You know… At this point, it’s not even about whether the iPhone is going to sell like hotcakes. (It will.)
The reason the iPhone will work is not because of its features. There are phones with more features, and phones with some features better implemented. It’s not because it looks cool. It’s not even because it’s gimmicky. The iPhone is going to work (and by work I mean ’sell’ and ‘resonate with people’, not necessarily ’shut down Motorola’) because of two things.
The first is that it’s the best manifestation yet of the gadget of the future. Go back 10 years ago, or 20, or 30, or 40 years ago - when people predicted what kind of devices would be available to them, they have imagined thin flat screens on which everything just works somehow. Look at half of the phone prototypes from the mobile phone companies themselves a few years ago. The iPhone comes closer to this than anything else because it cuts away as much as possible, and because there really is a lot of stuff on it. (Again, some other phones have more, but they usually don’t look the part this way.) I’m not the first to posit this.
The second is that it’s supposedly a lot more humane. Look at your mobile phone right now. You’re either pushing buttons to do stuff or you’re holding a stylus. The iPhone is controlled directly by touch. You touch that interface directly; not the stylus, not the selection you’re controlling with that joystick or directional pad. You.
There’s a number of technical things that plays off of this, or that help enhance this - such as the fact that by necessity, if you’re touching with your finger, you have to be touching something big. Things have to get more obvious. For the thousands of people that just plain feel like the computer is working against them, not having to pinpoint a check box with a stylus can be a big deal.
Neither of my two reasons are technical per se. They are deeply psychological. There’s technology behind them, but the net effect is that, if you end up spelling it out, it can sound as if people want an iPhone not because of its capabilities, but because of mind games, of instincts, of some sort of deep animal gadget lust, no doubt triggered by a reality distortion field.
I think the worst thing the iPhone’s critics can do at this stage is play it off as a toy, or claim that it’s technically inferior through-and-through and only bought by desolute fanatics. There’s a reason why people are camping out to buy them today. There’s a reason why, even in a culture where the mobile phone is an eternal polarizer and subject of conversations and essays, thousands of people haven’t camped out for a mobile phone before.
“The reason the iPhone will work is not because of its features.”
Dead wrong.
There’s a strange, pervasive idea among geeks that the user interface doesn’t count as a feature. This is because a primary identifying characteristic of computer geeks is the ability to get things done despite a crap UI. We’re the people who could use computers when every program change required rewiring the CPU. We’re the people who could use computers when it involved flipping banks of switches. We’re the people who could use computers when it involved typing weird incantations at a command line. We’re the people who won’t hesitate to try a menu item no-one has told us about. We can adapt ourselves to any UI, no matter how much it sucks.
For other people, the user interface is the most important feature, because it determines which other features they can use. Most users of current phones do not use the contact list, the alarm clock, the calculator etc. because they don’t know they’re there, and would never think to look for them. Menu-based phone/PDA interfaces, and to a significant extent iconic ones, are almost as opaque as a command line; you can’t immediately see the features, so they’re de facto not there. The iPhone provides a significantly more transparent interface; all the features available in a given context are right there on the screen (except the Home button). The Home screen effectively shows every single feature on the phone. For non-geeks, this means a lot more than features other phones have, but which they’d never notice.
I’d like a phone with the iPhone’s features, plus GPS, an IRC client, and various other stuff, and those are things you might get from a vendor aiming for a long list of features. But most people don’t need those, and would never use them. As such, Apple’s design choices are the right ones for a mass-market device. They’ve made a phone with features people actually have a use for, and the one feature that will let people actually use them.
By Ahruman · 2007.06.30 15:44
The shocking thing is that Apple was able to do this on their first try at a mobile phone. Conversely, this should be deeply humiliating for every other mobile phone maker.
By http://openid.aol.com/bitpuddle · 2007.06.30 15:46
Ahruman: I am a proponent of its interface - I believe it’s a better touch-screen interface than any other touch-screen interface I’ve seen. And I’m a user of the user interface just as much as anyone else. I care deeply about the user interface, and other people care about other things than the user interface. (If they didn’t, why would it be almost universally accepted that Macs have a good user interface and yet people don’t run out and buy them in droves instead of PCs?)
I have talked a lot about its interface and why it’s going to work. That the interface will work with people is not, in my opinion, in question. What I wanted to explain after being impressed by the scale of the iPhone hysteria yesterday was “what makes people so emotionally impressed by the iPhone?” In a world already dominated by mobile phones - a gadget for the non-gadgeteer - what finally makes the common man queue up outside of stores in thousands to snag a new one?
I’m not clamoring for Apple to include an IRC or SSH client, as many others have - that’d be missing the point. I could have written your final paragraph verbatim if I were writing about the interface as such. And I know - and late last year predicted - how important it’s going to be to have a really amazingly together suite of the ‘bare minimum’ apps you nowadays expect from a mobile phone.
This post was not ever about the technology - it was about what people looked at the iPhone and felt. When I said that the reason it’ll work isn’t about its features, I didn’t mean that its features sucked. I meant that the primary reason it will work is not the features as such, but the net total of the experience it creates - software, hardware and mystical aura, if you will. Behind that is everything - including the user interface, including the integration between different features, and including the features that are implemented well. The user interface is a big part of both legs (thing-of-the-future, humane) I propose in the post.
When it comes to features, there’s always another phone more hackable, or with GPS, or with a special form factor. The iPhone’s features will do it for me when this comes to Sweden if they just add MMS messaging.
Maybe the ultimate reason I couldn’t write that the phone’s success was guaranteed because of its interface is because I haven’t tried it. I’ve liked reading about the technology that went into it (especially the keyboard error prevention), I’ve liked the basic premise, but at the end of the day, I haven’t tried it myself.
By Jesper · 2007.06.30 18:58