And, on that note, how come virtually none of the ads for Apple’s new iPhone shows the unit at an angle? The ads I’ve seen show you very, very quick turns of the phone, which is held flatly at camera angle. I can’t tell how thick this thing is. And I’m a little suspicious of its rounded and rather dull exterior: I suspect Apple will refine this gadget over the next few years, making it sleeker, better looking, and of course less expensive, just as they have done with the iPod. The iPod now is much thinner and, frankly, better designed than it was at launch. And I have to assume some of the neato features of the iPhone will (likely sooner than later) get ported to the next generation iPods, meaning you get a dedicated entertainment device that will have several times the storage the iPhone does for a lot less money.
Much as I’d like to rush out and buy an iPhone, first I really can’t afford it (AT&T is not discounting the phone), but my real hesitation is I think it looks a little clumsy, the way the iPod did at launch. And the current generation of iPods are so much better, I can only imagine what the iPhone will be after Apple has first cleared out all the early adopters.
My money would be on the next generation iPod: where some of the cool innovations of iPhone are bound to debut. Even if the new iPod price isn’t appreciably lower than the iPhone, you’re bund to have exponentially more storage on a new iPod and you won’t need to pay some cell phone company an enormous service fee every month (remember, with the iPhone, you can’t just get voice service, you have to buy the expensive voice and data packages).
7 Comments
I am unlikely to get a phone/PDA convergence device like an iPhone until and unless it becomes impossible to get the things separately. Why? Because for me, a PDA has to be at least a certain size before it's functional to me. And that size is too big for a phone.
The enV or whatever it's called comes close, folding open for PDA use, but the screen is still a little too small. Those flatscreen pull-out things from Earth: Final Conflict would be ideal, but we're about five development generations from flexible displays that are commercially feasible, and then another few from ones that can act as touchscreens too.
scrawled by Dave Van Domelen | June 6, 2007 11:37 AM
I rambled on about my thoughts on the iPhone in the previous post about Cingular, so I'll just sum up and say I agree with you Priest. It looks really slick, and someday I might get one. But for right now it's too expensive and too new. Within a year or two it'll probably be quite a bit more polished and a bit cheaper and I'll look at it then.
Oh and according to the iPhone's wikipedia entry it'll be just a little less then a half inch thick. .46 inches to be precise.
scrawled by JasonD | June 6, 2007 1:50 PM
I'm hearing rumors of a widescreen iPod..maybe based on the iPhone interface...coming soon.
Apple's WWDC is coming in the next week, so we may hear something there (they speed bumped and techbumped the MacBook Pros yesterday, so that won't be an announcement, and it's a known that an all but finished Tiger is going to the developers at the show, so Jobs is gonna want something for a surprise.)
scrawled by Scavenger | June 6, 2007 4:32 PM
Todd: is Tiger Apple’s response to Vista? It’s certainly likely to come across as such. I’m almost shocked MI$ hasn’t put out its own commercials aping the Apple ones and touting Vista, except that MI$ is 97% of the market and could probably care less about the Mac ads since it remains unlikely that Mac will ever be taken seriously in the general PC market. There really is no OS war: Linux is likely as popular if not moreso than Mac, but the general pop is simply indoctrinated into Windows and I can’t imagine what it would take to get the general pop interested in another OS.
In that light (Tiger as Mac’s answer to Vista), Tiger looks pretty lame to me. A few GUI tricks, and maybe some stuff I don’t understand, but otherwise it doesn’t get me terribly excited. The MacBook Pros are a little more interesting, but, again, in a world of laptops, I’m not getting why I should go to a whole ‘nuther OS (and spend hefty cash) for an Apple.
So, yeah, they need a real player for their expo. A widescreen iPod would tend to look a lot like an iPhone. If they can make one at a lower price point, that’d be great, too. I have no doubt they *can* make such a beast. I just doubt they will. And, if Cingular/AT&T has even half a brain, there’s some contractual stipulation preventing Apple from marketing such a device for X-months or even X-years since it would tank, I mean TANK, the iPhone. Why would I sign some long-term contract for an over-priced service from SBC of all people if I didn’t absolutely have to?!
Jason: if the iPhone is that thin… why on EARTH won’t they demonstrate that in their TV ads? What am I missing?
scrawled by priest | June 8, 2007 9:59 AM
Tiger is the current Mac operating system, and predates Vista by about a year, I think. Todd's thinking of Leopard, which will be featured at that conference next week, and released sometime in October. I don't know enough about Mac operating systems to really grasp how big of a leap it is - the official names for these OS's are 10.4 and 10.5, so it never sounds like a big deal.
I almost jumped at the latest MacBook Pros - I work in LEDs, so the news screens with LED backlighting is more exciting to me than most people - but the screen resolutions are to low for me. I like my six year old 1600 x 1200 15" screen, and I can't see myself giving up the desktop space. As for the iPhone, it's more tempting than any other smartphone I've ever seen, but I'm still a $30/month, no texting, no webphone guy happy with my video iPod. It's just not what I'm looking to carry around right now.
scrawled by Craig | June 8, 2007 8:16 PM
Priest, I can't say for certain why they don't highlight the fact that it is that skinny. If I had to guess, I'd say because they want to appeal to the bleeding edge customers. So they put more emphasis on the screen and capablities rather then size, because, as you pointed out elsewhere, you can get a cheapy RZR nowadays so thin phones aren't quite as impressive as they were a year or two ago.
scrawled by JasonD | June 11, 2007 3:59 PM
Craig:
What's "LED backlighting"?
scrawled by priest | June 21, 2007 9:38 AM