By SteveJack
As I fully expected, the Apple iPhone hit pieces have begun. These articles will attempt to spread Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) for the next six months leading up to Apple’s first shipment of iPhones and well beyond that date.
If you thought that iPod and iTunes was subject to FUD, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, my friends. You’ll have to look to the Mac to find a threat of such magnitude that inspired such a FUD campaign. The reason for such a campaign against iPhone? Money. Lots and lots of money and the fear of losing a good portion of it to Apple.
You can call me conspiratorial. You can call me a crackpot. Call me whatever you like, but I will be proven right soon enough.
You will see articles that go way beyond legitimate reviews that will attempt to call into question every aspect of Apple’s iPhone, attacking everything from battery life, the type of battery, fingerprints on the screen, its Mac OS X operating system, and the type of network technology the first iPhone will employ (quad-band GSM) while failing to mention that Jobs stated that Apple plans 3G iPhones in the future. These articles will harp on the prices Apple plans to charge for the iPhone. They’ll claim the soft keyboard is difficult to use. They’ll make up even more things and they’ll find quotes from people who are supposedly not impressed with the device. I guarantee it.
Apple’s target of selling 10 million iPhones, or 1% of the total market, in the first year is too low, far too conservative. Apple’s iPhone user interface (UI) is far too advanced and too well-protected by patents (granted and under review) to be ripped off successfully. It will change the mobile device market in radical ways. I am, if anything, understating the havoc iPhone will cause.
The other phone makers, the other mobile device makers, and the other makers of so-called “smartphone” software understand the massive threat Apple’s iPhone poses. They have no recourse but to start up the FUD campaign, desperately hoping to slow Apple’s assault on the market. There is so much money at stake that things will get very nasty, very quickly.
The chits will be called in and the articles will get written. It’s already started.
So, keep this in mind whenever you read about Apple’s iPhone and you see an article slanted against the iPhone: the real Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt is being felt by all of the companies that Apple just humiliated yesterday. They are very scared and rightfully so.
SteveJack is a long-time Macintosh user, web designer, multimedia producer and a regular contributor to the MacDailyNews Opinion section.
Related articles:
FUD Alert: Analyst – I am pretty skeptical Apple’s iPhone can succeed – January 11, 2007
eWeek: Apple iPhone fallout: ‘They must be crying in Nokia-ville and other telephony towns today’ – January 10, 2007
The only thing really wrong with Apple’s iPhone is its name – January 09, 2007
Is Apple building ‘The Device?’ [revisited] – January 09, 2007
Apple debuts iPhone: touchscreen mobile phone + widescreen iPod + Internet communicator – January 09, 2007
This FUD crap started even before the Stevenote, by MS directly. <http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7006106203> [article posted after, but I read similar ones before]. Basically, if the iPhone is good at one thing, then it can’t possibly be good at another…
Course, that’s true for MS stuff in general.
See Howard Stern’s move to Sirius. Classic FUD campaign and it’s still going strong.
Peter – LOL!
You are RIGHT it is unlikely that the iPhone will run any full apps, but that will be due to hardware specs and hence lack of power to run those apps.
What you fail to see beyond your nose is the fact that the iPhone has a new UI technology. There is NOTHING stopping this UI with more powerful hardware to run what we know as Mac OS X.
You ask how the menu bar is going to work? if it can be mouse clicked, it can be pointed at with a finger!? As Steve said, the best pointing device ever is hanging off the end of our hands (or words to that effect).
So yes you are RIGHT, this product wont run photoshop, but that doesn’t mean the OS on the phone is not Mac OS X.
SEMANTICS.
Regarding me being slammed, whatever mate! That was related to the 5 odd posts in a matter of minutes that pointed out you were mistaken.
You posting a weak attempt to save face – that isn’t being slammed mate, but like everything you have posted here, it was weak in thinking.
Go back and read the thread buddy, I’ll take my feedback over yours any day of the weak, sorry I mean week!
Semantics is the tool of fools!
My 2 cents,
Luke
Oh and by the way, just because the Keynote and the tech specs don’t mention Carbon, etc doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Steve just said it runs OS X, he wasn’t going to then list all the components to satisfy the pedants like you.
By the way Steve did mention that the iPhone has Core Image, Core Video etc, and again within a few secs of deciding to search for some actual FACTS to back up my point I find this page on Apple’s web site (http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/opengl/) which states the following:
“What’s more, OpenGL lets such droolworthy technologies as Core Image, Core Video, Exposé, Fast User Switching and Dashboard use your high-end video card to accelerate onscreen effects. In fact, without OpenGL, much of the advanced graphics you take for granted today on Mac OS X would simply be impossible.”
So if Open GL is what enables the graphics technologies in OS X, I’d be betting it is present in the OS X on the iPhone, but then again, I also am betting that it is OS X.
Just like Apple Inc. was Apple Computer Inc. Maybe OS X <b>was/<b> Mac OS X.
It is no longer just a computing platform device?
But now I am getting into semantics, and I don’t want to look foolish!
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My 2 cents,
Luke
oops please excuse poor html there.
Should have read:
Just like Apple Inc. was Apple Computer Inc. Maybe OS X was Mac OS X.
Dance, Luke, Dance!
“You ask how the menu bar is going to work? if it can be mouse clicked, it can be pointed at with a finger!?”
Good point. Of course, you’re going to have an issue with screen real-estate.
Hell, look at Safari. Where’s the menu bar? It’s a web-browser with the same name, not the same browser. I have no doubt that webkit is implemented, for example. And one of the beauties of Cocoa’s View-Model-Controller design is that to move between environments, you change your UI’s views and controller and the model (which is the hard part) just ports over. NeXT showed this quite successfully with WebObjects.
So your Mac application won’t run on the iPhone. But a properly designed Cocoa application will probably move to the iPhone merely by changing the Views and Controller.
“[…] just because the Keynote and the tech specs don’t mention Carbon, etc doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”
Nor does it mean it is there. I’ll admit, neither of us are in the know here. Personally, though, I think it’s interesting that it is not included. I personally doubt the Carbon APIs are available, mostly because the vast majority of Apple’s development is in Cocoa. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing–Carbon mostly exists to protect third-party developers from having to completely rewrite their applications. If you’re writing new apps for a phone, why carry around the Carbon overhead?
“So if Open GL is what enables the graphics technologies in OS X, I’d be betting it is present in the OS X on the iPhone, but then again, I also am betting that it is OS X.”
Actually, I’d bet you’re right on this one. While all of those technologies can be done without OpenGL, it becomes less easy to move things between OS X and Mac OS X when you have different implementations (as well as the support headaches). Optimize OpenGL and everybody speeds up.
“Just like Apple Inc. was Apple Computer Inc. Maybe OS X was Mac OS X.”
Well, again, my theory on this is that OS X is a subset of Mac OS X. Certain things are not available in OS X that are available in Mac OS X. That’s been said by many people at Apple. What pieces are missing is the important question. Again, I’d bet that the Carbon APIs are missing. I’d bet that AppleScript is missing. Some chunks of Core Foundation are missing–mostly the ones that duplicate Cocoa functionality in Carbon. I’d bet alot of the printing architecture is missing.
Since the only place on Apple’s site that refers to OS X is in the iPhone section, I’d bet that Apple is trying to draw a differentiation. Thus, the iPhone does not run Mac OS X. It runs “OS X”–the subset.
Of course it is Mac OSX, If you are saying there is a differentation between Mac OSX and OSX, then you’re nuts..
OSX means Operating System Ten. If they arent using Mac OSX in iPhone, then it would be called iPhone OS1.
How do you know they’re wrong? They haven’t held an iPhone in their hands, sure, but neither have you. So what makes you right, instead of them?
@ Zune Tang
Actually this will be my first foray into technology-crushing in a great many years. I find blunt-force trauma less interesting from a technologists point of view than fire.
The real question is, Will It Burn?
And as we all know, with enough WD-40, *anything* will burn.
-c
MW: ‘cold’ (fusion built my hot-rod)
“You can call me conspiratorial. You can call me a crackpot. Call me whatever you like, but I will be proven right soon enough.”
… sounds a bit paranoid, no? Obviously, someone isn’t entirely comfortable defending yet another useless toy from Apple.
“…attacking everything from battery life, the type of battery, fingerprints on the screen, its Mac OS X operating system, and the type of network technology the first iPhone will employ”
All of the above is entirely fair game, and rightfully so. Apparently, you are already all too aware of the iPhone’s myriad flaws, so you figure if you take a more preemptive approach to your “defense”, you might actually fool people into thinking that the aforementioned problems are acceptable.
You IT types and nerds just don’t “get” the consumer market.
We don’t want your highest-tech, cutting-edge, most technically sophisticated, “corporate”, or IT-approved products or devices to do things the way you think we should. We don’t care about your price-for-features analyses or technical explanations about we should care about the IT-elegance of designs and capabilities.
We want the best “tools” to do what we want. We want simple, easy-to-learn, dependable, elegant, easy-to-use products that make us smile, and feel good to our eyes, hands and souls. We don’t mind paying more for something that is what we want.
This is why the iPhone will be a gigantic consumer success…because it lets us do what we want to do…not what you think we should want or what you think how we should do it.
already started, the new york newspaper today, had an “official review” of the iphone, claiming its internet (safari) wasnt all that. LOL all i do is laugh and smile, ahhh thier all screwed, lmao the iPhone is coming. =)
“They’ll claim the soft keyboard is difficult to use”
The only problem is that…it is. Stylish? Sure. Innovative? Meh. Awesome? I guess. Easier to use than a standard keypad? Nope.
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