Apple Without the 'Computer:' Life with iPhone

By Scott M. Fulton, III, BetaNews

January 11, 2007, 10:35 PM

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Dr. Gerry Purdy talked about the potential for Apple partnering with third parties to develop new applications. If Apple were interested in partnering the way it did when building "Copland" applications for the Mac, we asked Purdy, wouldn't Apple have already started seeking more partners than just Cingular? "That's why they took the name 'Computer' off the name of the company," he responded, "because it isn't about computers and computing per se, it's about solving problems that people have and giving them solutions that work. Apple's pretty good at that integration, so let's see how it turns out."

Carmi Levy believes the outside developers will come...and must come. "Certainly Apple will encourage the evolution of that developer community and culture," Levy told BetaNews, "such that these classes of rich, usable, and business-critical applications will be made available to this platform and to the end users who rely on it. The iPhone announcement is only the beginning; in the months to come, expect a very large cadre of developers, most likely from the Mac community but certainly not limited to that, to look long and hard at this new platform and start to identify and pursue market opportunities that wouldn't have existed on lower-powered devices."

Then should we start thinking of this device not as a smart phone, but as a computer - whether Apple wants to say it or not, a "little Mac," maintained from product cycle to product cycle with a refreshed base of new applications? "I think we're probably going to see pieces of that," Levy responded, "as we evolve from cell phones to smart phones to fully-converged devices. As the relative complexity of the device increases, the budget of time and money and energy for maintaining the effectiveness of that platform will also continue to grow. You can't have one without the other; there is no free ride in mobility.

"Over time," Info-Tech's Levy continued, "the amount of energy and resources that an end user and a service provider will have to devote to supporting this platform will grow as that platform becomes more complex. Obviously the basic cell phone that I carry around today - which is as dumb as a doorknob - will demand almost nothing in terms of upkeep, but the iPhone certainly will. There will likely be patches, there will likely be virus-related issues...because the more capable a platform becomes, the more desirable it becomes to the miscreants of the world to create some malicious code for it. So certainly, at some point, we will see malicious attacks against platforms like this, against Windows Mobile-based platforms, against BlackBerry. It's coming. It has to."

We'd heard word that some of the other handset manufacturers displaying their wares at CES this week were a bit relieved that the Apple iPhone was essentially a high-end model, and not a direct competitor to their mainstream products - not yet, anyway. "Sure. Why not?" responded Dr. Purdy when we told him this. "If you're entering the market with your first product, the competitors...who have more products and more maturity are going to leverage their ability for breadth in the marketplace. So that's going to give them an advantage short-term in the market. Let's see what it looks like a year or two from now, then it'll be quite interesting to see a) what's the reaction from Nokia and Motorola; and b) not only [that], what's the reaction from Apple? Apple itself will have its own reaction to the marketplace of adapting and developing what it needs to compete. Can it be as big as Nokia? No, but this is as close to betting the company, so it's about as good a bet as I've seen in a long time."

How long would such a response take to come to fruition, from both sides of the ballgame? "Well, first of all, nobody's going to react to it - such as Nokia - by saying, 'We're going to drop what we're doing and try to directly do something different,"' Dr. Purdy responded. Instead, he believes competitors will develop their own product timelines - if they haven't already done so - to bring them up to a par with Apple iPhone within a reasonable amount of time. "What I think will happen is that Apple will probably get pretty aggressive, and we'll see a series of products being announced by them before the end of the year. There's no reason for them to stand still with saying, 'Okay, now we're done.' If anything, they're sitting there with their own roadmap, ready to take this to the next level, and I suspect they will. They're very smart if they do, and challenged if they don't. So I would hope they will."

As Carmi Levy predicted, "Certainly I would expect Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint Nextel to be burning up with lines with Samsung, Motorola, and Nokia, just to name a few, as well as HP for their iPAQ, and asking them to accelerate the go-to-market plans for whatever really cool, next-generation smart phones they've got in the pipeline. This will accelerate those plans significantly because, if you're selling yesterday's phones, then you're yesterday's carrier...Which ultimately benefits everyone, because if you're a Verizon subscriber, then Verizon now has additional incentive to bring better product to market that supports richer services. So ultimately it's like the tide; it forces all boats to rise, not just those of the one carrier."

Ever since phones started becoming smart in the first place, manufacturers and carriers have faced the issue of how to deploy computer-like functionality over these devices in such a way that it can be monetized - that it pays for the billions spent in rolling out wireless telephony services over the past few decades. Apple's iPhone does address that issue. But if you look very closely, you'll realize it does so very, very carefully, so as not to trip the wires that open the floodgates. And yet it still moves us further toward that goal than ever before.

"There's a recognition that mobility does not mean that the experience has to be dumbed down or watered down or diluted," observed Levy, "that just because we are away from the office or away from the house doesn't mean we are willing to accept anything less than rapid access to full Web pages, to all of our media content, to our e-mail inboxes...We want our cake, and we want to eat it too. So the iPhone is an answer to that challenge to put a whole lot of functionality into a device that can slip into your pocket, and certainly compared to much of what has come before, it now rises to the top in terms of its ability to accomplish that.

"We've seen a lot of this capability in earlier BlackBerrys - certainly the BlackBerry Pearl raised the bar late last year," Levy continued. "Now I think the iPhone leap-frogs it because it comes from that different perspective. It's entertainment as a base with messaging built on top of it, whereas the BlackBerry has always been messaging as a base with entertainment on top of it. But we will certainly see BlackBerry - which is now a fairly obvious competitor to Apple - leap-frog one another in the months and years to come as each releases successive generations of technology."

The ink is barely dry on the sales brochures, and already analysts are aiming towards Apple's next move, its second act in the new business it has entered. Presumably it's the communications business. But even without the moniker on its corporate title now, Apple cannot escape the fact that it's in the computer business, even if for Cingular's sake it would like to pretend it's not.