Apple, the Inverted Fortress
Now that the confetti is being swept neatly to the gutters after last week’s parade, the real residents of the technology main street are starting to appear with concerns about the Apple iPhone.
Walled Garden
Apple is taking heat, flack for being not willing to be an open platform like so many third party applications. The exclusive lock down (both in platform and with employees) is denoted by Brian.
TCO of iPhone
The real cost of the Apple iPhone is being speculated by Allen at quite a bit more than any amount you anticipated, do you want to spend up to 2k a year on a phone?
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Lastly, Uncle Dave Winer doesn’t want to be confined, both by the information we receive or the technology, so why should we?A Marketing Company that happens to be in Tech
Steve Jobs is an excellent Marketer, the products requirements come from extensive Marketing Research, (product design comes after, BTW) and the advertising has been unique and innovative for decades. Yesterday, I challenged that the iPhone is being over hyped.
What do you think?
11 Comments so far
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I don’t think it matters whether the iPhone is being hyped. What matters is if it does what people want: integrate already existing technologies into an easy to use package.
If it does that, I’m stoked. Hype is irrelevant.
BTW, hot new photo!
On the other hand Gizmodo is doing carbon-fiber mockups of the iPhone. Perhaps we are taking things a bit too far.
Hasn’t Apple always been about the marketing and design. Of course, marketing needs some substance underneath to sustain it for as long as they have. The only reason I have never owned an Apple computer is a simple one. I couldn’t build one myself (not sure if this is still true with the Intel move). On the other hand, my next laptop is likely to be a macbook pro running parallels (with Ubuntu and Windows as virtual machines).
iPhone. I dunno. It looks mindblowingly good, but then it does lack 3G, a showstopper in my book.
Teresa
I’ll bet tons of ‘aftermarket’ ipod companies are gearing up to start building iPhone accessories.
Imagine the landfills filled with outdated iPod accessories that will never get sold.
I’ve got to thanks Thomas Hawk for the pic, he rocks.
Thanks Deepak, I think we agree.
The iPnone will prove its mettle this Xmas. Apple is the Michael Jordan of consumer tech. They have the DNA and mojo to get the job done (make the right design decisions, deliver quality, elegance, and coolness. This iPhone is Cingular’s to lose. If C delivers powerfully, like Apple will, the iPhone will indeed compoletely transform phones and handheld computers with MS and the rest anxiously playing catch up.
Prediction: MS will burn $5 billion before abandoning Zune.
Peter
Good point, I wonder what the Zune team is thinking right about now.
I am beginning to wonder if some of the negative feedback about the iPhone in the blogosphere is due at least partly to Jobs’ success is going directly to the mainstream media and thereby making so many of the “long tails” in New Media bystanders?
Dennis
Could be. Apple’s not friendly to bloggers at all this week (or in the past) so there is some animosity.
Just one small correction. Apple’s spending on market research is a tiny fraction of that of any other major manufacturer of consumer electronic devices. Apple doesn’t tend follow consumer demand a lot - it leads it.