Edible Apple

A great and must-read article over at Counternotions explores how Apple’s latest iPhone 3.0 announcements will further cement its lead over its competitors. The new iPhone OS finally brings some long sought after features to the iPhone – Cut and Paste, MMS, and Push Notifications all come to mind. And while those are welcome improvements, the iPhone was able to sell like hotcakes even without them because Apple tends to look at the bigger picture. Apple succeeds by creating products with a focus on usability and design, as opposed to some of its competitors who are seemingly obsessed with creating a laundry list of features that no one wants to use. I mean, would you NOT buy an iPhone because it lacked MMS? Yeah, I thought so. Anyways, here are some notable excerpts from the aforementioned article:

On the importance of the new accessory API’s:

The “Accessories” APIs alone represents concrete opportunities for thousands of new applications most of which we likely haven’t seen yet on any existing platform, translating into hundreds of millions of app downloads over the next few years, and thus growing the App Store into a multi-billion dollar revenue source 70% of which will go directly to developers.

While analysts and competitors were busy making feature-level comparisons (of mostly hardware), Apple consolidated its platform lead and laid the foundations of a new growth engine the likes of which the mobile industry has neither yet seen nor fully comprehends.

On Apple not pandering to feature hungry techies:

One might wonder at this point if there’s ever a way to fully satisfy the features-fetishists. Video recording/conferencing, voice control, background processing and a host of other capabilities may have to wait for the next iPhone version, when users can perhaps better enjoy the fruits of faster processors, 4G speed and Apple’s PA-Semi acquisition. Apple’s not in the business of feature-complete perfection or geek satisfaction. It’s merely seeking meaningful profit maximization as a business and inspiring transformation of industries it touches as a culture.

Again, the article over at Counternotions is highly recommended, and is the recipient of the first ever Edible Apple “Read this bitch!” recommendation. So yeah, check it out.