It’s the little details.
My iOS compatible headphones have controls that work perfectly on my macbook air, on my iphone, and on my ipad.
This means three things:
- I never feel like I need to buy another pair of headphones for each device
- I can let certain behaviours (changing the volume, pausing, etc) remain automatic, as they are the same on every device I use
- I both consciously and subconsciously consider every non-apple device as having a ton of associated costs, because my peripherals will not be directly optimized
Attention to detail is a wonderful thing, and it pays off for users and companies alike.
Yes, Apple takes 30%
But I buy more music directly on my iPhone than I have purchased at any point in my life - because iTunes / iOS has made it easier and cheaper to do so, to the point where the experience is better than piracy.
I used to spend about $100 a month on comics. I stopped because I was tired of having no space for them, tired of the weekly trip to the comic shop. After a few months, I stopped buying collections at the bookstore, again, due to convenience. I’ve probably spent more than $400 buying comics in the Comixology iPad app (over the last year). Again, ease, simplicity, and a better experience than piracy.
I used to spend nearly $150 a month on magazines, and then stopped, because I couldn’t justify the expense. Now, I buy at least one (and often several) magazines a month, again, on my iPad, and via iTunes.
So yes, Apple is charging 30% of subscriptions within their applications, same as sales happening through the iTunes system. Because, frankly, they are growing your potential market, as a music publisher, a magazine publisher, or a book seller. They are doing what you could not - fixing the barriers to consumption, and barriers to purchase, for your product.
Frankly, you could not have done this yourselves. And if you’d managed to hire the designers, developers, managers and consultants to create this model for you, it would have cost more than the gross amount of the 30% per sale that Apple is going to charge you.
Is it fair? Not really. Is it nice? No. But it’s not criminal. Because they already did you the favour of creating a channel where your products, rapidly losing relevance and consumers, can find a new audience that is both willing to spend money, and comfortable spending money.
They did it. You couldn’t, or didn’t. And with that, I start hearing a silent ‘only’ whenever I see a publisher talk about Apple’s 30% cut.
Just encountered my first iAd in the wild, while using Plaintext.
It was definitely the cleanest experience I’ve seen in an iPhone app advertisement, but the bar is fairly low.
At the same time, I only really clicked it due to format curiosity. I can’t say whether it would generate any interest from me if it wasn’t for that novelty.
There’s something to be said about ballsy marketing from a position of power.
A giant, full homepage advert, for an announcement. This provides zero benefit to those who visit the site, but sure as hell builds up an expectation for tomorrow that Apple has to deliver against.
The impressive part is that the minimalism of the page isn’t sacrificed around the ad. Stays true to the visual philosophy, even when it reduces utility. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. But it’s a very Apple thing.
This means that while we love our technology, we also somehow believe we are rock stars, and should wear jeans of a corresponding tightness. Through casual research I’ve discovered that on average an Apple users jeans are 33% tighter than a PC user, and a shocking 90% tighter than a Linux user. Apple fans are also hamstrung by a lack of cargo pockets on their pants that these other users enjoy. The problem is bad with a pair of Earnest Sewns, and becomes increasingly critical when I switch to, say, my Levis 501 XX Shrink to Fit 1947 Selvedge Cone Denim.
Today’s Apple event marks an important tipping point – it marks the point where Android starts to surge past Apple the way Windows surged past Apple in personal computers back in the 1990s. Moreover, I also believe that Jobs knows this, and doesn’t care. I think he’d rather have a small share of the market where he can exert complete control and create beautiful products that look exactly the way he wants them to look. Thus we have the new iPhone 4, which will cost a little more but will have pretty icons, pretty ads, and a cool video chat feature that only works if the person you’re talking to has the same Apple phone that you do. If you want to buy into Apple’s world, and you can deal with AT&T as your carrier, you’ll probably be very happy.
This has been my stance on Apple vs Android for a while. Google is the champion of owning a market, and collapsing it into a smaller one owned entirely by google. Apple, on the the hand, has spent the last decade building integrated experiences that Apple controls all aspects of, and gets paid at every transaction point of.
If I had to bet on who was going to make the most money in the long run, the smart bet is Google. But remember what Jobs said to John Sculley: “do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?” Apple is focused on a different end game than selling the most phones. It would much rather sell the most important phone.
Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.
The avalanche of media outlets offering their content for Apple’s mobile devices demonstrates that Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content. And the 200,000 apps on Apple’s App Store proves that Flash isn’t necessary for tens of thousands of developers to create graphically rich applications, including games.
Attention older geeks: You are not the world.
Even though I don’t own an iPad, and probably won’t anytime soon, I find the launch exciting. It seems like a big shift in interfaces, and a great opportunity for some of the talented developers I know.
This is a difference of opinion, but I have a few key things to point out:
- Closed platforms can be hugely inspirational. Go read Scott Pilgrim and tell me it would have existed without Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis, two very closed platforms.
- Nothing that offers internet access keeps people from creating. The internet BEGS for content, and offers thousands of ways to create it. My work and passions don’t require unfettered access to my device’s inner workings. They require information and a way to share my ideas and conclusions.
- Code is not the totality of creativity. Geeks (and I count myself among them) often forget this.
- No one is going to buy an iPad because ‘it’s easy’. If you think Apple’s value proposition is ‘easy’, you don’t understand the market. Simplicity, clarity of use and purpose, and astonishment aren’t ‘easy’. If they were, maybe people would use linux for something other than servers and proving a point.
- Saying Apple isn’t developer friendly is in no way connected to the reality I observe. The most engaged, excited and interested developers I know are working on Apple’s mobile devices through the app store. Would they like a clearer process from Apple? Of course. But they also like having a market, which no other mobile platform offers in a meaningful way.
What confuses me most is the suggestion that the iPad, and by extension the iPhone OS, design has “a palpable contempt for the owner”. It’s not contempt, it’s respect for a more common set of priorities than your own. Contempt is creating something that you need to conform to, a thousand times a day. Contempt is expecting someone to become an expert in using your tools, to make a simple task feasible.
If you’ve ever used Open Office, you’ve felt software with contempt for you.
Two simple things that Steve Jobs could do to revolutionize the Internet video industry:
1) Allow content producers to sell podcast subscriptions.
2) Make it so you can stream ads in Quicktime files.
I’m utterly baffled that you can’t sell a podcast subscription yet. That would be of huge benefit to a large number of publishers.
It’s got to be so annoying to compete with Apple, at anything really, because it’s not like they’re doing something fucking crazy. Everybody’s had these ideas before. The difference, and this is grim if you are a competitor, but the difference is that everyone else spends a lot of time (and often, money) determining why those things aren’t possible. And then it comes out, for real, only you didn’t make it. Some other guys did. And when you come out with what is (on paper) a better version of the same thing, maybe even multiple times over, it’s too late. You made a “product” to compete with their “product,” tastefully arranging your regiment, only to discover that they hadn’t made a product at all - they made a narrative. A statement about how technology should interface with a life.
