Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I’ve written about this before, but I wanted to quickly re-state it: It doesn’t make any sense for Apple to create a cell phone. The Almighty Pogue agrees with me, albeit for different reasons. Apple usually introduces devices that fill a market that is poorly served, or in which they can make significant improvements to existing products, and the cell phone market doesn’t fit that bill. Apple is also a company that is all about control (and I say that as someone who has signed an Apple NDA), especially vertical control, and relying on a cell phone service provider to make a product usable (or not) doesn’t seem to be Apple’s modus operandi, nor in their best interest.

How is Apple going to convince enough people to change cell phone carriers to make the alleged iPhone sell? How is Apple going to talk people out of existing cell service contracts? How is Apple going to talk people out of staying with service they’re already happy with? Is Apple going to wait for existing contracts to expire while the slow-selling alleged iPhone takes a beating in the press, and Apple’s stock takes a beating by extremely fickle dump-it-at-the-first-sign-of-bad-news short-sighted investors? What is it that Apple is going to add to a cell phone that will make it so much better than the phones available now that you’ve just gotta have it? An Apple logo? The ability to play music with an iPod interface? A scroll wheel? (Frankly, all those things together wouldn’t compel me to buy one since I already have a phone and an iPod.) Would Apple really sell an incomplete solution in the form of a provide-your-own-SIM-card phone, placing the work and the hassle (however small it may be to some of us) on the customer? Wouldn’t that be unApple-like? Would cell service providers support hardware they don’t explicitly approve for their network? Would you buy an unsupported phone like that? What is this compelling fire in the minds of people who want this phone so damn bad? What do they expect to gain?

This iPhone stupidity reminds me very much of the Mac mini. For months before its introduction, we heard all kinds of bullshit about the Mac mini. It was going to be super cheap. Everyone who always wanted a Mac but was too cheap to drop the cash for one would snap up a mini, and meaningless Mac market share would shoot through the roof and Mac minis would be everywhere. It was going to fundamentally change the universe. We must have them, now! My God, how can Apple survive without the Mac mini? Unless there’s a Mac mini introduced right freakin’ now, dammit, Apple is doomed, I tell ya! Dooooomed!

Almost two years after the Mac mini saw the light of day, it’s not super cheap (and never was). Users of other platforms either kept their same reasons for not buying one, or dreamed up new reasons. Meaningless market share did grow, not explode, but that growth is primarily because of Apple notebook sales, not the Mac mini. The Mac mini didn’t change the universe. It’s a nifty little box and I’ve recommended one or two to people, but it didn’t bring about world peace and a cure for cancer like so many predicted.

If there is an iPhone, and I hope there isn’t, it will turn out to be a similar kind of stupidity. It still doesn’t make sense to me, and while they would theoretically sell them to the people who get hard nipples just seeing the word “iPhone”, it wouldn’t help humanity create a Grand Unified Theory of Everything and it sure as hell wouldn’t clean behind the toilet for me. It will, however, continue to annoy me (and anyone else with a clue) because it can’t possibly meet the expectations of financial analysts and Mac-Macs. Either we’ll all keep reading this idiotic idea for the next decade until, under vastly different circumstances, Apple release some kind of phone (”See! I told ya so!”), or the idea will come to fruition and it’s failure to instantly bring dead loved ones back to life will earn it a bashing by the very people who closed their eyes and wrinkled their nose and clenched their fists and wished real hard for it to begin with.