 drive RAID, and Quad Core CPU, and SLI, please don’t list what you do with a computer. Let’s instead review what your mother would do on her computer, or your grandmother if your mother is particularly geek.

• Send email
• Store pictures
• Browse the web
• Listen to music
• Watch movies

Now, go back through the list, comparing each activity to a feature of the iPhone. Notice something? The iPhone can do everything a normal user usually does on their computer.

Some people think of the iPhone the same way Apple tells us to think of the iPod. As a device to make people more familiar with the Apple brand. The halo effect of the iPhone will bring more people to the platform, just as the iPod did. I think this is making things more complicated than the actually are. The iPhone is the next big thing Steve is always looking for. The iPhone is the next Macintosh. A user isn’t going to switch to the Mac because they bought an iPhone. They’re going to realize they can use their iPhone for everything and simply dump their PC.

Think about it. Apple has, at best currently, a 5% market share. There are predictions that their market share might grow to 10%. But the chances that the Macintosh will gain a controlling share of the market are slim to none. If Apple wants to get ahead of Microsoft and others, they can’t sit around working on the PC. Apple needs to come up with the next big thing. The thing that comes after the PC and makes it obsolete.

Apple isn’t seeking to revolutionize just the phone market. They are seeking to revolutionize something much bigger. If Apple replaces the PC with the next big thing, the Macintosh vs. PC wars become irrelevant. Windows becomes irrelevant. How does the PC matter when you can carry the exact same functionality in the palm of your hand?

And this is the beauty of the iPhone. While everyone talks about how this will replace phones from other vendors, they miss Apple’s real target, the PC. And when you look at it, it makes sense. Would you rather have a laptop for $1000, or a pocket computer for $600?

I’m not suggesting everyone ditch their computers in June and go out and buy an iPhone. And I’m not suggesting Pro users and gamers move to iPhones (can you imagine Photoshop on a screen that small?) I think PC’s and Macs will always be around for high end users. But over the next few years, I think the iPhone is going to evolve into a real competitor for the PC to the average consumer. Just as the Macintosh revolutionized a market full of Apple II’s, the iPhone will revolutionize a market full of PC’s. Steve Job’s comparisons between the iPhone and the Macintosh, and his idea of a new revolution, couldn’t be more clear.