Even though I have a strong interest in Apple, I often hesitate to write about the company or their products (outside of their direct effect on my life, e.g. MacBook random shutdowns) because I find that I very rarely have anything to say that hasn’t already been said elsewhere, and expressed much more eloquently at that. Why bother writing unless I have something original to contribute?
My original answer to that question was that I shouldn’t. Well, I’ve since revised my answer, because I realized that I sometimes really want to write just to get my thoughts down somewhere, and stop them from bouncing around inside my head. It’s relieving, in a way.
The first thing that struck me about the iPhone is that it seemed to me a remarkably un-Apple-like product. I don’t mean this in terms of the final execution; the sheer elegance and simplicity of the design is pure Apple. No, what surprised me was that the iPhone turned out to be the feature-packed, all-in-one device that it is.
My experiences with previous Apple products had led me to believe that Apple’s strategy was not to cram as many features into a product as possible, but to only include those which were absolutely essential, and to implement them extremely well. To me, the iPod epitomizes this approach. The iPod is not the most feature-laden DAP on the market. On the contrary, it’s one of the most featureless. Its focus has always been on music playback, and its UI was expressly designed for this purpose.
Yes, Apple has added video playback, games, and many other features to the iPod over time, but they have managed to do so without detracting from the core function of the device. This is more than can be said of their competitors, who continue to cram more features (FM tuners, line-in recording, support for more file formats, etc.) into their DAPs while neglecting the single most important component: a simple, intuitive interface for syncing, navigating through, and playing music.
The moral of the story is that good design is often not about deciding what needs to be added, but what needs to be left out, so that the focus can remain on what’s really important. Do one thing, and do it well. There are dozens more maxims I can regurgitate, but you get the idea. This is what I thought Apple was all about. And this is what I fully expected the iPhone to be: a kick-ass phone that did a kick-ass job of being a phone.
What we actually got was a kick-ass widescreen iPod / mobile phone / internet communications device.
Wait… what happened to doing one thing, and doing it well? I thought about this for a while and concluded—and I know this sounds like a cop-out—that there’s nothing wrong with doing multiple things, and doing them all well. It’s just extremely difficult to pull off. But if there’s one company that can do it, I’m confident it’s Apple.
That said, the iPhone really is in a different class than the iPod. The extra, unnecessary features of DAPs (FM tuners, etc.) are just that: extra and unnecessary. Yes, there are people who will demand them, but they are in the minority, and their concerns are ultimately peripheral. The iPhone, on the other hand, is comprised of three “products” that there are most definitely huge markets for.
The reason I initially doubted that Apple could produce an easy-to-use, all-in-one device, and why I doubted that they ever would, was that I was under the mistaken impression that there is something inherently user-unfriendly about this new class of “convergence” devices, that complexity would scale linearly with the number of features added to them.
This was all before I watched the Stevenote. When I finally got around to it, and listened to Jobs explaining the rationale behind an Apple smartphone, it all made perfect sense. But just to make sure I wasn’t under the influence of that famed RDF, I sat it out for a while before writing this.
I think I’ve waited long enough for the effects to wear off… and I still think what Jobs said makes a lot of sense. Namely, that the problem with smartphones isn’t that they try to do too many things, but that all the things they do depend upon the same UI. The user-unfriendliness of these products, then, stems from the fact that the UI is not one that is specifically tailored for the application in use, but a compromised one that is applied to many applications. In terms of interfaces, what’s good for a phone isn’t necessarily so for a web browser, and vice versa.
In other words, current smartphones do a lot of things, but do no one thing particularly well.
What Apple has done, then, is create a device with a completely dynamic UI, one that can adapt to whatever application is thrown at it. Not only does this allow the interface to be optimized for each specific application, it also allows for an unprecedented level of integration between the different applications, which makes the device as a whole more useful than its individual components. In the end, this is really the key benefit of the convergence of all these technologies, and not just the fact that you’ll have that many fewer devices to carry around.
Simply put, the iPhone does a lot of things, and does all of them extremely well.
Theoretically, that is. How effective the Multi-Touch interface is in real-world use remains to be seen; after all, not many people outside of Apple have actually had hands-on experience with the iPhone. Except maybe David Pogue. That bastard.
Although Jobs derided the “little plastic buttons” of competing devices like the Blackberry, the truth is that hardware buttons are, and always will be, superior to virtual buttons on a touch screen. Yes, the “revolutionary” Multi-Touch interface depends upon the elimination of hardware buttons, but there’s no use pretending this isn’t at least a minor sacrifice. It may be a necessary one, but it’s a sacrifice nonetheless.
And despite what Steve says today, deep down, I think he knows this. To my knowledge, Apple has used a pure touch interface in a shipping product only once before: in the third-generation iPod. (I’m not counting the Newton because its input method was a stylus; therefore, it’s not truly a “touch” interface.)
What happened to the 3G iPod? It was quickly obsoleted by the 4G and the mini, both of which featured non-touch Click Wheels. I’m convinced there’s still some part of our brain that craves tactile feedback, and I don’t think it’ll be conditioned out of us anytime soon.
In any case, the benefits of a dynamic touch screen interface outweigh the loss of tactile feedback, as far as I’m concerned. Sometimes you have to take a step backward in order to take two (or ten) steps forward.
On another note, the industrial design of the iPhone appears (to me, at least) to be a significant departure from the Apple products of today, as it doesn’t seem to fit into any of their current design themes (anodized aluminum for “Pro” products, white plastic for consumer-level products).
My guess is that the iPhone is our first glimpse of Apple’s next-generation design theme, and that we’ll see start to see elements of it propagate throughout the rest of their product line-up. New MBP enclosures, anyone?
3 Comments
Beautifully written and thought-out piece! I particularly like your analysis of the touchscreen vis-a-vis hardware buttons.
But you’ve got to be kidding… it takes more than a few days for the Jobsian RDF to wear out, man. ::chuckle:: A couple weeks is about right. ;-) Write a follow-up post then.
You make a very good point about mechanical buttons. That’s actually one of the first things a coworker of mine told me about iPhone - having no buttons might make it inconvenient. When you’re driving (or other attention-requiring activities), it’s instinctive just to pick up the phone and start touching for the buttons and dial, without looking. With virtual buttons, this is very hard. I’m sure there are more cases and examples similar to that.
By the way.. about doing one thing and doing it really well.. honestly, how can you do a phone (alone) “really well?” There’s only so much you can do about a phone.. in fact, I think most phones nowadays are already really well done, as just a phone and nothing more… :)
By the way, your comment box extends in height as I type, instead of adding a scroll bar.. interestingly, the page design actually allows for this to happen quite seamlessly.. neat feature. Man, the nice design of your pages somehow encouraged me to use good grammar and punctuations and capitalizations and such. I don’t normally type like this. :/
While I agree that the phones we use today aren’t by any means terrible, I believe that the iPhone proved that there are still many aspects about them that could be dramatically improved. I think the reason why a lot of people (myself included) see the products we use as “already really well done” is that it’s sometimes hard to imagine how something can be improved until someone actually goes out and does it, and you can see the improvement with your own eyes.
A good example of this is voicemail. Although I admittedly don’t know too much about cell phone technology, I assume that almost everyone’s voicemail works the same way as it does on my phone; that is, you call a special number, an automated system plays back your messages one by one, and waits for your command to save or delete each message. I should mention that I somehow always forget which number is the “delete” command (probably because I don’t get a lot of voicemail), condemning me to wait until the prompt at the end of the message (“to delete this message, press 7”), even if I already know I want to delete it halfway through.
Maybe at a subconscious level, I realized that this was pretty clunky, but I never gave it much thought because everyone’s voicemail worked the same way, and I came to accept it as The Way Things Are. I certainly never went around complaining about how much voicemail systems suck. To quote Jonathan Ive (again), “We tend to assume the problem is with us, and not with the products we’re trying to use.”
Then Apple introduces Visual Voicemail on the iPhone. It’s not a particularly ground-breaking feature in that it basically just gives an email client–like interface to voicemail, but it’s one of those things we look at and think “Well, duh. That’s how it should have been all along.” The question is, if Apple hadn’t done it, who would’ve?
P.S. Thanks for your comments about the site :)