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Apple's Strategy Behind iTunes Mobile Phone
vishnu writes "CoolTechZone.com is running a story that analyzes Apple's strategy with ROKR. According to the author, the phone disappoints, but is this Apple's way of testing a potential market. Quote: "There was nothing wrong with the creative cells of the designers at Apple; ROKR is simply Jobs taking a calculated risk. He doesn't want a cell phone that doubles as an MP3 player to become too popular as that would cut straight into Apple's bread and butter product, the iPod. On the other hand, Jobs knows for a fact that in the future cell phones will play a huge role in portable digital music; therefore, he is hedging his bets. He wants to give people a taste of what is to come but at the same time, he wants to project phones as an extension but not a replacement of a portable music player. He's consequently hoping to discomfort Apple's competition with a cell phone that has nothing but iTunes going for it."
It is a dumb idea to bet against the convergence of personal digital accessories. If Steve Jobs really thinks people are going to buy two devices when one will do, his calculated risk is not calculating enough.
There are a lot of people who say they only want a phone that only does phone stuff. But those phones are losing ground to cell phones that are as powerful as the first Apollo onboard computers. You simply won't be able to buy a cell phone that doesn't come with some level of multimedia support. The top of the line phones will feature full-blown MP3 players (duly locked down with DRM) whether or not Apple wants to jump into the fray. The bottom of the line phones will not be as feature rich, but they will have cameras and good screens, not to mention moderately performing audio.
So you can carry one device that plays your music well, acts as a cellular phone, and can be your email address away from the computer. Or you can have two devices clipped to your belt.
Minimalism in form with maximalism in functionality is the new black. Sleek and cool. Not clunky and lame.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
While i do agree with Apple's statement that a too good iTunes Phone would cut into their iPod profits, why even bother at all? The cell market is very hard to get into, and the way Apple is going it could churn out small incremental updates for a long time. It's best to bet on a videoPod than on yet more convergence of devices.
Ah well, i better find my roll of doublesided tape, i got work to do.
Will wank off Linus Torvalds for fame.
Apple's strategy here is to sell a program and a service to Motorola. It's not Apple's hardware, guys. The ROKR is not an Apple product.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Hasn't the market shown time and again that a hobbled version of a product will quickly be beaten out by an unhobbled one? In the short term this might keep iPod sales up, but in the long run somebody else will offer a full function cell with mp3 capability (and yes, I avoided the typical, "In the long run.... We're all dead" statement).
I've never been a huge fan of Apple but I have to admit that the iPod has been a great success for them. Sad to see them repeating the history of their computers: establish a great product and cult following and then piss off your customers by limiting their growth options. They took enough body shots from Microsoft over the last 15 years that I would have hoped they learned their lesson.
Even the brightest minds make mistakes. It's about time to suck it up, instead of touting it as a "clever tactical move".
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
No,
There is no money lost. The hardware is not apple's but the software is. Where is the downside on that?
The fact that it's ugly, small, and brain dead is motorola's fault. It's not an Apple product. I suspect that Apple has a much different draft of what that device is supposed to look like, and we will see it in a bit. They don't have a lot of exerience engineering mobile communications hardware. I'm pretty sure that a phone done correctly will be worth it's while. Make no mistake - the iPod phone will be a product of Apple's, which is why Motorola was left out to dry.
I currently have the RAZR admittedly not a great phone but I was comparing the the upper flip part of the fone with the nano and both are about the same thickness and cover the same area (RAZR's flip top is wider but shorter). My point? If they can fit something to the same profile (nano) as half the RAZR i'm sure they could integrate a decent phone in the same sized package? Imagine a flip with the top being like an ipod nano and the bottom being the numeric keypad? Sounds pretty cool to me.
Also along the line of convergence most new subcompact digital camera's do a decent job of capturing 30 fps video (MJPEG / MPEG etc). Yes they dont compare with a video camera but the convenience alone is worth it. Give it another generation or two and I dont see most people (casual video makers) caring enough to buy two separate devices, this will eventually happen with cell phones as well.
Apparently we have fallen on the bad side of moderation here. Sorry to drag you down.
I appreciate your argument, but I just don't see that as the way things are going. Phones are becoming the central device in personal accessories. They contain the key technology that has driven almost all new tech in the last 5 years: communication. Now, you are able to talk to your friends anywhere you go, send them an email from wherever you are, or take a picture and let them see what you are seeing (albeit in VGA and through a cheap lens). These are things people didn't even realize they wanted to do until the technology became available. If operators lower the cost of packets, such services will become even more popular.
People already want to take their music with them. They have since Sony brought out the Walkman years ago. The features necessary to playback music are pretty light, comparatively. It's a matter of increasing the audio out abilities of the phone (I'm simplifying, of course), and you've got yourself a media-playing phone. These already exist in some markets, and I don't see the momentum stopping.
The primary thing holding back this particular convergence is lack of storage, but as we saw earlier Flash memory is becoming more abundant than ever. Removable memory is also getting very large, so carrying around your media isn't going to be a hassle.
I also see phones becoming cheaper (price per feature) and the cost of a cellphone/media player is going to be a better value than two separate devices. It's going to come, and I don't think that staggered technology improvements are going to hold back the convergence products.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Part of the problem is that hardware designers are approaching the problem from the wrong angle. Instead of thinking in terms of "PDA", "phone", "music player", etc. they should think more abstractly, in terms of "I/O", "communications", "storage" etc.
I've got a PDA, cellphone, and iPod. Each of them has a screen and CPU. Why is that? It's completely wasteful! I don't want a PDA with its own processor and memory and whatnot; I just want a screen that I can write on, like an electronic notepad. I don't want a phone; I just want a tranceiver. I don't want an iPod; I just want a storage device.
Wouldn't it be much better for the (pda-like) screen device to be an interface for the "phone" and "iPod"? Wouldn't it be nice for the cellular tranceiver to be only the size of a USB key and get awesome battery life, because it wouldn't need that bulky and power-hungery screen and keyboard? Wouldn't it be nice to have that 20GB of space available to the general-purpose computer instead of just for music?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"In my history of owning devices that do multiple things, it is always the case that they do each poorly. It is less than the sum of the parts."
Duh. Seriously, duh. The reason the extra stuff in the cell phone is interesting is that not everybody has all their fancy doodads at every given moment. A cell phone typically goes with people EVERYWHERE, but it's difficult to imagine anybody walking around with a cell phone, Game Boy, iPod, digital camera, PDA, and GPS.
You're sitting here saying "It does everything poorly" and I'm sitting here thinking "It does it less poorly than nothing at all." I've got some pictures of my nephew acting silly when we went out to dinner. I have a nice digital camera, but I wouldn't have gotten those photos if my phone didn't have a camera. Why? Because I'm not lugging that thing around everywhere I go. Okay, they're 640 by 480 and a little blurry, they're still amusing photos.
Of-freaking-course they're not going to be as good as a much more expensive dedicated device. It's like saying "I don't want a Game Boy because it's nowhere near a PS2."
"Derp de derp."