Why the iPhone is Breaking Our Hearts

iPhone Broken Heart

I follow a lot of technology blogs, both from a personal and professional interest. A good amount of those are Apple-related. Many are discontent around how Apple has done things recently. I've thought a lot about it, and I have a hypothesis as to one of the factors.

It started with the price drop. Everyone who stood in like on June 29, and everyone who bought one in the weeks that followed, knew that, eventually, the price would drop, and the 2.0 model would come out, blowing away what was in our pockets. They knew it was the price of the early adopter. We bought them, and evangelized to our friends about how cool it was.

When Jobs announced the price drop, many felt used. The fact that the drop was so soon (about two months) and so much (a third) that it could only be a pre-determined business strategy. The rebate took the sting out of it, and things moved along.

Then, there was ring tones. You can't just make an MP3 file a ring tone. You had to buy certain songs on iTunes, manipulate it down to 30 seconds, then pay another $0.99.

And, in the last few weeks. Apple made a few more moves. First, they warned that the new firmware might "brick" (cause irreparable damage) to unlocked iPhones. I believe this was a sincere "we tried it in our labs, and the firmware bricked unlocked phones at a higher rate than any others."

Once the firmware was out, it did other things. Unlocked phones could no longer work. Even unofficial applications on "legit" iPhones were blocked off. Clearly, Apple cut off enthusiastic fans to further their own business interests. That's business, however much we may dislike it. But why did it sting?

When it comes to digital music, Steve Jobs and Apple seem to always have been able to strike a middle ground between the music industry and consumers. When the iTunes store came out, consumers had been trading songs via Napster--probably a bit extreme. On the other hand, the music industry, as recently as this week, would have you believe that ripping your own CD to listen to on your own iPod is theft. Personally, I think they would charge you for humming a song to yourself.

Jobs managed to strike a balance: offering songs with encryption that only did enough to prevent wide-spread copying of files. Doing so created a fairly flexible model. You could even burn them to CD (a limited number of times). He did this by creating a simple price model ($0.99). At that price point, for most people, if you can buy it at the iTunes store, it's not worth trying to go around it.

I don't think the music industry expected MP3 players and digital music to take off like it did. This was 2001/2002, when only the hard core geeks had MP3 players. Now, everyone has one.

Fast forward to today. Clearly, the music industry sees how this is additional revenue for them. They even got Microsoft to give them a cut of every Zune they sell. They also went further, by saddling Vista with a cumbersome suite of DRM, making extremely difficult to use, and gobbles system resources. I don't think most people are bothered by it. It's Microsoft, after all, and no one expected Vista to be that great. I suspect there are many who thing that Bill Gates would charge a license fee to his mother for pictures of her grandchildren.*

But Apple...they were for us. The cliche would be to describe Jobs as a benevolent dictator. I like to think of them as the cool teacher at high school who let you call him by his first name. He could sit down with record execs, find a way to give everyone most of what they want, and everyone is happy and/or rich.

With the iPhone, there was a vision: to create a world class product, and get Apple into new markets. To to that, he needed a carrier that would help him make this vision. Likewise, record companies are now wise to how digital media works. To provide what Jobs envisioned, deals had to be made.

In other words, Apple acted like the business. Not the first time. Not the last time. However, as has been noted, the iPod (and now iPhone) has a devoted following. There is a feeling of betrayal that I think runs deeper than simply "I can't do what I want with my iPhone." It is that credibility I think that Apple lost, and should strive to regain.

I've been very great full that much of the technology we use--personal computers, blogs, MP3 players, even the airplane--was developed by enthusiasts. Much of this could not have been envisioned without letting innovators run wild. With Vista and (hopefully to a lesser extent) the iPhone, we are now seeing products come out and into popular (near mandated) use that were designed to meet the interests of businesses at the expense of the consumer. My hope is that adding the needless complexity and hassle for the consumer will prove to be a bad decision, and great things will emerge.

*I think that is a bit extreme, but I thought it was funny.