The part I always remember from Steve Jobs’ most famous keynote, when he introduced the iPhone, is the very end, when he announced Apple Computer Inc. would henceforth be known as Apple Inc. I found this quite shocking at the time, and looking back, it truly did speak volumes: Apple was moving away from computers as they were traditionally known, and to a new world where the Macintosh was but one part of the overall puzzle.
In that light, to me the most significant part of today’s keynote was another change of name, this time, of iPhone OS to just iOS. On one level, it makes sense (just like the Apple name change did given at the iPod’s success and the impending iPhone). iPhone OS is on the iPhone, but also on the iPod Touch and now the iPad. But to me, the long-term significance is greater still, again, just as it was with the Apple name-change. In this case, it is an explicit announcement of an i-platform, built around touch, mobility, and apps. Given this, the rumor about an iOS-based AppleTV makes perfect sense (and it’s interesting that if true it will be Apple that first truly realizes Microsoft’s “Three screens and the cloud” strategy. The difference? Apple’s won’t include a traditional PC, whereas that is all Microsoft knows). Apple is not only defining but making explicit moves to own an entirely new paradigm of not just computing, but entertainment.
Small wonder it’s the most valuable technology company in the world.
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Sometimes I think, based on the negative columns written by tech experts, that the tech experts are the ones who don’t get it, that they can’t see the forest for the trees.
Most people drive a car to get places, and they rate the car by how little it interferes with their drive. A minority drive to places to be in a car, and those folk, while entitled to their opinion, miss the point of a car completely.
That’s what’s so great about Apple products. They make the product itself disappear. I’ve had too many fights with other computing platforms to ever switch back. I don’t fight with Apple products, I just go ahead and do what it is I sat down to do.
” — A comment on A VC: I’ve Changed My Mind About The iPad
It’s clichéd, but a nerd is defined by his computer, and you need to understand why.
First, a majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”. Nerds know how a computer works. They intimately know how a computer works. When you ask a nerd, “When I click this, it takes awhile for the thing to show up. Do you know what’s wrong?” they know what’s wrong. A nerd has a mental model of the hardware and the software in his head. While the rest of the world sees magic, your nerd knows how the magic works, he knows the magic is a long series of ones and zeros moving across your screen with impressive speed, and he knows how to make those bits move faster.
The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the world. He sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through the day.
– Rands in Repose: The Nerd Handbook
One of the most striking things about the controversy surrounding Apple having amended Section 3.3.1 of the iPhone developer agreement is that the developer reaction is entirely irrational, at least from a purely business sense. In fact, if you’re an iPhone or web developer, it’s a positive development! From the Gruber piece referred to by Steve Jobs:
WEB DEVELOPERS: No change. The iPhone remains completely open to web apps. The difference between the web, as a competitor to native iPhone apps, from something like Flash is that the web is not controlled by anyone. There is no platform vendor for the web — and Apple has complete control over WebKit, its implementation for the web.
IPHONE DEVELOPERS: No change. If you’re a developer and you’ve been following Apple’s advice, you will never even notice this rule. You’re already using Xcode, Objective-C, and WebKit. If you’re an iPhone developer and you are not following Apple’s advice, you’re going to get screwed eventually. If you are constitutionally opposed to developing for a platform where you’re expected to follow the advice of the platform vendor, the iPhone OS is not the platform for you. It never was. It never will be. (And, in one sense, this is good news for existing iPhone developers: their skill set is now in even greater demand.)
Moreover, the iPhone retains it’s best-in-class SDK and UI toolkit, and the App Store itself with it’s predisposed-to-buy user base is simply unmatched. The approval process remains problematic from a developer perspective, but if anything, that situation has improved, and Thursday’s iPhone 4.0 announcement contained thousands of new API’s. On any sort of objective metric iPhone developers are better off than they were a week ago.
But oh!, the angst. To choose but one relatively rational and widely-linked post at 37signals:
Lots of developers, me included, have had such a gut-turning reaction to Apple’s new policy that we have a hard time thinking and speaking rationally. The emotions take over and we start screaming “fascists!”
(A Twitter search for Apple Fascist should do the trick).
Wait, 37signals? The company that makes some of the most kick-ass web applications anywhere? You know, ones that don’t need app store approval and work flawlessly on the iPhone in a way they never worked on mobile phones before? That 37signals?
What’s their problem? What is everyone’s problem? (Other than Adobe, who brought this on themselves).
Why are non-Flash developers going to the mat for a technology that they themselves hate? It just doesn’t make sense.
And that’s where the Nerd Handbook comes in. I prefer the term “geek” to “nerd” myself, but there’s a lot I can identify with in that post, especially the bit about being defined by my computer. I’m not a developer, but I know more about tech than most of my peers, and I know how a computer works. More importantly, I know enough to know that the iPhone really is a computer. I know that it runs the same operating system as my MacBook Pro (note the fact I made sure to include Pro), and I know that the development environment is little different than the the development environment for any other platform.
And so, when Apple dictates what tools can be used and what apps are permitted, I can empathize with this geek angst.
They are restricting what I can do with my computer. They are limiting my freedom. They are telling me what I can and cannot do.
Suddenly, the quick resort to cries of “Fascism!” is at least somewhat related to reality. For most geeks, including those who are completely unaffected by 3.3.1, like 37signals, the fact Apple is restricting what they can do on a computer is fundamentally wrong.
There’s just one problem: the iPhone isn’t a computer. It’s a phone.
At least, that’s the way that 98% of the population thinks of it. It’s a marvelous phone to be sure, one that may very well have changed the way they live, but it’s still a phone.
And the apps? They’re awesome! Who woulda’ thunk you could put apps on your phone? You certainly couldn’t three years ago! And the App Store is so easy! Why on earth would you want to go on the scary Internet and get a virus when you’re looking for an app? It’s awesome!
This is the way that normal people think of the iPhone, and it is completely orthogonal to what developers think - and more importantly, downright upsetting to their notions that the iPhone is a computer. But the fact of the matter is that while these normals are underrepresented on the blogs and forums frequented by geeks, they are the vast majority of the 85 million that that has bought iPhone OS devices, and it is their preferences that is driving Apple’s policies - and make no mistake, there are significant upsides to the end user and to developers.* The iPhone simply doesn’t crash, the battery is sufficient, and applications are generally consistent and usable. All of these are derived in part from policies that upset developers.
In some sense, this entire brouhaha makes me think of the eternal divide between engineering, who makes a product, and marketing, who knows the user. It’s a conflict that plays out in every tech company every day, and while in some cases the engineers win, at Apple they don’t.**
* The move is also an obvious one from a strategic sense. For more on that, I highly suggest this comprehensive overview by Jason Snell at Macworld. Also make sure you check out the pieces by John Gruber and Louis Gerbarg linked to in this post.
** I would argue Apple is actually a third kind of company, one driven by design, but what that means in the “engineering-driven/marketing-driven” paradigm is another post (or something more substantial?) for another day.
For all the hoopla about the iPad, today’s event about iPhone OS 4.0 was a stark reminder about where Apple truly differentiates itself. And that differentiation was made most clear with the announcement of a feature that Android has had for over a year - multitasking.
I’ve had lots of conversations about multitasking, generally taking the view that the downsides outweigh the upsides. It’s both amusing and horrifying that Advanced Task Killer is one of the most downloaded Android apps - the fact that most people don’t even know what a task killer is is a damning indictment of the user-unfriendliness engendered by background processes run amok, to say nothing of the toll on battery life. In short, it is a bad experience, even if it’s a nice feature - and Android has lots of features.
Apple has taken the opposite approach to iPhone development: 1.0 didn’t run any 3rd-party apps; copy-and-paste wasn’t added until 3.0, and now “multi-tasking” will arrive this summer. But what Apple has spent time on is the user experience. There simply is no question – and every Android user I know admits this – that the iPhone experience is nearly flawless in a way you don’t appreciate until you try something else. That takes hours, expertise, and taste, and it’s not something that lends itself to a checklist. More importantly, it’s something that is either built in to the OS and the SDK, or it’s not, and if it’s not, it’s almost impossible to add later.
What is possible to add is features. And that’s why today’s announcement was both fantastic and completely expected. Apple got the hard stuff right in the beginning; now it’s simply adding the missing pieces and destroying any remaining points of differentiation. And, in the case of multitasking, doing it in a way that makes Android’s implementation look like a crude hack.
Stepping back to those conversations about multitasking, or the lack thereof, every single person I’ve talked to has cited Pandora. The music service is perfectly suited to multitasking, or so we all assumed. But actually, we don’t want the app to multitask, we just want to listen to music.
That’s what makes Apple’s “multitasking” solution such an innovative design. Instead of allowing apps to run in the background willy-nilly, it has seven services, including audio, that apps can provide in the background. In the case of Pandora, the vast majority of the application can be flushed from memory; all that matters is the thread processing the music stream. Other services allow for VOIP, Location, and other common background tasks, while all apps gain the built-in ability to save state.
But here’s the thing: of those 85 million iPhone OS buyers, 84.5 million don’t care about the technical details. All they know is that they can listen to Pandora in the background without needing an “Advanced Task Killer,” whatever the hell that means. More importantly, it’s a feature that is a perfect match for the design ethos of every aspect of the phone, an ethos that is missing from Android, and one that can’t be added four years down the road.
I haven’t even touched on iAd, which looks amazing, or the social gaming network. I don’t think the iPhone is even close to plateauing.
UPDATE: According to Android developer Robert Love, the Android handles multitasking in a similar way to the iPhone. This puzzled me all evening - why does Android need a task killer then, and will the iPhone? Jobs certainly doesn’t think so:
If you see a stylus, they blew it. Similarly, in multitasking, if you see a task manager, they blew it.
The answer may lie in Love’s follow-up after the iPhone 4.0 announcement:
One difference between Android and iPad & iPhone is that Android does not kill applications on task switch. The iPad & iPhone will continue to do so. Thus, in some sense, Android has a third solution to application multitasking: We allow apps to actually multitask until the system experiences memory pressure, at which point our OOM killer is able to kill applications in least-recently-used order. Then, our serialization solution kicks in, making their reload transparent to the user.
I think this explains it. The problem from the user standpoint is that memory pressure may have very well resulted in a song skip or game slowdown before the OOM killer relieves it, something Apple won’t tolerate. In that sense, it’s kind of a metaphor for my contention: Apple puts the user experience first, features second.
Here’s an email reply I just sent to a good friend concerning the iPad. I haven’t bought one yet - I plan on getting the 3G version, but given the argument below, I think my personal experience (or lack thereof) is irrelevant.
Did you get an ipad or go to the store to play with one yet? I went yesterday and was underwhelmed. It’s a beautiful device, but it’s a little heavy. The typing is much better than the iphone, but still not as good as a traditional keyboard.
I did go in and play with one. I think it’s a bit heavy too, but it’s faster than I expected, so for me personally it’s a wash - I definitely still plan on getting one and think I will use it heavily.
However, I have seen nothing to dissuade me that this is a very big deal - in fact, the vast majority of reviews have only further convinced me this was the case.
The iPad is an amazing thing for me, and you guys, to use. We appreciate the technical triumph that it is, even as we lament its shortcomings. Each of us will decide whether or not it fits in our workflow, and proceed from there (and while I agree those who spent money are motivated to like it, those who were critical of it previously are also motivated to dislike it).
But what I think I’ve consistently argued is that what is truly amazing about the iPad, and the other touch tablets that will follow, is that it means for people who are not technically inclined. One of the best reviews I’ve seen so far said this:
Simply put, there is a certain magic to using the iPad that’s nearly impossible to convey in words - you have to touch it to believe it. And that’s key to why the iPad will be the future of computing, though even those words don’t do justice to what I’m going to describe, now that “computing” is as much about games and socializing and hobbies as it is about using spreadsheets and databases and word processors…
So what’s the difference between a Mac and an iPad? It’s that blank slate thing. No matter what you do on a Mac, the keyboard and mouse and window-based operating system make it impossible to ignore the fact that you’re using a Mac, and it’s often equally impossible to ignore the fact that you’re using a particular program.
In contrast, the iPad becomes the app you’re using. That’s part of the magic. The hardware is so understated - it’s just a screen, really - and because you manipulate objects and interface elements so smoothly and directly on the screen, the fact that you’re using an iPad falls away. You’re using the app, whatever it may be, and while you’re doing so, the iPad is that app. Switch to another app and the iPad becomes that app. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is.
For example, when you’re using James Thomson’s PCalc, the iPad becomes a super calculator. When you’re using we-Envision’s Art Authority, the iPad becomes a virtual art browser. When you’re using theNetflix app, the iPad becomes a TV showing every movie and TV show Netflix can stream (at least when it works; one of three shows we tried failed for unexplained reasons). When you’re using OmniGraffle, the iPad becomes a dedicated diagramming tool. Heck, Twitterrific on the iPad is more the embodiment of Twitter than Twitter’s own Web site, and, amusingly, when you use Amazon’s Kindle app, the iPad becomes a Kindle, or, to put it another way, a fancy piece of paper.”
That sounds really cool to me, but in more of a nifty sort of way. But for people who see the computer as an obstacle, it’s truly revolutionary. The computer has gone away, leaving simply the functionality they want, with an interface that requires no learning curve.
I think it’s really relevant that we started this conversation with the video of the 2.5 year old. It’s so easy being the kinds of people we are, know the people we know, doing the kind of work we do, to lose sight of how very different we are than most people, especially when it comes to understanding and dealing with computers. The iPad levels the playing field, and I remain convinced that’s a really big deal.
And, of course, it’s only v1.0.