To Be Fair

Perhaps I was a bissel harsh on Apple and the iPhone in my last post. I did not mean to imply that the iPhone was not a good product (it's just less capable and more restrictive). In fact, it has many great qualities  one real advantage for most people (and the iPhone 4 has a great screen). It is so simple that anybody - from baby to bubby - can use it. Think about it. There's essentially ONE button (plus power and volume). That's it. One button. No complicated choices to make. Simplicity!

The simplification goes beyond the single button approach too. The only things on the screen are apps. Need to launch an app? There it is! The interface is designed so intuitively that you can just scroll, click, done. The screen is spared from other distractions as well. There are no widgets to confuse the user with app-lite functions. Notifications are kept as uninformative as possible. They either pop up on the screen with a message and then disappear forever or sit on top of the app icon as a nondescript number. Also, no need to worry about apps running in the background like some gonif in the night. There are only a few pre-selected, Steve-approved services that can run in the background and developers must make special calls and rewrite code to use them. No need to worry about whether limiting the capabilities of the platform will stifle innovation. Innovation often comes at the cost of simplicity.

Need to connect to your computer? No problem. Only one way to do that too - iTunes. For most people, it doesn't matter that iTunes has become a bloated monster program. All that matters is that it simplifies moving pictures, music, movies, books, and apps onto the phone. Most people also don't care that apps only come from one source and that all those apps have to be carefully and arbitrarily vetted first. To them, quick updates and bug fixes are not important. No big deal if the latest fart-app doesn't work properly there are hundreds more in the app store.

This formula, while entirely too simple and restrictive for me, works amazingly, magically, well. When somebody buys an iPhone they know exactly what kind of experience they can expect. It may not be the best product out there but it is easily the most popular. It offers a seamless integration with the desktop computer. The term "iPhone" is almost synonymous with smartphone. It doesn't encroach upon one's curiosity or sense of independence. Most of all, Apple's massive market share will guarantee that these tchachtkes will be the standard for a long, long time.

To finish off this post of praise, I tried to come up with something to compare the iPhone's amazing success to. I needed a product that owned the market despite vastly superior alternatives. Could be used by any shlob whose VCR still blinked 12:00, was regarded with a growing sense of disdain by the technologically elite, and allowed its parent company to partake in near-monopolistic thuggery. The only real comparison that I can draw is to say that the iPhone is the Internet Explorer (or the giant "E" that represented the internet to so many people) of phones!