MacWorld report: iZap, Apple MacBook Air, iPhone and AppleTV

The picture shows an electric car called the Zap, which someone appears to have decided that it needed a few upgrades to become the iZap. Jet motor, rotor blades and iPod interfaces....

I tracked the MacWorld keynote via the Macrumors site on my iPhone this morning. It worked very well, with updates being pushed every few minutes. Over-all there was some good stuff released, but I think expectations were higher.

Later in the afternoon I dropped in on MacWorld for an hour or so, which was plenty of time to check out the interesting stuff.

The MacBook Air is another hit product, destined to become a geek status symbol. It looks good, feels good to use, and has the option of a solid state disk. I had some hands-on time, and I want one.... They are expensive, but the format is very well designed, and I expect it will come down in price and get new options over the coming years. To make the case strong enough despite being thin, there are more curves in the case (curved metal is much stronger than flat sheet) and it has no large holes in it. So there is no removable battery pack, and each key has its own small hole in the casing. It actually looks more mechanically robust than my MacBook pro.

I hoped to find some interesting third party iPhone applications but didn't see anything worth mentioning. I played with a demo iPhone with 1.1.3, it had a bunch of safari based games bookmarked on the second page of icons. Once I got home I upgraded my iPhone, its running fine and the new features work well. They were well leaked a few weeks ago, so there is nothing new to report. The iPod touch picked up the missing set of applications as I expected, but Apple want $20 for the privilege. This is the first example of optional applications, and charging for applications, and I expect the mechanism will get well tested by the Touch then it will be introduced for the iPhone and third party applications.

I have had an AppleTV for six months or so, and the upgraded software looks much better. I don't think I will be renting or buying many movies, but the user interface is better, and the ability to browse both audio and video based podcasts could be interesting. I mostly use my AppleTV for YouTube, playing music and sharing photo albums. One new feature is the ability to pull up photo albums over the Internet from the .mac galleries generated by iPhoto. I've been using .mac for years, and the latest (Leopard) version of iPhoto galleries is very slick and well integrated.

Apple also introduced Time Capsule, which is a network backup server combining a 500GB or 1TB of disk with an Airport. The hardware was not on show as far as I could tell, and it looks similar to the AppleTV package, but with more Ethernet ports and no video port. Personally, I don't want two separate products in this space, I want an AppleTV that operates as a Time Capsule and Airport. I want to backup my laptop and be able to play the music and video directly from the backup copy.

I'm disappointed that there was no new iPhone hardware or Leopard upgrade, and no business oriented iPhone software. I guess that's going to be featured in the next show....

WWJD - What Would Jobs Do...

Somewhere in Apple there is a product team with a plan. We now have observed several steps unfolding in this plan, so I'm going to put myself in their place and try to make sense of the plan so far and where it could be going.

I have *no inside knowledge* of anything going on at Apple, this is all conjecture, OK?

Product teams have four big things that can be traded off against each other to some extent.

1. The release date
2. The available resources
3. The feature set at launch
4. The product quality at launch

For the iPhone, they waited until they had working prototypes in January, and set a release date for June that they kept to. The product quality at Apple has to be very high, and I think they did a great job with the iPhone at launch. However, products always take longer than planned, and we know that Apple delayed the launch of MacOSX Leopard so that they could put extra resources into the iPhone, so it was probably slipping at that point. The one thing that I think they were able to trade down to get a high quality product on the release date was the feature set. This is why I regard the iPhone as an unfinished product. To get a high quality product, you can simplify testing by having fewer features and fewer options in those features. This is the Minimum Marketable Features (MMF) approach I have mentioned before. Some simplifications at launch:

• US Market Only - no internationalization
• Basic camera support, no video capture (not even demo'd at the launch event)
• Relatively few preferences and options

Apple appeared to schedule bugfix and minor features releases shortly after launch (1.0.1 and 1.0.2), while concentrating development and testing to include internationalization for the worldwide rollout of the sister product, the iPod Touch and the international iPhone with 1.1.1. The Starbucks feature of the iPhone music store has its own roll-out issues, so it makes sense to add that feature as a major update rather than on initial launch.

I expect that Apple thought they had locked down the phone well enough in its first release and were surprised by the speed and extent of application and SIM based hacking. Adding digital signatures to prevent hacking in the initial launch version would have also made the final stages of debug and testing harder, so it makes sense that they didn't do it. Once Apple realized that they needed to lock down the phone to take back control of their product feature rollout plan, they  had to find extra resources to develop and test the extra security features. This had to steal resources from something else, so I expect that some features originally planned for 1.0.2 and 1.1.1 have been delayed.

Opening up a product for developers is a lot of work if you do it right. There are developer specific tools, APIs that need to be stabilized, extended and documented; training classes and developer support organizations to put together. We already know that Apple was pulling resources from Leopard development just to get the iPhone out of the door. We also know that Apple already has a developer support organization, but that organization already has its hands full trying to get Leopard out of the door as a high quality product with a lot of new features that need to be documented etc. Leopard ships this month, so Apple's developer support organization should now have some spare resources to focus its attention on doing the work required to do proper high quality iPhone developer features and documentation. Based on this analysis, the earliest I would expect to announce developer support is MacWorld in January, and that plan could have been set over a year ago. I also think Apple underestimated the demand from iPhone developers, but had no spare resources to do anything about it other than emphasizing Safari based applications.

The iPod Touch has a smaller set of applications that have been fully internationalized. The extra applications on the iPhone are the US specific ones. I still think this is a transitional problem, and I expect that a minor update in October or November will upgrade the iPhone to have more extensive internationalized support, and that the non-phone-specific applications will all end up on the iPod Touch as well. If I was planning the release calendar, I would bring out one new application in each release, along with a set of less exciting upgrades like internationalization.

There are three empty slots in the iPhone user interface. I think they will all be filled by the time we get to January's release. One will be the Finder, so that users can store and browse files and applications, one could be an iWork launcher to highlight some of Apple's own business oriented applications, and January's icon could be related to installing and managing third party applications, hopefully including Flash and Java.

Its possible that iChat could merge with the SMS tool, and I would expect video support to be a feature of the camera tool. I would like a terminal with ssh support, but that's not mainstream enough to get its own icon....

Of course, Steve calls the shots, but what do you think the three remaining icons will be used for? Let's collect some suggestions in the comments.

What the iPhone doesn't do, why not, and why I still want one...

There is a very nice posting on the iPhone at RoughlyDrafted, taking a thoughtful look at all the coverage, and pointing out double standards in many of the negative commentators who are putting down the iPhone for not being "enterprise ready".

Back in January, I wrote a summary of thoughts on the iPhone from the perspective of typical product development practices. That post got a lot of traffic, it seemed to be very popular in Germany, where there is a great tradition of quality product design (I can't think of a German designed product that isn't well engineered).

Overall, with the additional advance information that has been released so far I don't think I was too far off the mark. I did expect that support for Adobe Flash and Java would be included, but they both appear to be missing. This is going to be the biggest pain, as there are a lot of web sites that use Flash or Java applets. Given time I expect these issues will be addressed.

I talked about Minimum Marketable Features (MMF) which are described in a book called Software by Numbers, written by my good friend Mark Denne. Its a philosophy of development that optimizes product features by releases over time. Many of the iPhone's shortcomings are explained by an initial focus on the needs of people who have never used a "smartphone" before, (rather than a focus on the business market) and a close integration with other Apple products that support an "insanely great" combination of product features.

For integration with non-Apple products, there is a two pronged strategy. One is to provide basic file viewers for Microsoft Word and Excel documents that are common email attachments. The other approach is to leverage Google's web based application suite within the Safari browser, which now includes Word, Excel and Powerpoint, Gmail etc, and also integrate with the Google maps application on the iPhone itself.

For the question of whether the iPhone can be used in corporate environments, there are two issues - virtual private network (VPN) access to get at internal web sites, and email integration with Microsoft Exchange. There have been some hints that the standard MacOSX VPN functionality is included, and Apple states that syncing is supported with Outlook/Entourage contacts and calendars. For actual Exchange email access, the Exchange server would have to support IMAP or POP (most aren't setup this way) or the Outlook Web Access client could be used in the Safari browser on the iPhone.

Safari is key. It is not only the way to manipulate documents and corporate email, its also the designated "API" for new iPhone applications to be developed. Apple stated that Safari will have access to many of the internal functions of the iPhone, so that the primary programming language for developers becomes Javascript. For all the people with existing mobile applications this is a pain, as they want to have J2ME to get them ported quickly. However, the iPhone is a huge leap forward in user interfaces, and to provide the consistent look and feel that magnifies the ease of use, Apple are enforcing Safari as the only framework for extending the iPhone. This makes perfect sense as a product strategy. It has upset many developers, but the laser-like focus on ease of use greatly increases the iPhone's perceived value and total addressable market. More users will be willing to pay more, increasing Apple's sales. Later on, perhaps Apple will focus more on the "traditional" smartphone market, but for now they are simply going to redefine what that market is.

How many people have both iPods and cellphones in their pockets? This fall, how many students will turn up at college with an iPhone in their pocket?

My work machines are a MacBook Pro and a Blackberry. I'm building the homebrew myPhone design (more on that later), but I think I'm getting tempted by the user interface, I want an iPhone....

What the iPhone doesn't do (yet) and thoughts on why not.

There has been a lot of commentary, complaints and opinions on the iPhone. I haven't seen much discussion of its features and strategy from the perspective of the realities of product development. In my opinion, what Apple have done is the right set of strategic and tactical moves for the first product in a new family. What was announced and shown is not the final feature set for the initial device and it does not include the full vision of the product.

Lets look at the timing of the announcement. As a new entrant in the mobile phone marketplace, the correct strategy is to pre-announce. There is no existing product from Apple to cannibalize, and there is only partial overlap with the iPod market. The announcement was made after the holiday shopping season, and the timing is setup to get a volume ramp in place for the 2007 holiday shopping season. The initial launch is based on the minimum marketable features (MMF) required to address the Apple oriented consumer marketplace. Rather than wait until the full feature set is ready or create low quality solutions for a wide feature set, the Apple strategy is to develop a small number of features to an extremely high level of quality and integration, and focus on the needs of their core market of existing OSX and iPod users.

Lets look at disclosure related issues. For a phone to be released as a product it has to go through FCC testing that takes a month or two, and the FCC process is relatively open. All the new phones are scooped by Engadget Mobile before they turn up in stores. For the big splash product announcement, it needed to be scheduled before Apple turns over an iPhone to the FCC test process. In order to keep details on the product quiet for as long as possible, it is also much easier to do the initial launch before completing negotiations with key third party application developers like Adobe and Microsoft. I've heard that there is no Adobe Flash support in the device at present, and there is a clear need to support Microsoft Office at some point in the future. These omissions are easily fixed, its just a matter of time.

New models in the iPod range are announced when they are basically in stock in the stores. If you take the iPhone package, and remove the phone parts, keeping the iTunes music and video functionality, and WiFi/web connectivity, you are left with a very nice looking wide-screen networked iPod. Its main issue would be the relatively small capacity flash, so that could be increased, or a hard disk could possibly be crammed into the package. I would not expect anything like this to be announced until it is completely ready and in-stock, but if it exists, it could end up being released this summer around the same time as the iPhone actually ships. Since it isn't a phone, its outside the Cingular agreement, but adding a WiFi only VOIP client like iChat or Skype would create a product that competes with the Sony Mylo.

During the demo's no-one tried to show the iPhone's camera, this indicates to me that it isn't finished, and I hear elsewhere that they are still working on video capture. For use as a video-phone, the camera is on the wrong side, you can't see the display while you are on-camera. This makes it seem less likely that a full iChat function will be included in the initial package.

Apple is getting a lot of criticism for its locked down and controlled approach to third party software on the iPhone, and lack of a developers program. Developer support falls outside the minimum marketable features required for initial launch into the consumer marketplace. By taking full control of the product, Apple can make sure that very high quality standards are in place, and that applications integrate with the iPhone experience. The reality of product development also makes it hard to build a stable developer API until the product is finished, so I fully expect a phased developer program. The initial phase included applications like Google Maps and Cingular Visual Voicemail from development partners (and I expect some kind of GPS location service to appear in the product soon - perhaps even in the initial release). The second phase will be a closed private developer program including big partners like Microsoft and Adobe. The third phase will start to open up to the Apple developer community, with stable public APIs and developer tools. Extensibility is a MMF for the professional/consumer (prosumer) and enterprise marketplaces, along with Microsoft Office support. This may take a year or so to arrive, its inevitable, but I can see why its not a feature of the initial product launch.

There has also been a lot of grumbling about Cingular and the lack of 3G service. Apple have dropped hints that they will support 3G sooner rather than later. My guess is that 3G is considered an MMF for the European and Asian markets, so I wouldn't be surprised if the models launched in those markets in late 2007 and 2008 included 3G support, and as Cingular's own 3G network continues to roll out over the USA the timing would make sense here as well. The real alternative to Cingular for Apple would be to setup their own Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) like Helio or Virgin Mobile. This is a big complicated thing to do without any experience, so my guess is that they decided that the highest priority was to get the product launched with a big network partner like Cingular, and to decide later on whether it is worth creating an MVNO for a less compromised product. So when the exclusivity arrangement with Cingular expires, they may well focus on their own MVNO services.

So thats my opinion, as someone who has developed products and strategies in the past and understands the compromises, but with no inside information on their actual plans. My own plan is to avoid the initial release, and see what the product looks like for the Xmas 2007 shopping season.