Does iPhone signal the end of the Mac?
By Richard Koman - January 10, 2007
Thinking about the iPhone and its impressive use of OS X - and Apple's name change from Apple Computer to Apple Inc. - I wonder if Steve Jobs is finally ready to lead his company out of the PC business once and for all.
Apple is clearly covering the consumer electronics space - with iPods, a PC-to-TV streaming device (or more likely an iPod-to-TV stream), and the iPhone. All of these show that OS X can be a powerful embedded OS for devices. Coupled with web services like iTunes (will we see a namechange there too, to something like iMedia?), the company's growth is entirely(?) built on consumer market devices.
Now throw in the emerging Web OS and Steve's new willingness to offer standards-based services like Yahoo mail and Google maps - and the fact that Macs now run on Intel and run Windows natively - and you can finally think about the irrelevance of the PC operating system. In my daily computing life, Firefox is the operating system, not Mac or Windows. Indeed, I pretty seamlessly bop back and forth between the two - since all my data is stored online.
As Apple shows with the iPhone, though, OS X can be profoundly leveraged into realms where the computing experience makes a huge difference. And unlike PCs, phones are a realm where Apple can license its OS into Microsoft-like dominance.
What do you think? Am I reaching here?
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Comments (5)
Yes, I think you're reaching. You may use FireFox a lot, but *really* look at all of the other stuff you use on your computer which you can't get from the web. For me it's things like Reason (a music composition program), Photoshop, Illustrator, TextMate, the command line, the Ruby interpreter, and so much more. There are certain things which will continue to be best addressed as software on a computer (and not a phone or the Internet).
Posted: January 10, 2007 5:05 PM
Right, Photoshop, etc, of course. But speaking as a user ... can't you imagine online apps being able to do this stuff? In any case, does Mac Photoshop work any better than Win Photoshop these days? In any case, I'm saying Macs are not a growth business for Apple - iPod, Apple TV and iPhone are.
Posted: January 10, 2007 6:29 PM
Actually, I can't imagine an online app even coming close to the experience of Photoshop, but then again, anything is possible. Anything like that would likely be a *long* way off, and I say that as someone who develops web apps all day long...the technology just isn't there yet.
No doubt that the consumer products will continue to grow in importance to Apple, but everything still revolves around a computer at the middle of it all. Just look at the Apple TV right now - it syncs with iTunes to get its content. Granted it has an ethernet port and you can imagine in the future that it'll just run iTunes directly, but clearly Apple isn't ready to give up on the Mac just yet. :-)
As a side note, you're the one who picked the title "Does iPhone signal the end of the Mac?" ;-) and I think that title is reaching...a lot. But that's ok, dreaming of a net-centric world where everything is on the net and I can hook directly into my brain is...wait, that's my dream. :-)
Posted: January 10, 2007 6:44 PM
Tom,
I don't think you are reaching at all. As mobile devices become more powerful and robust, the desktop and laptops start to seem like the dinosaurs they are destined to become. Once the display and I/O issues are out of the way, there is no real reason to have a "computer" as we currently know it.
Posted: January 11, 2007 8:57 AM
I agree - mobility and wireless will become the general purpose computers of the future. Desktops will return to "workstation" status - for the jobs you need real horsepower for. Laptops? Not sure, but I'm looking towards the One Laptop Per Child project as the leading guidepost there.
I would point out though, that I, not Tom, wrote this piece.
Posted: January 11, 2007 9:51 AM