What a shocking , stunning , surprising Macworld Expo keynote address Steve Jobs contribute today . It was strange and different in so many ways , from the over lack of fresh Mac announcements ( atMacworld Expo ! ) to the surprising removal of “ Computer ” from the companionship ’s name after thirty years .
While Apple ’s promotional auto tends to act like every product the company produces is a groundbreaking ceremony , earth - shattering new development , the introduction of the iPhone was not like most previous Apple mathematical product declaration . clear everyone at the companionship , from Steve Jobs on down , feels that the iPhone is going to be a transformative product , one that does n’t just hurl Apple into a new and highly competitive market , but makes them a leader and a serious instrumentalist overnight .
At its core , Apple has always been about using engineering to shift the human race — specifically , the life story of routine people . ( Unlike John Mayer , Steve Jobs does not seem content to hold off on the world to exchange . ) With the phylogeny of computer engineering into midget , portable devices , Apple has finally found the everlasting place to express its values of high technology and absolute easiness . The iPod started it off , but with the iPhone there ’s no uncertainty any longer : Apple really is much more than just a electronic computer company . It ’s a engineering companionship whose destination is to use not bad computer hardware and software to make devices that people will use in just about every part of their lives .
The iPhone is the freehanded exercise from today , but the promulgation of Apple TV meet in too . Apple is pushing their technology , their relentless integration of hardware and software , into all sorts of new place . Yes , fans of Apple ’s computers may be interested about the society ’s new name , but you really should n’t be . This is n’t some new Apple you ’ll need to get to love — this is , in fact , the company that made the Mac great applying those same ware doctrine to a whole wad of new areas . Just as the personal computer market need a Mac in 1984 , the complex and fractured mankind of cell phones could really apply a charge in the trouser . And the iPhone ’s ply that boot .
Will Apple become the dominant cell phone maker in the Earth ? I kind of doubt it . But I think it ’ll be a serious thespian , and I imagine its front in the marketplace will force everyone else who develops cell telephone to overlook a bunch of their assumptions and accept that some of their telephone ’ feature plainly are n’t good enough for consumer .
Perhaps the most lurid thing about today ’s tonic , however , was the depth and complexness of the iPhone . Steve Jobs was on stage for about two time of day , and almost all of it — debar a abbreviated Mac update and a poor venture into the Apple TV — was devoted to the iPhone . This was n’t the sort of protracted , demonstrate and thenre - demonstrated keynote that give the audience the sense that something fall through at the last minute and Jobs is just up there meet time . No , this was a display full of content , perhaps the most exhaustingly detailed product roll - out I can call back from Apple .
And yet for every piece of music of information we got about the iPhone , I find oneself myself total a half - XII questions to that tilt of interrogative sentence I keep undulate up inside my nous . According to Apple , the iPhone runs Mac OS X. Will Mac developer be able-bodied to develop programs that will run on the iPhone ? What about the iPhone ’s “ thingumabob ” — are those essentially Dashboard gismo , or something else ? Why does the iPhone ’s SMS messaging program expression like iChat , but not let you employ the phone ’s networking features to link up to the real AIM internet ?
The list goes on , and I ’ll be sitting down with Apple tomorrow to inquire as many of them as I can . But I reckon it says something about this production that , as simple as it ’s imply to be , it has a level of profoundness that we simply did n’t see in the iPod . The iPhone is , indeed , something more blood-related to the Mac than to the iPod . It ’s a whole complex gimmick , something that we ’d credibly call a hand-held data processor if we were n’t calling it a phone instead .
Another question , too , is about the emplacement of this intersection versus the iPod . A widescreen iPod for watching picture would seem to be a gravid intersection , but this novel widescreen iPhone has an iPod nano - sized reposition capacity . Is there another , hard - private road - based iPod waiting in the offstage ? One that looks a mickle like an iPhone , but with more store space and without phone characteristic ? clear there ’s a whole lot more to say about how the iPod and iPhone product bloodline arrive together and split aside , and it ’ll take a few months for it all to make sense .
Before I go , a remark about the name . I acknowledge it : I was completely convinced that iPhone was not this product ’s name . evince you what I love about the inner working of Apple . But I ’m still not that big a fan of the name . I ’m kind of over the whole “ iProduct ” affair . But I do n’t get a vote , and Steve Jobs does , so there you go .
In any event , I ’ve already ordered my Apple TV , and I fully expect that I ’ll be move on to an iPhone in the very nigh future tense . As John Mayer pointed out as the keynote event stop , Five months is longsighted sentence to await for a newfangled Apple contrivance . At least I ’ll have an Apple television set to keep me party in the meantime .
