Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [90]
Stability and User Experience: The iPhone
One of the big selling points for the Mac is the suite of iLife applications: iTunes, iPhoto, Garageband, and the like. The apps are designed for everyday creative activities: storing and organizing digital photos; making home movies; recording songs to post to MySpace.
The iLife apps are a big part of what makes the Mac a Mac. There’s nothing like it on Windows. Steve Jobs often points this out as a differentiating feature. It’s like an exclusive version of Microsoft Office that’s available only on the Mac, but it’s for fun, creative projects, not work.
One of iLife’s selling points is that the applications are tightly integrated with each other. The photo application, iPhoto, is aware of all the music stored in iTunes, which makes it easy to add a soundtrack to photo slideshows. The homepage building application, iWeb, can access all the pictures in iPhoto, which makes uploading photos to an online gallery a two-click process. Integration on the Mac is not limited to the iLife suite, however. Across the board, much of Apple’s software is integrated: Address Book is integrated with iCal which is integrated with iSync which is integrated with Address Book, and so on. This level of interoperability is unique to Apple. Microsoft’s Office suite offers a similar level of integration, but it is restricted to the productivity apps that ship with Office. It’s not system wide.
The same philosophy of integration and ease of use extends to the iPhone. Jobs took a lot of criticism for closing the iPhone to outside developers, but he did so to ensure stability, security, and ease of use. “You don’t want your phone to be an open platform,” Jobs explained to Newsweek. “You need it to work when you need it to work. Cingular [now AT&T] doesn’t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.”6
While Jobs is exaggerating that one unruly app will take down a cell network, it can certainly take down a single phone. Just look what the open-platform approach has done to Windows computers (and, yes, Mac OS X, too, to a lesser extent)—it’s a world of viruses, Trojans, and spyware. How to avoid? Make the iPhone closed. Jobs’s motivation is not aesthetics, but user experience. To ensure the best user experience, the software, hardware, and services users access will be tightly integrated. While some see this as lockdown, to Jobs it’s the difference between the pleasure of the iPhone and the pain of a confusing off-brand cell phone. I’ll take the iPhone. Because Apple controls the whole widget, it can offer better stability, better integration, and faster innovation.
Devices will work well if they are designed to work well together, and it’s easier to add new features if all parts of a system are developed under the same roof. Samsung’s TVs don’t crash because Samsung takes care of the software as well as the hardware. TiVo does the same.
Of course, Apple’s iPhone/iPod/iTunes system is not perfect. It too crashes, freezes, and wipes files. The integration of Apple’s apps offers a lot of benefits, but it means that Apple is sometimes too inwardly focused when better services come along. For many people, Flickr offers a better experience for uploading and sharing photos, but users need to download a third-party plug-in to make using Flickr as easy as uploading photos to Apple’s Web services. Macs still crash and peripherals can go unrecognized when plugged in—but in general, their stability and compatibility are better than Windows’. Thanks to Jobs’s control freakery.
The Systems Approach
Jobs’s desire to control the whole widget has had an unexpected consequence, which has led Apple to a fundamentally new way of creating products. Instead of making stand-alone computers and gadgets, Apple now makes whole business systems.
Jobs first got a peek at this systems approach in 2000 while developing iMovie 2. The application was one of the first consumer-friendly video-editing applications on the market. The software was designed to let people take footage