Enough with the iPhone already

Yesterday I stopped by the Apple/Slashdot site. Wall to wall iPhone articles and literally thousands of comments. It’s the cover story on the Macworld web page, and for three days in a row the same iPhone article was the most popular tech story on the BBC web site. MyMac.com has run a stack of iPhone stories as well, and this week’s TidBits is mostly about the iPhone,

Enough already!

It’s just a damn phone. A cool one, yes. Quite possibly the next iPod. Certainly likely to keep Apple in the media spotlight for a while.

But I’d like the Mac web to get a sense of proportion here.

For one thing, the iPhone launch is US-only right now. For those of us elsewhere, it’s much less interesting. Europeans have enjoyed most of the features the iPhone offers for a while now, in large part because the cellphone network and marketplace in Europe is larger and more developed than it is in the US. Two popular cellphone technologies in Europe — 3G and GPS — aren’t available on the iPhone, and until there’s an iPhone that has them, selling the iPhone in Europe will be more difficult than in the US.

But the other issue is that by focusing on the iPhone, the Mac web has taken its eye off the issues facing the Mac platform.

We’re still waiting for some of the key applications to become available in Intel versions. The three Office applications for a start (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel). AppleWorks seems to be in a state of Living Death, but without a spreadsheet program, iWork isn’t an adequate replacement yet. Lots of drivers for things like printers, keyboards, and other peripherals still aren’t available as Universal Binaries. (If you’re a Logitech customer, you’re probably still waiting for keyboard and mouse drivers that are even stable with OS X 10.4, let alone the Intel Macs!)

There’s not much news about when the next OS X version, Leopard, will be released. It’s suffered a long series of delays, caused in part by moving staff from the OS X to the iPhone divisions. All the while, Windows Vista has been selling well. If there was clear blue water between Windows XP and OS X Tiger, Vista has narrowed that gap considerably. It remains to be seen whether OS X Leopard will leapfrog the Mac forwards again.

We’ve yet to see where Apple are taking their Mac hardware next. The MacBook Pro and Mac Pro designs in particular are showing their age. The basic design of the MacBook Pro is essentially the same as that of the Power Mac G5 released in 2003. The Intel iMac is only a little fresher, sharing the same form factor as the 2004 G5 iMac.

The Mac Pro reveals another issue with Apple’s hardware at the moment: by using similar processors to the PC manufacturers, comparisons of raw performance are now much more meaningful than they were back in the days of comparing PowerPC chips to Pentiums. For all the hype about Apple “supercomputers”, we’ve yet to see a Mac Pro that delivers performance that truly blasts the competition out of the water.

Above all else, Mac users still don’t know where Apple is heading. Right now, Apple are focusing on the media applications, in particular, the things that deliver purchased content (like movies and music) to the consumer. That’s fine for the home user, but for those of us using Macs in the office, the lab, the classroom, or the design studio, this is much less relevant. Programes like Aperture and Motion are definitely steps in the right direction, but there’s no road map of where we’re going here.

The point to all this is that Apple is transmogrifying before our eyes and no-one is really sure into what (except maybe Steve Jobs, of course). Will Apple become another Sony? Or a Microsoft? Or an IBM? Can it be a great producer of consumer electronics *and* an innovative hardware and software designer at the same time? Is what’s good for the iPhone and iPod market good for the Mac market too?