iPhone misses the social networking revolution

Steve Jobs doesn't understand how today's end-users communicate.

By Peter S. Magnusson

from the July 11, 2007 edition

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Cupertino, Calif. - Apple's choice of June 29 as the rollout date for the iPhone was variously denoted "iDay" and "iFriday" by the media, and saw anxious early adopters standing in line for hours outside thousands of Apple and AT&T stores across the country.

I was one of them. And I was not disappointed. This device lives up to the "insanely great" tag. For any tech aficionado, this is a must-have. Established players are reeling from this opening salvo.

Strangers come up to me on the street when they see me using it. Some take pictures of me, as if any iPhone owner is now a tourist attraction. Today a happy couple told me they could now go home and tell their kids that they "had touched the iPhone," a reaction I found slightly disconcerting.

Cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs is positioning the iPhone as the third leg of Apple's strategic chair. He is saying that the iPhone will reinvent the notion of a cellphone in the way that the Macintosh reinvented the notion of a computer.

I disagree.

I don't think the iPhone fundamentally innovates over and above the existing offerings, in the manner that the iPod, the Macintosh, and the Apple II all did in their day. To the contrary, I find that the iPhone reveals that Mr. Jobs, and thus Apple, does not (yet) understand a paradigm of 21st-century computer usage.

At its heart, the iPhone is a projection of the original vision of bringing clunky desktop applications such as e-mail, contact databases, to-do lists, telephones, note taking, and Web browsing to the palm of your hand. Because that is essentially Jobs's generation – transitioning from the mainframe office environment to the PC-based office – he can't quite get rid of the notion that a mobile device is nothing but a really small personal computer.

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