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10 Apple iPhone 4 Game Changers
Editor’s note: there has been a good discussion this afternoon about the new iPhone 4 and how it compares to Android and other mobile devices on the NY Tech Meetup mailing list. Jonathan Hirschman put together the below list of game changers coming out of the Jobs keynote today announcing the iPhone 4. Jonathan does note that he is currently an Android fanboy.
So many game changers with today’s iPhone 4 announcement. Here’s my list of game changers:
* Almost every other upcoming or current phone is now a generation behind.
* The traditional computer/OS combo has become, again, a bit less relevant. Also interesting is that this eroded relevancy is not because of anything happening in the cloud.
* 300 DPI resolution is now the new standard for many display devices, just like Apple set it for print devices with the original LaserWriter. Notebooks, desktop monitors, phones – it’ll be demanded by consumers in short order.
* Apple now has erected toll-booths on all digital consumables across the board – apps, books, music, movies, TV, ads. They’re feature complete in this regard. And then they’ll bring out an iOS based streaming TV box, too… holy crap.
Apple is now truly the Apple Broadcast Network (I saw this moniker for the first time here)
Simply put: anyone else selling digital consumables should be very nervous about now. They are going to see much of their revenue siphoned off quite shortly. Some familiar brands are going to be roadkill. Having a client on the Apple device will not help, not if the prices are the same.
* Apple has plunged a dagger into both Google and Android with iAd, especially wrt the sales stats mentioned in the presentation. ($60mm in presold ads for 2H2010? That’s insane. For comparison, that’s more than a year’s ad revenue for SiriusXM).
I mean, Jobs said that they’ll own HALF of all mobile advertising by end of year. This is an existential threat to Google. Google is going to get radical. Google is going to have to start thinking about becoming a hardware maker, or doing a rev share with hardware makers.
* HP has just been told what their playbook needs to be. But they’ll screw it up.
* If FaceTime is truly open, Skype is in trouble, too.
* The ATT upgrade offer (anyone expiring this year gets the upgrade NOW) makes it 100% likely that they won’t have an iPhone exclusive in 2011.
Pretty huge bombshells throughout the presentation. Apple is quickly shaping up to become our children’s Microsoft.
Jonathan Hirschman has been observing digital technology since both he and it were infants. Along the way, he founded or managed four Web startups, held a seat at the W3C, and has fondled most everything containing a microprocessor ever made.
My first thought after watching the WWDC keynote address was, ‘every mobile platform should be nervous.’ Apple continues to innovate new technologies, or take old technologies to the next level. All I’ve ever seen from the other mobile companies is very good copying. After Apple’s original iphone, we saw many companies poring through the iphone tech specs to figure out how to copy the iphone. And it has continued to date. No ingenuity, no innovation, just overt copying. My suggestion is to stop copying, and brainstorm something new.
I am an Apple fan. However, I am a bigger fan of ingenuity and innovation. I think the mobile platform marketplace should be a place of competition. Not one where Apple is leading and inventing, and everyone else is copying. I would love to see a marketplace where companies went head to head, each creating their own new technologies. Thus giving us, the consumer, a legitimate choice between two technologies, not one technology and its copies.
Keep in mind the 300+dpi lcd technology has been in development for 1-2 years at least now. It will take a year or two more before the ipad can be given the same treatment, but when it does it’s game over for the e-ink people, and might be lights out for the pixel qi folks as well (it all depends on whether or not their tech can reach comparable pixel densities in time).
This comment — $60mm in presold ads for 2H2010? That’s insane. For comparison, that’s more than a year’s ad revenue for SiriusXM…. What a crappy and irrelevant comparison. I mean really, WTF?
I like your point about why ATT is being so “generous” with the upgrade policy. It makes sense that they are highly motivated to lock in users for another two years, if there is going to be an end to their iPhone exclusivity soon.
I don’t agree about 300 DPI becoming the new “standard” for all types of displays. The iPhone screen, like a laser-printed page, is meant to be held about 12 inches from the eyes when viewed. A typical distance for a computer screen is about twice that distance (or more). Therefore about 160 DPI would be equivalent to the new iPhones 326 DPI, at computer screen distance. The 27-inch iMac is already at about 110 DPI. It would be a waste to make a desktop display with 300 DPI pixel density. Laptops screen are often used a bit closer, so they may need to get up to about 200 DPI to have the same effect. The point is to make individual pixels indistinguishable, and the needed density of pixels depends on the distance from eyes to screen.
ken1w,
Point well taken regarding what the actual DPI of what some display devices may be. On the other hand, if desktops go multitouch, the users will be in greater proximity. In any case, I think everyone is going to want a “retina display” on their device.
For an alternative view, see Louis Gray:
http://blog.louisgray.com/2010/06/iphone-4-is-nice-but-its-not-enough-to.html
Oh man, apple just rocks!
Jonathan – I’m happy to see CenterNetworks getting more authors and content but I think you’re thinking ‘in the moment’. How many times have we seen Google, Microsoft and of course Apple come out with something that nobody expected. There very well may be something sitting … waiting to be launched right now and nobody knows it. It also is VERY possible that it will come from a start-up that hardly anyone has heard about.
Remember I wrote this :)
Your criticism would be well taken if we were simply talking features. I have no illusions that amazing technologies can appear out of left field and disrupt everyone at a device level.
In this case, however, Apple has disrupted on a new scale, and it goes far beyond the phone. Their iOS platform has effectively, out of nowhere, taken the biggest slice out of mobile advertising. And almost as astonishingly, they’re up to 22% of eBook sales since the recent launch of the iPad.
In short, they’ve destroyed both Amazon’s and Google’s growth prospects virtually overnight. How does Google take back Apple’s projected near-majority share of mobile advertising? How does Kindle recover? It’d be like asking how anyone takes back Apple’s digital music share.
It took years for that music share to be built. The advertising and eBooks situation are coups in comparison. Next coup is video. A lot of companies have reason to be very afraid right now.
Jonathan … a few valid points yes but years have been getting shorter and shorter (and I’ve been doing this stuff a long time). What used to be decades in tech is now years. What used to be years is months … and I, for one, honestly don’t think Google is worried …. at all … despite the numbers.
As a parting shot, I’ll suggest that the entire reason for Android was to give Google more advertising inventory in case they got shut out of other platforms. They just got shut out. Next step will be for Apple to be available from multiple carriers, which will further reduce Google’s oxygen.
So yes, I think that they’re worried, at least a bit.
I have a general rule that companies that don’t worry about their competitors – particularly powerful and well-funded ones – don’t stay around long. Apple certainly worried about Google’s ad presence and now Google needs to really think about how to counter this play by Apple.
Imagine what would have become of Apple if IBM hadnt entered the picture with “business machines”
You are now seeing exactly that. The business model of making cellphones has been destroyed for everyone but Apple.
This is perhaps the greatest retail thing ever made for sale in the history of the human race. Its not that other manufacturers CANT do it. They WONT do it because their commodity product cycle does not allow them to spend more than a couple months per model, mostly making small adjustments to commodity software that has no value add. The cellphone equivalent to knock off PCs.
iPhone 4 is the result of at least 2 years maybe more development on just this model, plus the software on it. And they were already 5 years ahead.
Let me know when a cellphone manufacturer of any stripe is willing to invest that kind of time and money into a single model of cellphone only to end up not coming close to this level of quality.
Its not only the technology its also the business model. This is priceless. It will not be bested in our lifetimes.
I lol’d at your comment
Agree w/ most of what you say, but I think you’re a bit too pessimistic about time to market.
Apple spent 2 years on developing the iPhone. The copiers need only 3 months for a physical look-alike, and 9 months for a good Android copy.
BUT, that’s copying the device in hand; they’ll need three years of hard, loss leader work to match the ecosystem; in fact, it’s probable that no one will match the ecosystem, marketing, retail, and combativeness of Apple. Not on this planet.
I think Apple will dominate all of mobile computing by 2013: 30% of the revenue, 60% of the profit.
2013 market cap: $700mm
Google should have done iAd, not Android. They let Apple change the game in mobile ads, but Google did not change the game in phones.
The current idea with Android is it’s supposed to be a 1990′s Windows to Apple’s 1990′s Mac, but that was not even the same Apple. Instead, iAds could be a 2000′s Mac to Google’s ad business as 2000′s Windows, with Apple taking only a small piece of the overall market, but taking 90% of the high end and the majority of the profits.
Another irony is Google’s ad business reminds me of the 1985-1995 Apple, just sitting there, watching the world change around them, missing obvious opportunities.
At the end of 2010, 98% of the 2008-2010 iPhones will be running iOS v4, iAds, and 400,000 native C apps. Android will still be 75% v1.6 phones with no updates coming, banner ads, a closed native C app platform, and less than 100,000 baby Java apps. What if Apple brings iAds to the Web, with 1-click purchases? Or does a deal with Facebook?
I counted 8 game changers though I like that you captured the threat to Google nicely – the next few months will be very interesting.
And I agree – I think Google needs to get behind a big Android push
Wayne,
Sorry, I didn’t put the title in here, so I apologize if I’m a couple of “changers” short :) That being said, I think that Google is realizing that they underestimated Jobs. Their likely response is to try to assert more control over the OS and installed applications (to erect their own tollbooths and improve overall UX); the hardware makers’ counter-response is likely to be to ask for a share of recurring revenues. Should be very interesting to watch.
you are kidding right?
Huh? Who wrote this article?
With FroYo and new vastly superior Android updates, Apple remains a phone for people who don’t really need or “get” phones.
“Almost every other upcoming or current phone is now a generation behind.”
What? The 8MP cameras, bigger screens and faster processors of Android phones make iPhones look like kids.
I wrote this article, and I’m an Android fan.
I stand by my words. Not only is the iPhone 4 hardware, in total, ahead of anything running Android, but the integration and user experience is vastly ahead. Now, I do value things like having a rooted phone, custom roms, unofficial tethering, sideloading apps – but that’s just me, and not the vast majority of users.
You don’t get superior usability and utility by just having a bunch of individual excellent hardware features. While Android is great, it is fragmented in terms of versions, OEM customizations, and different default apps – so it is also fragmented internally (for example, there is no default eBook reader at all). The smoothly integrated whole of Apple’s offerings, along with the hardware excellence, truly do put the new phone at least a generation ahead.
I’ll be keeping my Android handset for now, but I’d really like to have synchronized eBook notes and bookmarks across my devices, as one example. Google just isn’t there yet with the smoothness, the integration, the overall utility.
I look forward to them catching up. You probably do, too.
you mean fragmented like people with iPhone 3G can’t fully upgrade to OS4.
Fully integrated.. are you kidding.. the synchronization between calendars, email, docs, and other google services is awesome and on top of that free.
And their hardware is not vastly ahead.. check your facts man.
We’ve seen this battle played out before, and consumers will want choice in the end, not the walled garden.
Fanboy
I don’t see any hardware excellence in iPhone. 960×640 resolution might be better on 4-5″ screen. On 3.5″ you won’t see the difference.
On software side, iPhone doesn’t have widgets and FaceBook/Twitter sync with address book.
Facebook app syncs with your address book, I think it has done this for awhile. I don’t use Twitter but I imagine it could sync with your address book to.
A better 5mp camera is worth a lot more than the cheap 8mp cameras they put in HTC. Bigger screens are only so good, they also mean bigger phones. This is a personal issue, everyone has their sweet spot. And HTC are yet to address the battery problems, unlike Apple.
There are some great HTC phones, and android has come a long way very quickly. Still, for now, I think the iPhone 4 is the best phone on the market, or will be when it is released. Who knows, HTC seem to be releasing a phone a month, maybe they will have something better soon, but bigger screens, more camera MP is not going to cut it.
HTC will soon be paying Apple for every device it sells. I don’t support Asian companies ripping off American companies ingenuity, but Google does.
I don’t think that this is likely; if it is, HTC is out of business. HTC has enough patents such that they’ll both probably enter into a cross-licensing arrangement down the road, and the matter will be settled.
HTC agreed to “license” Microsoft’s patents, but I’d guess that the fee was more quid pro quo – Microsoft would offer up their patent portfolio (and get a PR win), and HTC would agree to actually produce Windows-based phones.
What a stupid ignorant racist hillbilly redneck. You do know that the iPhone is made in China? So does that mean your beloved American Apple is taking away American jobs and giving them to the Asians? Sheesh!
Just to be clear, my comment is squarely aimed at that Riley above.
Great round up the WWDC keynote. The think that stuck with me is that Apple now has the web biggest web store. Over Amazon, ebay etc. Wow