PAMtastic Questions and Answers

Still a few days to go, but I think we already have the answer to this little prediction from Palm investor Roger McNamee:

“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone. Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later. Think about it - If you bought the first iPhone, you bought it because you wanted the coolest product on the market. Your two-year contract has just expired. Look around. Tell me what they’re going to buy.”

A: (wait for it) iPhones:

Approximately 12% of consumers who visited a retail store this past weekend to make their iPhone 3G S purchase said they were replacing a BlackBerry handset, the latest sign that Apple continues to make headway against rival Research in Motion in the high-stakes smartphone market.
That data point is one of several interesting statistics to come out of a survey by Piper Jaffray of 256 early iPhone 3G S adopters shopping for their new handsets at Apple retail stores in New York and Minnesota this past weekend.

What a remarkable and unpredictable turn of events! Apple convinced another million rubes to buy their products that, as we all know, are only a temporary fashion and not indicative of a new usage model at all. I thought this introduction would mark the end of the iPhone era as hordes of dissatisfied users fled the sinking, née doomed platform for the Elysian fields of Windows Mobile and Blackberry or scrappy up-and-comer Palm Pre. After all, they've got tiny keyboards. And some other features that are...probably important! RIM (and the rest) can't possibly fail. Right? You don't just walk in and create a "decent phone." It's just not possible. Well, I'm sure these poor, misguided users will be off to RIM, Pre, or Android any day now...

Tablet Rasa

Is it just me or is all the speculation about Verizon/Apple/iTablet/iPhone-lite sort of missing the point? Everyone speculating seems to forget how it is the Kindle works and how Apple might improve on that model.

Here's my prediction: Verizon, if involved at all, will provide transparent but always-on network connectivity but no traditional phone service. This would be just the same as the way Sprint provides WhisperNet to the Kindle; this way there's no ongoing commitment on the part of the consumer, and assuming this tablet/Verizon thing comes to pass, Apple will contract in a similar fashion with Verizon for the data service and a lifetime connection will be included in the purchase of the device. Maybe Apple throws in a MobileMe subscription for a the first year to make for seemless desktop/mobile doodad integration featuring "instant and anywhere" sync.
Any calls made on an iTablet will be made through Skype (or some other IP-phone service) over normal WiFi connections but never, ever over this mobile data connection Verizon might be providing. That keeps AT&T content for the next couple of years as the butcher gradually sidles up with the pneumatic stunner in the runup to 2010 or so. You can sum it up thusly: Verizon:iTablet::WhisperNet:Kindle.

iPhone Mini: if it exists as a US product (and I still have my doubts, though Gruber makes a nice case), it will be an AT&T device; essentially as he described it on DF: a novel form factor (size- or volume-wise) that is essentially an iPhone 1.0/3G in modified clothing. The top billed iPhone will sport an updated version of the same design we see today, but with suitably gaudy specifications by comparison.

Lost his Marble

Adam C. Engst seems to think that Mac OS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard) will or should be free...or at least nearly free. Say, $9.95 for the DVD. His point mostly rests on the perfectly good notion of simultaneously dragging all the remaining Tiger (and, presumably any pre-Tiger OS user still out there) into the future; the net result is a unified system architecture that helps Apple (and any developer) going forward as less heed may be paid to ensuring excellent Jaguar support in some new application.

Here's why he's wrong: Snow Leopard will be Intel only. In fact, Snow Leopard will be by definition a system bifurcation. Every operating PowerPC Macintosh: stuck at Tiger or Leopard (I mention both because the finest system for the PPC was clearly Tiger); all other Macs: on to Our Brighter Future.

So, carve it in stone: Snow Leopard will be announced and a full demo given at WWDC, cost $129.00, only run on Intel-based Macs, and probably ship reasonably soon after announcement, say right around 9/1/09.

How do you sell that, when this upgrade is supposedly only under-the-hood changes along with some much needed but not-at-all glamorous additions? Interface change, my friends. Marble, here we come.

Stanford and Son

You can understand a lot about the iPhone and the iPod Nano (which cost more to produce yet still replaced (at the same price point) the most popular iPod ever, the "mini") from this quote from Steve Jobs, re: Macintosh 25th anniversary

“I don’t think about that,” he said. “When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”

Then consider this, from the then-titan of the industry:

"I'd shut [Apple] down and give the money back to the shareholders."
--Michael Dell, 1997.

And, perhaps even more telling, this notorious quote from Jobs himself, to Fortune magazine in 1996:

"If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."

Which is basically exactly what he did the next year. At any rate, worth considering the state of Dell today, run to the whim of Wall Street analysts, and the then-doomed Apple (Wired circa 1997: Silence grips Apple Deathwatch). One commoditized, the other innovated. This despite the fact that even Macworld magazine had inexplicably begun running Windows NT tips. And in every major instance, Apple's moves were greeted with derision and a fall in stock value (iMac, iPod, Apple Stores, iPhone were all (wrongly) crowned as the last gasp of a desperate company; after all, even might Dell couldn't figure out how to do bricks and mortar. My stars!).

This is ultimately Steve Jobs value to Apple. The actual products aren't nearly important as the corporate daring, the brass balls that are necessary to tack hard against the wind and discontinue your best seller in favor of something even better. Or to say "fuck it, we will put no floppy drive in there." And etc... Very few other companies of size do the same. Hell, very few Mom and Pops will make moves like that. Worth considering.

iPhone and 3G

I'm not so sure that the iPhone will ever support 3G. Methinks, in his heart of hearts, Steve Jobs plans to leapfrog all of that...long-term, the iPhone will essentially be a wireless internet device that can make what amounts to a radio-call in a pinch. Check out this excerpt from an interview with Jobs and AT&T CEO and Chairman Randall Stephenson:

[Stephenson:] Wi-Fi is just an enhancement to your existing wireless capability. I have this perspective that the more wireless we become, the more wireline we become. The deeper you push these wireless capabilities the more you're relying on the underlying wired transport which is a much faster, high-capacity transport.

AT&T would be insane not to see it this way. Essentially-universal broadband is coming sooner or later. They're a copper-wire company that needs to be an over-the-air company. If they don't leverage that existing (and unique) backbone into something useful for a WiFi world they're out of business; they're certainly not going to require all that wire for the future's phone calls. So they gradually morph into a WiFi-providing, fat datapipe company, leveraging a wireless phone userbase that need not even notice the change as it happens. Ultimately, you're paying a subscription fee to AT&T for WiFi access that happens to include access to EDGE (and 3G) networks for use in a pinch, otherwise known as "away from the city."
For AT&T it's a return to the good old days: they control the underlying network, they control the access devices (instead of a Princess Slimline, you get an iPhone or derivative), they subcontract access out to other providers. There is no Step Two. Step three: Profit!