Dear Apple: WTF Is Wrong With You?

By On April 24, 2009 · 6 Comments · In Rants

The iPhone and the iPod Touch are NOT netbooks and they also cannot compete with netbooks yet.  Sure, if you made them with 9-ich screens you could maybe make a case for it. But right now, you just sound like crazy people with all your talk of “junky hardware” and “cramped keyboards”.  Your insistence that an iPhone can do everything a netbook can do is just plain silly.  I can’t write a novel on an iPhone — well, not without driving myself crazy and posibly going blind — I can write a novel on my NC10.  And I am.

Really, now.  Every quarter you just make me lose confidence in your sanity over there.

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  • http://agrumer.livejournal.com/ Avram Grumer

    This reminds me of how Steve said that the very idea of a video iPod was ridiculous — six months before releasing a video iPod.

    If they follow the same schedule, the tablet-sized iPod Touch should be announced in October.

  • http://quivo.dreamwidth.org Quivo

    HOMG thanks for posting this! I am really, really tired of people insisting the iPhone and iPod Touch Can Compete With Netbooks, Really. I don’t understand how someone can look from the HP Mini 1000 or the Sony Vaio P to the iPhone and think “yeah, totally the same”.

  • http://quantumage.livejournal.com Randy Henderson

    I agree that I could not write a novel on an iPhone — my wrists and thumbs would be killing me — but I imagine I would be in love if I wrote text message novels, which are HUGE in Japan. The ability to see what you’ve written in previous texts as a thread would alone be a huge plus:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/world/asia/20japan.html

  • http://www.stonetable.org Adam Israel

    I absolutely agree with you. I would be all over an Apple netbook but they won’t sell one for me to buy. :(

    Some of the current netbooks are OSX “compatible”, though. I’ve played with OS X on non-Apple hardware and it does work well, if the hardware is supported. The fact that it’ll run well with the MSI Wind, Lenovo S10, Dell Mini 9 or HP Mini 1000 is pretty exciting. Almost enough to make me take the dive.

  • Mary Kay

    Heh. I like Avram’s comment and I hope he’s right. Currently I’m deliriously happy with my iPhone and my MacBook Air, but I’d look seriously at an Apple Netbook. Of course, I long ago swallowed the Apple Koolaid. I don’t care what sort of nonsense they spout as long as they keep putting out cool tech for me.

    MKK

  • http://sillybean.net/ Stephanie Leary

    I don’t think anyone at Apple really thinks the iPhone/Touch is a netbook. I do think they’re pushing it as an alternative — for now.

    The article you linked to was really about a quote from a RIM guy. Both RIM and Apple have been pushing their phones as email-and-web computers, but I’d say the difference is that RIM doesn’t have a netbook competitor in the pipeline, and Apple does.

    I’ve seen two reports today (both via Daring Fireball) suggesting that Apple is about to release something in between the iPhone and a laptop in size. See also this bit on the way Apple often disparages the products it’s about to trump.

    Apple has done a lot of things that suggest it’s developing something ultra-portable: experimenting with the Air, redesigning the notebook cases for durability, embedding Inkwell and VoiceOver in the last several OS versions (and voice tech in the new Shuffles), developing resolution-independent interfaces. And of course there’s the fact that the iPhone/Touch OS is essentially the Mac OS, stripped down a bit with Edge/3G networking added.

    This is all a very long way of saying Avram is right: Apple’s rhetoric now is consistent with its rhetoric prior to every other major product launch.