Secret Weapon Labs

I’ve had this post and its composite thoughts go through several different iterations and variations since Apple announced the iPhone, but alas I’ve come to the conclusions from which they all started.

In reading this month’s issue of Fast Company (one of my favorite magazines), I was fascinated by the article on Jeff Han, an NYU researcher at the Courant Institute for Mathematical Sciences who presented at TED Talks (stands for Technology Entertainment Design) in February 2006. His presentation was on multi-touch interfaces on large pressure sensitive displays and how the technology is seeing the light of the day and can really make such interfaces less of a novelty and more ubiquitous. His presentation is fascinating and available on Youtube. You can also view the more polished demo video on the Fast Company website. Once you see the video, you’ll understand why I’m bringing this up. Jeff Han himself has already commented on the iPhone:

“The iPhone is absolutely gorgeous, and I’ve always said, if there ever were a company to bring this kind of technology to the consumer market, it’s Apple. I just wish it were a bit bigger so I could really use both of my hands.”

I’d be a little annoyed if my cellphone needed two hands, but I catch his drift.

More recently and after the iPhone announcement, momentum changed from praising the iPhone to almost bashing it with concerns over the closed iTunes platform, the fact that it runs a closed version of OS X, and that this is Apple history rewriting itself, etc. There has been the specific issue of Cisco’s possession of the iPhone name, and a blog posting from the General Counsel stating that Cisco wanted an open approach hoping their products could interoperate in the future and that they could facilitate openness and clarity. While this is wonderful sounding and rosy, it would seem to be a well-executed publicity stunt at courting the favor of the public towards Cisco, in otherwords, just short of a publicity stunt. Subsequently, the clamor for Apple’s rejection of “open standards computing” has only grown louder.

But all this hoopla fails to meet the idea that advancing the state of the art is not necessarily about quantity and marketing, it is fundamentally about innovation and maintaining the experience of using that innovative technology. The iTunes+iPod equation is the example that Apple can’t trust other music and hardware companies to break iPods with crappy driver development, bum music files, or worse: viruses and malicious code.

So I’m happy about the iPhone. I’m happy that it points to higher plane of thinking and using the technology that surrounds us, but no one consolidates and simplifies into a smart usable standard. That may be the iPhone, but I won’t be getting one… yet!

At the very least, I won’t be the one waiting at the midnight lines at Apple Stores worldwide with $500 or $600 cash in hand. If anything of history can teach us in technology, it’s that the first iteration needs to be put through its paces. When I used to compute on a Powerbook Pismo G3 laptop, I was floored at the 17″ 1ghz Powerbook and promptly bought it as soon as I could. I’ve never regretted the laptop or not appreciated it’s beauty. But the subsequent updates had me realize that being the cutting edge adopter also means you can get cut and burned. I only recently learned that the 1ghz model I purchased (and am typing this post on) shipped with a 4200rpm drive and not a 5400rpm drive. To most, that means nothing, but when you use a faster computer whose only prowess above your own is the rate at which the needle reads data, you appreciate the difference. Apple has never shipped another laptop since with a 4200rpm drive.

The first generation iPod with the rotating scroll wheel was beautiful but replaced shortly thereafter by the second generation iPod and ultimately the infamous click wheel. The xbox 360’s launch date machines recently have been openly acknowledged by Microsoft to be below the quality of device they intended to sell.

My point is ultimately that rushing to buy an iPhone, while fun to be one of the first few, will be far less gratifying until it receives even more spit and polish from the team behind it, and as long as Cingular can keep up their respective end of a cell-phone contract and make sure there is coverage with it. So I won’t buy an iPhone when it ships, but I will certainly be happy to when we see the second generation version which will be out sooner than we anticipate.