Sorry geeks, the iPhone is not for you

Dear geeks of the world,

You keep asking what Apple’s problem is when it comes to allowing the iPhone to be hacked by third party installations. I’m afraid the “problem” is that simply put, the iPhone is not designed for you.

Certainly you have the right to feel disappointed that the cellphone Apple brought to market has very little in common with a hypothetical Apple cellphone that you’ve been dreaming about, but the fact is that the iPhone is what it is: a mainstream consumer-level phone with some traditional “smartphone” features built in. It’s clearly not meant to compete with the blackberry or treo; it’s meant for people like me who have been stuck on a featureless phone like the RAZR because the we find so-called “smartphones” to be unusably overcomplicated.

Why would Apple do this? Because at last count less than ten percent of all cellphone users in this country are using a smartphone, with the rest of us (ninety percent-plus) still using something lame and crappy like a RAZR and desperately wishing that someone would bring a feature-laden phone to market that was simple enough to be easy to use. In a future version of the iPhone, Apple might care about the folks currently on smartphones, but they’re coming after the ninety percent of us dummies first.

Once you accept that that’s what Apple is doing, the rest of it all makes sense. The last thing a novice phone user like me would ever want to do is start installing third party apps frontier-style on my first feature-phone. So Apple has apparently decided not to waste time focusing on something that the iPhone’s target audience isn’t interested in anyway. Sure, installing software on your Mac is pretty easy, but you’re making use of installer apps, disk images, drag and drop, or however else third party software is delivered (not to mention you’re dealing with a three-inch screen, just a few buttons, and a stripped-down MacOS, making it all the more complicated than on a regular Mac). Apple can only work on so many iPhone features at a time, and supporting third party installations is rightfully nowhere near the top of their list.

You don’t have to like, agree with, or find acceptable the fact that Apple is completely ignoring existing smartphone users when it comes to the iPhone, but I think you have to agree that it’s pretty clear that Apple could care less about the phone geeks right now. Geeks are going to continue to buy the iPhone and try to hack it into something it’s not, and that’s your right, but Apple sees you guys as nothing more than an annoyance at this point.

Apple took the music player market by marketing to the mainstream and then letting the geeks fall in line, and they’re using the same strategy here. I still hear geeks complaining that the iPod is too limited or too user-friendly, but that doesn’t change the fact that Apple’s strategy worked and the iPod has most of the market. Some will argue that the same strategy won’t work as well in the phone market, but let’s all at least agree that that’s what Apple’s strategy is.