Apple’s market position is as enviable as it is challenging right now. They’ve got a huge chunk of the laptop computer market. They’ve got the lion’s share of the digital music industry and a formidable piece of the video-over-Internet market. Their PC sales continue to rise despite a generally stagnant PC industry, and their iPhone has performed as well as could be expected. And that’s saying nothing about their software divisions, which are monetary bovine in their own right.
Last week TruPhone announced a product for iPhone. For those of you sleeping under a rock, TruPhone makes a VoIP software add-on for cell-phones which provides cheap, SIP-based Voice over IP calling, allowing you to circumvent ridiculous international long-distance charges (Europe) or silly ‘free calls after 9′ minute packages (North America). But TruPhone really hit a home run when they became the first to enable VoIP calling on Apple’s iPhone. Previously, Apple had been mysteriously quiet about the lack of Voice over IP on the iPhone, this despite its inclusion of SMS-compatible iChat (which is a VoIP tool on Mac) and a robust digital camera (which would make for great video-over-IP experiences). So TruPhone’s VoIP-via-iPhone introduction was significant.
But iPhone’s developer ecosystem (or lack thereof) is filled with well-documented pitfalls, and TruPhone’s product may be as much of a hack as it is a development that Apple endorsed in its “sure developers can do that” attitude. Problem is, Apple has already broken things people created for the iPhone, like bricking, by releasing software updates. I would hate to see TruPhone’s product get broken when Apple’s AT&T exclusivity expires and they’re free to implement VoIP for themselves.
Then, there’s the much-rumored new Newton. The old Newton, as you’ll recall, was a crap circus. Like all the early PDA products (or should I say all PDAs period), the Newton was extremely well intentioned, well designed, and well, useless. So much has changed, though, and it’s got me wondering if a modern-day Apple ultramobile could be a successful product for Cupertino.
And I think, based on what we’ve seen with the iPhone, that the new Newton probably doesn’t have the brightest outlook. One reason the iPhone has been so successful is because of all the things it doesn’t do. Apple purposefully made it easy to use by eliminating non-essential functionality like VoIP-over-WiFi. A Newton isn’t going to appeal to the same people who truly benefit from the no-nonsense approach of the iPhone because it will be more of a hacker’s tool akin to the Nokia N800. Serious computing tasks will still take place on a Macbook Pro, and one-touch tasks will still take place on the iPhone. Somewhere in the middle, we’ve got this UMPC marketplace that still, somehow, seems to be solving problems people don’t have.
I think this is what his Steveness was referring to five or six years ago when he said Apple wasn’t interested in the PDA market. After all, PDAs had to become mobile phones before consumers finally became interested in them in droves… And Steve already has that angle covered with the iPhone.
