Apple's Smart Phone Depends on OS X Tie-Ins

anaesthetica writes "According to AppleInsider, Apple is not only working on a cellphone + mp3 player iPhone, but is working on a second model designed to be a smart phone, highly integrated with Mac OS and .Mac. The smart phone has gone through several iterations, as the notoriously demanding Mr. Jobs ordered the elite team working on the phone to redesign and re-engineer their prototypes. Capabilities are reported to include Front Row interface, syncing contacts and iCal with .Mac, "call ahead", iChat video conferencing integration, WiFi, and a slide-out keyboard. Too good to be true?"

Comments

Re:I see that Mr. Jobs.....

[heinousjay]

That's got a lot more to do with the fact that Steve wanted access to a larger market than he had at the time then any altruistic impulses to let Windows users in on the Ipod fun.

Mac users a good test audience.

[Kadin2048]

Well if you look at what they did with iPods, they didn't release them for Windows initially. Instead they waited until the iPod had already become a success with Mac users, and then released both the iPod and iTunes for Windows.

I suspect if they had released a Windows iTunes+iPod at the very beginning, it might not have done as well as it did, released a year or so later, with a lot of traction. I expect they probably would have gotten a lot of flak for not having it work with WMP or whatever the dominant Windows music player software was in 2001. By holding off until later, they could not only sell the device, but sell a solution that was part of an entire application/product/service "stack": iTunes, the iPod, and the iTMS.

Apple's fan base within the Mac market provides them with a perfect test audience for their products, before they go on to release them to the rest of the world. I wouldn't be surprised if they released their phone as Mac-only initially, and then if it's a hit, made a PC version of the Mac's software so that PC users could get in on it. But that way they allow PC demand to build first, and then respond to it, rather than trying to create demand first.