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...

Stonecutters

Time for prediction accuracy measurement everyone! Yes, it's delicious PAM; this time, we review our psychohistorical analysis re: iPhone, Mac OS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard), and the magical mystical marble interface. Let's review. I said:

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.

Alright, Snow Leopard was announced and given demo at WWDC: +1
SL will cost, um, $29.00: -1(00)
SL will indeed run only on Intel-based Macs: +1
SL will indeed ship "in September": +1

75%. Not too shabby. Take that, eternal asshat Rob Enderle.
On Marble: Clearly, that'll be the reason the next update reverts to $129 pricing...

iPhone Mini: I "have my doubts" and still do. +1, huzzah! Also a bonus dose of goodwill for noting the notion that existing iPhone tech takes up the "low end" (whether in Mini form or not) while shiny new iPhonery takes the old price-point with feature/memory extension. Fish in a barrel, that one.

The tablet: too soon to score. Certainly the animus directed at AT&T onstage implies a "hey look, it's that Verizon guy!" attitude amongst the Apple powers that be. We shall see. Score it a zero for now, though.

That gives the staff a 4 out of 5, for a glittering 80%. Everyone feel free to take one extra mint on the way out of the office tonight.

Kindlegarten

This is one of the strangest statements I've seen in a long time:

We see that when people buy a Kindle, they actually continue to buy the same number of physical books going forward as they did before they owned a Kindle. And then incrementally, they buy about 1.6 to 1.7 electronic books, Kindle books, for every physical book that they buy.

That's Amazon honcho Jeff Bezos as quoted in the NYT (reporting on the introduction of the NOW! Bigger! Kindle DX).

Amazon reports rather impressive sales of Kindle-books, especially given that the article states there are probably fewer than 1M Kindles in circulation as of today. And yet, people who buy the Kindle (a device whose chief benefit would appear to be the avoidance of buying dead-tree books that the buyer has to lug around, store, and etc...) keep right on buying dead-tree books they have to lug around at the same rate as before...they simply supplement those with some Kindle-books.

Are these gift books? Do these buyers understand what their Kindle does (and that it does more than calculate tips)? Particular authors that are not available on the Kindle for some reason? What possible explanation can there be (if we assume that Bezos is being completely open about the underlying stats and isn't simply mistaken on some point). Seriously, this seems to me to be the key moment of the whole presser but it's reported without too much note.
But this admission does go a long way towards explaining why Amazon decided to put out a Kindle reader app for the iPhone: it's unlimited upside to them. If they sell a Kindle once you've read some of their books on the iPhone (and presumably discovered that you could read on the little screen after all, but decide you would prefer to do so on a Kindle for one reason or another) then it's even more profit for them. But, if you don't make the leap to their device, you're still apparently going to buy just as many dead-tree books as you ever did, plus some number of Kindle-reader books for the iPhone.

Vaguely unbelievable, but apparently true.

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.