iPhone Wins

3 July 2007

Ok, I know I’ve gone on a bit about the iPhone.

I’ve had complaints.

I endeavoured last week not to mention it at all, which was particularly difficult considering the near complete saturation of the web of every tiny, unimportant detail. So difficult that I actually failed, with a little iPhone UI tidbit on Friday. Sorry about that.

This will hopefully be the last I have to say on the matter, at least until the announcement of what they’re doing over here – assuming, of course, that when they announce the sales figures they’re not either small or massively large.

So, now that the dust has settled I think we can safely say that the iPhone is a phenomenal success. Never before have we seen a product launch have quite such a huge amount of hype, and never before have we seen a product match or exceed it’s hype quite so well.

The parallels with the initial launch of the iPod are uncanny, even down to the little details. They’ve launched to a limited customer base (people willing to use AT&T in the iPhone’s case or only Mac users in the iPod’s case) a product that, by all accounts, has less features then the competition at a higher price. The little details I think are most interesting, and shows really how much they’ve learned from the iPod – for example the way that the iPhone comes with a dock and power adapter, which iPods haven’t come with for a while; they know that these are the sort of details the early adopters like, and they know they can drop then further down the line when they need to reduce costs.

It is going to be huge, there’s no real doubt about it now.

And the biggest looser in all this?

Mac OS X 10.5.

10.5 is the longest developed Mac OS X release since the first release, and while we’ve got a quite a few nice new features (and it’s certainly a good upgrade) it seems to be “missing” something. Almost like the real headline feature or features were pulled near the end of the development cycle, leaving a few nice touches like coverflow in the Finder and a reflective Dock to take up the slack.

If you have any doubt, check out this video on Engadget of iPhone interface effects and then compare it with the videos of 10.5 on Apple.com. The difference between them is staggering, especially when you consider that the iPhone is a mobile phone – I particularly like the animation when you delete a note.

This kind of interface fluidity is what I and many others hoped to see in 10.5, along with a true new interface; quite frankly Apple can do far better then a shiny dock and transparent menubar. There’s no technical reason why they couldn’t have implemented animation everywhere – in fact, there’s very good technical reasons why they could as 10.5 features CoreAnimation, which lets developers easily add animation to their apps. Why would Apple spend all this time developing this tech if they weren’t going to use it in the OS?

Except, of course, they do use it in OS X, just not the flavour that runs on Macs…

From: Articles

3 July 2007