Dear Apple,
I understand there's an early adopter tax. I understand those people who go out of their way to get the latest and greatest tend to get lose out the earliest and most. That's okay. Dropping $200 off the price of a phone that I bought just a few months ago is a little nuts, but that's okay. I'll admit it: it was fun having the coolest phone and the coolest iPod in the block (or, in my case, in the tristate area).
The problem is that you've devalued my iPhone. Yes, you've devalued it $200, so if I wanted to sell it on eBay or something it would effectively bring in less money. But what I mean is that you've devalued the experience of an iPhone. You spent six months pumping it up, positioning it as the next big thing for your company. Now you've swooped in and released something that's fairly close to the iPhone. Don't get me wrong; iPhone Touch is pretty nifty (although it's just not quite there... the front's a bit dull and the dearth of icon-ry is kind of -- dare I say -- ugly). And it will be a big hit for those who want WiFi and their music on the go. But you're knocking off your iPhone experience.
Let me give you a concrete example. You'd run into a hell of a less bitching and moaning today if you just scratched iPhone owners' backs a little. No, I don't mean giving us the opportunity to buy more bullshit (Starbucks? Ringtones? Please.) But I mean you should have at least made some gesture to say, hey, thanks guys. Thank you for paying $200 extra when you didn't need to. Thank you for paying us to beta test our software and hardware for two months in real-world conditions. Don't think I've forgotten about the frequent Mail.app crashes or the message on sync: "Your iPhone contains diagnostic data that could help improve your iPhone experience". It's just a bit mean to just devalue the experience of someone who has been so beneficial to you.
The crux of what I'm saying, of course, is that we need an SDK. I thought your "incredible" announcement was going to be just that, not some lame Starbucks deal that we likely won't see for another year. I mean, I'm a web developer and love standards, but, no, you don't have an SDK. I don't want to get into hacking my iPhone, since you don't seem to like it when people do that (you wipe all changes to system software). But what I'm really looking for- video recording, iChat, SSH, and so on... well, you just don't want to code it yourself. And that's fine. Just let someone else do the dirty work for you and give them a proper way to do that. We'll all be better off. I appreciate that you've finally given us a proper way to get video output on our iPhones, but that's just not the type of help we were looking for today.
If you just want to toss me a $200 check to make up for it, you know where to send it.
Have any of you bought any movies from the iTunes store yet? I say this because I was looking into doing that tonight. I ended up not buying (Disney's just not my thing, really; I'll be waiting on the next studio to come along), but it really was a bit of an eye opener for me in terms of Apple's new foray into the movie business.
iTunes is really a powerhouse. Everyone knows that. It's one of the keys to the iPod's success- the quick ability to buy songs, browse artists, hear previews, and so on. But applying that model to movies is slightly problematic. As I was browsing their (albeit limited) selection tonight, it occurred to me that I wasn't really sure about buying in the first place. I'm a huge movie buff- I have tens and hundreds of DVDs. But last year I signed up with Netflix and it kind of changed my views on movies. I started to realize that hey, I only really watch any given movie a couple times every few years. With Netflix it became so much easier to grab a movie, watch it, and send it back. There are plenty of new movies I've seen from Netflix that have been great but I really don't have a need to go out and spend the extra money to buy the DVD. On one hand the pay to own model that Apple's pushing on iTunes right now doesn't make too much sense for me, but on the other hand I'm not too keen on DRMing everything to make some sort of renting model.
The other big problem I found out tonight is that I really don't know what I want. I really rely on Netflix's fantastic recommendation engine to bring me some really interesting movies I wouldn't have otherwise thought of. iTunes, on the other hand, doesn't have that sort of functionality. It's the traditional brick and mortar feel: bring a catalogue to the user, let them pick out what they want, and go. They do have some sort of related movies feature ("Viewers also bought"), but that doesn't quite touch the surface of Netflix's recommendations. Apple has traditionally seemed to shy away from any "web 2.0" technology- social networking and so on. That makes some sense due to the fact that their main products don't call for that type of technology. But I think iTunes is sorely lacking in that regard. Their music offerings could benefit from this, too, but movies is really where it's needed. For example, I really exploit Netflix in terms of rare, usually independent flicks. I know most of the mainstream productions- I don't need extra emphasis on that. Especially in terms of Apple's model (compared to Netflix's monthly rate), the more movies that Apple can recommend to me and the better that recommendation engine works, the more movies I will purchase. I can't tell you how many times I've been on Netflix or Amazon and thrown that impulse order in just because of a choice recommendation.
Of course, it's all for naught right now. The current Disney catalogue is too small for any serious moves in this area. But once Apple gets some more (sluggish!) companies on board, I think they're really going to have to improve on this. No one thought Netflix would really make much of an impact ("just go to Blockbuster!"), but they're succeeding today. If Netflix or a new Netflix-esque company can do comparatively well in the digital realm, Apple might actually have some competition in the digital media realm. Social networking is really making an impact online- just look at the tremendous rise of del.icio.us, Flickr, digg, and YouTube. Leveraging and applying that social power to movies seems like the next logical step.