Apple execs admit to iPhone anxiety
By Peter Rojas 
posted June 4th 2007 6:41AM
posted June 4th 2007 6:41AM
The hype over the iPhone is almost deafening right now, but there's an article in today's New York Times today that captures a rare moment of self-doubt from Apple regarding the impending launch:"The anticipation, which is intense even by Jobsian standards, has led to some quiet, behind-the-scenes anxiety at Apple. Some Apple executives worry privately that expectations for the one-button phones may be too high and that first-generation buyers will end up disappointed."
They're right to be a bit nervous. We don't doubt that the iPhone will sell like crazy when it first comes out and be hard to find in stores for months, but it's rare for anything this highly anticipated to completely live up to everyone's expectations. The iPhone's on pretty much the most massive pedestal that any gadget has ever been on, and if there are any issues with it -- like with its touchscreen, battery life, call quality, or software stability -- you can expect the backlash to be severe.
"I know, right? Visual Voicemail has been around for years, so has multi-touch and full featured web browsers"
bravo.
people need to stop talking about this thing like it's been out for 6 months and they've been thoroughly testing every feature it has to offer. hell, we don't even have a complete list of what those features could be, let alone have enough information to judge how they will work. that's why people have been scrutinizing the commercials (by the way, there's a missing application that pops up on the home screen of some of the commercials, but is cut out of frame, clearly a deliberate move by steve j to stop people from seeing what this feature is- thats why the applications are sometimes in a different order).
personally, i believe the iphone is going to be a huge hit. most of the people making the derogatory, think-they-sound-intelligent remarks are either misinformed about the iphone's features, or hate apple from the start and are just looking for ways to bash it.
considering that this thing has gotten possibly more press attention than any other consumer electronics device in the past decade, and it HASN'T EVEN COME OUT YET, i have absolutely no doubt that it will be a success. apple proved it with the ipod: extreme numbers of features AREN'T what people care about the most, rather, ease of use and a beautiful design. and believe it or not, people WILL pay generously for that.
give the iphone a chance. it already has a plethora of features that make it stand out, something the people who insult it for being barren of features are either ignorant of or have chosen to overlook. lets see what this thing can really do before we criticize.
> hell, we don't even have a complete list of what those features could be
unfortunatly, we do have the complete list of features, and also non-features.
"give the iphone a chance. it already has a plethora of features that make it stand out, something the people who insult it for being barren of features are either ignorant of or have chosen to overlook. lets see what this thing can really do before we criticize."
How do you define a "plethora"?
For such a long-winded diatribe on the closed-mindedness of others, you are sure quick to judge. There is no reason not to discuss the weaknesses of the iPhone where those weaknesses are apparent. The iPhone is, after all, hyped as being revolutionary even though it is not especially unique, new, or full-featured. Why should we accept your declaration of a "plethora of features that make it stand out" yet wait and see on its obvious shortcomings? Speculation is an equal opportunity activity and we are equally right to speculate on its suckiness are you are to speculate on its greatness. The difference is that our speculation is based on facts on experience, yours is based on the reputation of a company.
I don't think they should be worried about the phone; It's the carrier that will push potential buyers away.
@raphael
i think a lot of people would dispute that. sure, they've given us a set of features that will be in every iphone. just like they did with leopard. now we haven't exactly been told outright like we were with leopard that there was more coming, but there's no doubt in my mind that jobs has a few tricks up his sleeves to announce closer to the release (the smallest indication of this would be the "missing application" i noted above).
even if there are no special, super secret features, we certainly don't know a lot about how well the features we DO know of will work.
>but there's no doubt in my mind that jobs has a few tricks up his sleeves to announce closer to the release (the smallest indication of this would be the "missing application" i noted above).
wow, can't wait to see that ;-)
>we certainly don't know a lot about how well the features we DO know of will work.
and again, ALL the features that we do know already DO work WELL, and since a long time.
WITHOUT 3G DATA THIS WILL STINK! Edge is horrible, and ATT's voice coverage leave alot to be desired. Apple should have bended for verizon,we'd have a CDMA 3G EVDO vversion that would work the way it should.
You think verizon would sit around and let apple blame them for their shortcomings? If I had an iPhone I'd be very afraid to carry it around. It looks very fragile.
yeah why would they decide to make it come out for ATT only, seems like an awefully stupid idea. Granted its easier to justify making a quad gsm phone so you can use it world wide and stuff...but doesn't verizon have the largest consumer base? and apple should know that all of the phones for verizon have a lot to be desired. I bet though if the iphone came out for verizon, verizon would be like OMG LETS PUT THE CUSTOM VERIZON VERSION OF whatever the hell OS that iphone uses.
i really hope verizon gets some good phones soon. I hate my launch LG chocolate its a piece of crap.
Re: Noob
ATT/Cingular has the largest consumer base. VZ behind by about 4-6 million users.
@raphael
this is exactly what i'm saying; we could argue this back and forth all day about whether or not there will be as yet unannounced features, but the fact is we don't know, and we won't know until it launches.
how can you judge a product that a) you haven't used yet, and b) you only have what (may) end up being a partial features list?
4 gigs -- obviously some of the flash drive space is going to be used for operating system (Jobs has said Iphone is running leopard ) and some sort of cache for the various applications so I would think anywhere from 500 megs to a gig of 4 gig drive is gone. So you could probably get 3 or 4 movies into 4 gig Iphone if you had nothing else in it .
but most people will have music and photos so that will take out more drive space.
I've had many phones in the past, especially HTC Pocket PCs (see my article: http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/articles.php?action=expand,47921) and I can tell you honestly, getting to exactly what you want has never been a quick and easy task. Even on my RAZR V3xx, just to get to my music, there's a minimum of 10 button presses, and even though I can almost do it with my eyes closed and in under a few seconds, given a level playing field, only an idiot would consider this over the iPhone's two button action to the music.
So, it is really all about the experience. If we go back to the old PC vs. Mac war - sure, they both can surf the web, do your simple Office tasks, and work with videos, photos and whatever. But, which interface would you rather work with? Which platform is more stable? (Assuming the iPhone will be as comparatively stable as the Mac is).
I've been a solid PC guy for 20 years all the way back to the IBM PC AT, and I have to tell you, I really felt like I missed out on not playing with Apple's products any time sooner.
I'll be honest I am going to buy the iphone. Everyone says it has the same features as all other phones, the gui is no different, the form factor is not different. Multi-touch, accelerometers, ipods, and touch screens have been available for years on phones. I want one because it feels right, it looks rights and I have ALWAYS been happy with Apple products, they work the way "I" work. for millions and billions of people it won't be the right choice because they think linearly, they have a closed mind are to cheap or have a jealousy complex...there are thousands of other phones out their that are better then the iphone, at least that is what I hear from you all, just don't come within 5 feet of us and don't ever, ever ask us to let you see our phones.
It's a first generation device so there will be issues. Of course there will be people that complain about nearly every feature and how it doesn't meet their expectations.
People that view it objectively with reasonable expectations and allow a usage grace period will probably enjoy it more and have better judgment. Anyone who plays with it for 15 minutes and states that they have first hand experience I'll take lightly because 15 minutes doesn't cut it. You've been using/reviewing it for a month, then I'll listen.
I know for certain there will be some annoyances with this first generation iPhone...That's really not what scares me. It's the two year commitment that I have to make with AT&T since I've had Sprint for around 10 years and most likely will not drop them 1) because I have an all inclusive plan that no carrier could match today [not even Sprint itself] and 2) I need to feel confident about a switch first.
Yeah just like everybody has been saying, its not necessarily the features, its how it accesses those features...its extremely easy.
It will at first appeal to the extreme gadget consumers, but when the general consumer realizes its ease of use I believe they will go out and purchase one for themselves.
Apple is a very trust worthy name for most consumers. Everyone who owns a Mac loves them, but more importantly their are over 100 million iPod owners (give or take the few that have bought multiple ones) that will see this phone and KNOW that it is what they want.
It will get more negative press then positive (besides a few announcements about it selling out everywhere or something like that), but when that passes this phone will be the next generation. It will start a revolution. Which is great for us because then after a while every smart phone will be like the iPhone (innovation and ease of use) so everybody wins. There is no way anybody can be upset about it.
It's a phone, kids.
All you have to do is go out and look at all of the thousands of other phones out there and look at what sells and what doesn't sell and you realise something really quickly - the phone market falls into four groups:
The frugal- which is the huge bulk of the market and one the iPhone hasn't a hope in hell of penetrating.
The functional - which is the Smartphone/PDA group which is owned by the Blackberry first and Windows Mobile second. Again, the iPhone won't make a dent here because it's missing support for the things his group needs.
The fashionable - which is where the iPhone may do well - for about one year, and ONLY if they release it at the right time. The fashionable crowd is very fickle and they swing from candy-bar to flip phone and back. This crowd is happy to pay $500 to $600 for a phone, but it has to be the RIGHT phone. One strike against the iPhone is its size - it's huge. Yes, it's thin, but large - larger than my Wizard and that's considered a large phone.
And of course, then there's the fandom - Apple fans will buy this out of a compulsive need to own anything Apple and I'm sure they'll find reasons to rationalise away any shortcoming in the product.
Will the iPhone be a success? Sure - this is a market that loves new toys. Will it be a runaway hit? No. Will it be a lasting hit? We'll see. Apple will have to constantly change this product - it could end up taking more resources and effort than the iPod and Mac combined.
The phone market is a cutthroat industry that makes the PC market look like a gentleman's club.
I wouldn't say its "huge"...I have a Blackjack it it is almost exactly he same size dimensionally; but not having half the face covered in microchicklets, plus a 7 button softkey/nav amalgam makes it seem a lot bigger, but its ever-so-slightly longer than the blackjack, and thinner.
Jeff,
I very much agree with your opinion. Not much the categorization (there are actually six groups according to studies) and so not with US only focus. (Smartphone category is led by Symbian: 120 million phones, WM second, Blackberry third AND the very basic phone: e.g. 200 million Nokia 1100 sold).
Apple needs to compete in all 6 categories to become one of the players. I think the smaller upcomers are now selling around 40 million phones per year. Just to put the 10 million planned (or 20 million expected) iPhones sold into perspective.
Jeff said: "Yes, it's thin, but large - larger than my Wizard and that's considered a large phone."
I did some relative size comparisons, and um, ya dude...unless you have tiny hands...I dunno...
Its about .5 inch longer than an iPod, .25 inches less wide and about as think as a 30Gb iPod. Its almost the same size as a Samsung Blackjack.
I'd say it was "right in there" for the form factor.
I saw the iPhone yesterday when I was going to eat dim sum at Tong's Palace in SF. The one thing that caught my eye was how thin it was compared to HTC MDA. Since there is no keyboard, the size is very thin. The screen looked nice a big.
First gen users are going to hate on the low battery life of the iPhone. I predict it will need to be recharged at least twice a day if used as a media player, phone, and browser. Also, the iPhone is getting more press than it deserves. Microsoft's $5-10k multi-touch screen computer is a bigger deal than Apple's touch screen handheld, in my opinion. But I'll wait to hear what buyers say after June 29th.
Raphael, the iPhone has OS X.
"Why should we accept your declaration of a "plethora of features that make it stand out" yet wait and see on its obvious shortcomings?"
because you can't necessarily say that they are shortcomings (yet). people keep remarking on the lack of tactile feedback that a physical keyboard would have, but as of now, none of you has actually tried it. perhaps the on screen keyboard will be a hit, enabling much faster typing, or perhaps not and it will bomb. that remains to be seen, but as of now we cannot say, because no one has ever done it before, and not one of us has used it.
**i know someone will go and find some obscure product that utilized an on screen keyboard that failed. this is not, however, entirely comparable to the iphone, as no one can argue against the fact that apple is far better at implementing existing technologies in an easy to use way in their products than most other companies (a la the ipod)
4 gig should hold plenty of 15 minute aqua teen hunger force episodes so athf fans would be set
*note to self, don't bring iphone to fenway*
Why would they have to put OS files in the user storage space? My phone advertised 17MB of user storage space and guess what? I got 17MB of user storage space.
To that other guy that was complaining about battery life: If you watch movies all day and then don't have the battery power to make a call, that isn't Apple's fault. They didn't make you watch movies all day. You decided to watch movies all day and runn down the battery. It is your own fault the battery is dead. If I decide to drive across the state and then don't have enough gas to get back home, is it Chevy's fault?
The biggest flaw of the iphone will be lack of voice recognition software (thnk Microsoft VoiceCommand for Pocket PC). The lack of hardware buttons that you can feel without looking at the device and inability to speak commands/ask the iphone questions will be it's failure. Ok, maybe not a failure but many people will be dissapointed though.
Microsoft my ass. The best thing about the iPhone is its total syncing with us Mac users and then some. No other cellphone has it. I can finally stop carrying a separate organizer, a laptop, and my video ipod (maybe not the ipod). I'll be able to sync my address book, contacts, iTunes, calendars, passwords, etc. I guess most of you Windows lusers just don't understand that.
Battery power is of concern too but with my iPod I was able to view a few video podcasts on my long subway ride in New York, and when the power got low, I'd listen to just music. It was fine. Now I plug it into my car and have no worries. I'll do the same with the iPhone, I'm sure it's battery will suffice even for a few days.
I am sure not many will be watching movies on the small screen, unless they don't have a desktop computer. What's the deal with that? Unless you are taking a 5-hour bus ride cross country. Watching short podcasts is just as fun. It's primarily a CELLPHONE for pete's sake! Not a portable movie theater.
mr. greengart,
this makes sense only if you believe that the iphone is not the latest version of an ipod. if you see the iphone just as a souped up ipod, which to me it looks like, then it will appeal to a young market with little disposable income (the same market as the ps3). these people will supposedly think that 600 is too much for a phone (im not even talking about the service contract).
thanks for your comments.
I would pay $500 for a phone that does two things:
* Has really good sound quality
* Gets great reception
I will switch to any service provider who can get me a cell phone that works even 75% as well as a land line. I'll pay as much as they want.
The iPhone is a phone with a really cool interface. That's great. But what I really need is someone to make the experience of talking on the phone better. Is anyone willing to innovate there?
Here's a little secret. The iPhone 1.0 won't have iChat ever, becuase that's the killer feature that will get you to upgrade to the iPhone 2.0 that will have a camera on the front and broadband. If you want to do video chatting check back in 6 months. Remember, you heard it here first.
Adnan Osmani @ Jun 4th 2007 12:09PM said...
"Apple brings concepts already on the market to a more general audience. They do *not* innovate, however the company is excellent at marketing and giving everyday people a reason to use new technologies."
OK, I want to stop you right here...its an "Internet Pet Peeve" of mine. Adnan, we don't get to re-define words because we either don't know what they mean, or think they mean something else on the internet.
For your perusal, the definition of innovate:
innovate |ˈinəˌvāt| verb [ intrans. ] make changes in something established, esp. by introducing new methods, ideas, or products
You seem to suffer from a rather common misunderstanding; innovation and invention are NOT the same...must be the i,v and n common letters that throw people off or something.
Innovation is Apple's *specialty* and always has been. They've invented a thing or two along the way, as well.
Christian made a very strong point here the best thing to do with this sortof technology is to ...wait.Apple knows that it can sell these things to the market with all of key features it's missing and knows that it can build a similar amount of hype when iphone 2.0 is announced early next year. I can only hope by then at&t won't still be requiring 2 year contracts to get these
What about product to ship?
Apple has in the past screwed up product releases by not having enough product to meet demand. Not just a week or two but for months. They really have only 1 chance to get it right. The phone market won't be forgiving. If they haven't been smart enough supply demand, then they deserve what they get. Apple only get one chance to make a first impression on the actual market! Blow that with mind numbing stupidity of not enough product and you guys we be toast, and the laughing stock.
The kid who thought he could sell product in the big league.
You've been warned!
Good Luck
Joe
This one is directed @ Peter, Ryan and the rest of the crew here:
I'd like to make a personal, public request. If Engadget, when doing product reviews, could back back to doing proper *qualitative* product reviews, I know I for one would appreciate it.
Reviews have really started to just turn to crap, not only in the CE space engadget covers, but in general....and here is what I mean:
Things aren't reviewed on their own merits or claims of what they do, but, oddly and inversely, on things that OTHER things claim and do/fail to do.
This is a *product comparison*...put it in a chart or something at the end.
I think this is largely why its hard to get good product reviews off the web; they are largely laundry list comparisons...and unless i'm planning on washing clothes, I just don't care.
Does item X do *what it says on the box*? How well? Does it do it the way they claim it will? Any Gotchas?
THAT'S a product review.
What we get generally is "Product X is supposed to do 1,2 and 3...but product Y does 1,2,3 and 4...tho not quite the same as X. Additionally, Product X DOESN'T do 9,5,14 OR 42..."
Note here, that we really didn't talk about how well Product X did what it actually, you know, claimed to do...and further indict it for claims that were never made.
I'm not saying every review you guys do now is like this; the video reviews seem to follow the "correct" format, but some of the write-ups are almost becoming throw-aways when a good portion concentrates on completely different products.
The last good one I saw was the LG Prada review video (I think Ryan did that one)...it was all about the phone, what it did, how it did what it did and how it matched up with the claims made by the company.
Lets have more of that, and leave the crap to the upstarts and also-rans :) I can just go to the comments and get the "lists" as it were.
Ok, back to this other thing. Apple sucks/does not suck, MS is evil/is not evil...or whatever boring platform thing we were doing before ;)
When it's unlocked, got 80gig of storage capacity and can replace my phone AND iPod in one fell swoop, then I'll think about it.
As a former sprint rep and working and using verizon, coming from a CDMA user, it would have atrocious to have this phone on CDMA because the battery life would have been impossible.
So without a doubt, users are gonna be complaining about the battery life. Why? Well Smart Phones users are accustomed to this. They turn down their screen brightness, turn bluetooth off, etc and use the features as lightly as possible to preserve the battery and get through the day. Laughing and saying "oh thats just cdma"? Last I heard, Cingular has been shipping the blackjack with the an extra in box battery. Hmmm.
It seems that many of the users of the the Iphone are *not* gonna be your typical smart phone users. Likely for many this will be their first smartphone experience. turn down the screen brightness? don't let it vibrate or turn down the sound or not flop through your photos constantly to whore out all the wonderful vibrant features just to be able to squeeze out 2-3 hours of talk time? I'm guessing some people wont take to this well.
I "do" actually have full faith in the phones ability to play music without depleting battery... Because musics not display based, and does not require network communication, several hours of music should be possible without depleting battery at the same rate as the rest of the features.
Browsing the net/fighting the slow speed net? Again will crimp the battery life.
The phone will please i'm sure but there will be a learning curve for users to be happy with the battery life. And none of the advertisement , for a smart phone newbie, can explain this.