I think they've just done with the iPhone what they did with the iPod; I'm so glad it happened. Both the music and mobile industry needed a revolution, but people inside where too happy to have status quo to keep the demand under control.

I'm also impressed to see how perfectly executed was the Apple strategy. They've build it step by step, service by service without getting too much attention. Now that all the pieces fits together, you can see what they have accomplished.

The App Store is a great revolution in mobile content distribution. The SDK will be a huge success and the platform will attract a tons of developers.

I wrote about this here:

http://ekive.blogspot.com/2008/03/apple-and-iphone-sdk-multiplying-halo.html

I think you mean "heads" - big difference.

It's entirely possible that all the success described will come. The iPhone is a great device. But I see an absence of understanding what other platforms actually offer. A real competitive analysis would be welcome.

Jobs show that the same pattern: without willingless to open up the platform!

Some how I feel the history will repeat here for Apple.

Yes, they still have time to correct it, but I doubt that Jobs can.

I agree that the iPhone is a great device & brought a revolution to the mobile world, but no one likes the close Apple-only system.

& speaking of the OS being the next-gen era of computing... can anyone tell me which modern OS doesn't have multi-tasking?

I guess you meant you have to register as a developer.

Great post!

I think the most positive thing here is that other companies are imitating Apple's culture, making products easy to use.

Easy => Sell more

Great article!

Alex

A couple of examples:

"First compare this offering with what Microsoft offered for Windows a while back."

Why should we do that?

"As the complexity of our software increases, so do demands on libraries. Microsoft learned it the hard way with years of set backs when it rolled out .Net. Had it simply embraced and optimized Java, it could have been years ahead instead."

You could easily argue that frameworks and libraries were actually first class citizens in .NET, whereas languages were second class

"When Java came along, Apple was unmoved, because it was just too slow. "

But Microsoft should have adopted Java instead of having their own platform?

"Developers are rushing to the stores and are creating Objective-C books. This language is having the last laugh now. "

And all other languages are forgotten now, or? I will take a while before Objective-C reaches critical mass.

"Apple has made this play flawlessly. The enterprise and SDK solutions will go hand-in-hand to propel the iPhone to be THE handheld device of the future. Ironically, the PC just got its final blow not from a MacBook (which has been on the rise too!), but from a small new computer. Apple got its revenge elegantly, relentlessly and creatively. The next era of computing will be dominated by Apple."

Pure speculation. There is no argumentation in the post warranting this conclusion.

"If the platform is that mature, why are there so few native Mac apps compared to Windows? When is the last time you saw a web site running on Objective-C?" - Matt S

There are fewer Mac apps because there are fewer Mac users and thus Mac developers, not because the platform isn't mature. Additionally, I believe on average Mac applications tend to be higher quality than Windows apps.

Objective-C was created in 1986; an eternity before Java, .NET, etc. Cocoa has it's roots in OPENSTEP and NeXTSTEP, also created in the late 1980s. It's a very mature and excellent framework.

As for web sites running on Objective-C, Apple's WebObjects framework originally used Objective-C, but unfortunately they killed that off back when Java was being hyped.

Current website that use Objective-C? Well, I know of at least one...

> "Since the early days, Apple embraced a language called Objective-C"

That's not true. Objective-C came with Next and Mac OS X. The X stands for ten, and there were 9 iterations of the "Classic" Mac OS, staring in 1984. Before that, in the very early days, there was the Apple II and the Lisa, each with their own platform.

> "When Java came along, Apple was unmoved, because it was just too slow."

Since its launch, Mac OS X made Java part of the core API, running Java apps at the same level as Cocoa apps. Apple even contributed to the development of the JVM and Swing, IIRC. From http://developer.apple.com/java/ : "Mac OS X is the only major consumer operating system that comes complete with a fully configured and ready-to-use Java runtime and development environment."

> "Apple is a well-oiled machine that has perfected the art of execution. But beyond that, Apple's secret sauce has been its software."

I believe they're also selling quite a bit of hardware. I hear people are all over their industrial design :->

> "In a lot of ways, web applications have been playing catch up with Desktop apps. Now, a handheld device has lept forward"

Uhm, you are comparing ASP-like scripting languages with a actual hardware platform with its own OS. That's beyond apples-and-oranges.

Anyway, there are too many enthusiastic false assumptions to take this seriously. The damn thing need a usable keyboard in the first place.

-- GR, happy iPhone user.

1. The SDK & Enterprise features will be the game changer that puts Nokia & RIM onto the back foot. Why do i ignore the rest, well they've already been knocked or knocked themselves out of the game.

2. The elegance of the environment is paramount for developer adoption. Java had it, then blew it by miring its performance on the desktop and its development at the hands of self serving commitees. .NET was and still is a disaster which no one took seriously. Silverlight seems to indicate that MS have learnt a few lessons but its still to prove itself. Objective-C whilst not a buzzworthy as the rest, when combined with Cocoa is a formidable development environment.

3. The feature set of this SDK is pretty much complete, i'm hard pushed to think of something they've left out or not thought about.

A lot of people whinge about the openess of this platform. Well openness is not a guarantee of success. Linux has yet to show some chops on the desktop or handheld platforms. Apple is pragmatic, they get involved with opensource projects were its advantagous, ie. Safari with KHTML project, Darwin (their own BSD variant) and on the server side with numerous projects, ie. sendmail, cyrus, apache, Jabber & MySQL. What they don't opensource is the front end, and the applications they build on the front end. Why? because for the most part opensource applications with a GUI have been failures at taking market share. Due to numerous points of view of what a good GUI looks like.

If by openness you mean licensing the operating system to other manufacturers, well they tried that before and it was a failure, why? Because Apple builds the complete widget, hardware works in tandem with software, as soon as they hand HW design to someone else, it dilutes the brand. Unless there's a partner who's massively in another market, ie. Enterprise, there's no point in doing it. In this case Apple's having a go at the enterprise itself. If it doesn't succeed then, i'd say partner with someone like IBM. But from what i saw last Thursday, i think they have a reasonable stab at it.

Sorry for the verbosity.

M.

What i want to see on the iPhone would be:

- a full featured time tracking software: It's a business instrument, no challenge, so let's use it like one.
- a rapid web site layouter: That would be a great toy to show a customer different layouts and color combinations, let him modify it with his fingers. It's a device for calls, so why can't i use it for a diverse way of communication?
- several translation tools: You can use the camera to photograph a menu or some kind of text, the application reads and translates it. This has been already around, but i haven't seen it for the iPhone admissible accomplishment. Another one would be a translation tool by voice input and voice output.

Anyway, i agree with Lars Hansen, who criticized some aspects of this article: At first, Objective-C and the iPhone SDK are not the cream of the crop, right out of the nursery. Let's talk about that in a few weeks again, when everyone tried to work with it. Give it a load test. ;-)

Also, no one killed the PC. The iPhone is indeed a big shot, but doesn't replace any desktop. It extends it in a way we primary know for a few years, maybe outstanding in his niche. So, ask yourself: Can you substitute your whole production system (e.g. the tower under your worktable and the 2 19" above) with a 3.5"+8GB device? Neither this nor any other mobile device will supplant it in the next years. So, come down to earth and enjoy your new ways of mobility in a way that supports and extends your current workflow.

Best Regards,

Stefan

For starters, what is an incentive to develop native software that will be neutered and price-fixed to $6 and require distribution through Apple? This makes the device worthless for enterprise LOB use as no company will allow its proprietary code to be sent to iTunes and distributed to others. So as far as enterprise means "checking email and calendars" the iPhone stands no chance against millions of Windows Mobile devices that have custom software deployed on them.

So both from the enterprise development/use standpoint, iPhone is a dud.

Also, please fact check your articles a little, EAS was licensed by Apple at iPhone launch and has been a very expected and demanded feature by its users.

Long time reader, this article made me lose all respect for RWW. Please consider reviewing one sided love letters in the future.

-Vlad

The 'punters will pay because it's a premium tool' argument will be proved false. And the iPod experience of having new, better versions come out onto the market so quickly makes the empoverished punter even more wary.

Geek chic the iPhone may be, but for the foreseeable future, ordinary European mortals won't care, in large numbers until it is really, really cheap.

This and a lot of the other stuff written about Java here are misguided. Apple has heavily embraced Java at various points. WebObjects was moved entirely off Objective C to Java and remains there and makes most of the OpenStep platform available to Java developers to this day. At times the API has been opened up to make access from Java straightforward.

Also, comments that Java is 'slow' are very blunt. Once a modern JVM is running, it's very fast - comparable to objective C. There's no particular reason that someone couldn't have written a java silo which ran up with classloader sessions in the breach and then accepted applications via IPC commands if they wanted fast launch times and security between applications. The points about libraries earlier in the article are a better way to look at the situation: Java doesn't have an effective footprint in the desktop world. The issue isn't Java being 'slow'.

Apple has offered respectable scripting interfaces to its platform in the latest API release. Raw execution speed isn't a strength of those languages. But I expect us to see a serious application development community start up in this niche.

Unfortunately, this article was too enthusiastic, full of unfounded predictions, irrelevant comparisons and unchecked facts. Thanks for the detailed info, but you need to be more unbiased in the future and be able to see through the hype.

Starting with the title. Next-gen computing? Give me a break; the iPhone is in no way "next gen;" it offers largely the same feature set as competitors with a better interface. Polished, yes; next-gen, no.

The rest of the post, as some have pointed out, relies on a number of assumptions which aren't backed up by reality.

This is something I'd expect to read on MacRumors, not ReadWriteWeb (what does this have to do with the web, anyway?).

Consumers like it because it guarantees quality and consistency. The Apps Store will let programmers focus on the quality of their software and leave the marketing and distribution to Apple. Again, Apple is correctly putting the concerns and interests of the consumers front and center.

Obviously the buzz isn't being generated by Microsoft or Linux so it can't be real.

It's hard to change focus when you've been fixated in your own world.

"years of set backs"
"lightening quick"
"Every new Apple announcement, we keep thinking that they won't top it." (is that supposed to be a sentence?)
"Apple's has embraced"

Wow, so the Sony PS1 and PS2 never won anything?
The entire videogame console industry never won anything?
4 Billion songs sold over iTunes, 2nd largest music retailer, yet thats not winning, ever?

Typical closed-minded open-source thinking :p

And, well done article, Alex. Looking forward to seeing what fun stuff comes out this June and beyond.

This allows Apple to leverage OSX across all of their hardware and software development, while using the least amount of resources and making programing much simpler for developers by using the same tools and libraries.

This is a very efficient and effective on so many levels. Microsoft could only dream of a model like this.

Who can beat iPhone 2.0?
http://counternotions.com/2008/03/10/iphone2-competitors/

So both from the enterprise development/use standpoint, iPhone is a dud.

Here are the facts:

-- The developer sets the price to any amount he wants!

-- The enterprise will have an in-house tool (maybe a private version of an app like iTunes Store) to distribute their apps to their users only-- nothing needs to go through the public iTunes Store.

These facts were presented by Apple, during the Mar 6 announcement, and at the press session afterwards.

Lastly, If the writer of an article can be slammed for "fact checking"... doesn't that also apply to those who post comments :)

You are right but wrong. Openness is the future, but not in the old way you are thinking about it. The old arguments about monopoly/control and vertical vs horizontal platforms don't apply anymore. The market is much faster now. Instead of a 20-year PC evolution wave to ride, companies have only a few years to either get it or not! The iPod, FaceBook, YouTube, Wii, Ajax and Web 2.0, blogging, are all examples of this faster-paced world.

Openness rules when it comes to the medium itself or the tech behind the medium. The end-user (market) doesn't care one bit if a single or small group of companies monopolize a market -- especially and significantly if the product is free or very affordable.

What still matters is that "eco-systems" will continue to have an impact around early successes (eg: iPod, Facebook, MySpace) and so what we are learning is that there are now significant advantages to "first movers" in new emerging markets.

Apple will continue to win big for several reasons. 1) its a fast-moving company 2) it utilizes open-standards (H.264, MPEG4, OpenGL, HTML 5) rather than inventing its own stuff like it did in the past, 3) they can fully integrate software and hardware, 4) they are great designers and great marketers, and lastly 5) people love Apple. Only Baby Boomer MS Fanboys rant on about Apple anymore.

The iPhone doesn't let you run applications in the background, meaning that although services like VoIP are theoretically possible, they won't be available to handle incoming events (like calls).

But who really cares about VoIP ... more concerning is that this limitation prevents anyone from "pushing" data to the handset. It's a limitation enforced by the carriers for years. Until they open up binary SMS to third-parties or allow applications to sleep on the phone in the background, we're limited to browser-style applications that "pull" data.

That's not how we use mobile devices today. We receive more calls and text messages than we send, statistically. Mobile devices are notification-centric. They're not devices where we browse and search things.

It's not the PLATFORM, stupid. It's the use-cases.

Apple's just as clueless as the rest of the mobile industry.

Value added applications, brought to you by Nike etc.

A great article, as ever Alex.

http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html

Enjoy!

You are right but wrong. Openness is the future, but not in the old way you are thinking about it. The old arguments about monopoly/control and vertical vs horizontal platforms don't apply anymore. The market is much faster now. Instead of a 20-year PC evolution wave to ride, companies have only a few years to either get it or not! The iPod, FaceBook, YouTube, Wii, Ajax and Web 2.0, blogging, are all examples of this faster-paced world.

Openness rules when it comes to the medium itself or the tech behind the medium. The end-user (market) doesn't care one bit if a single or small group of companies monopolize a market -- especially and significantly if the product is free or very affordable.

What still matters is that "eco-systems" will continue to have an impact around early successes (eg: iPod, Facebook, MySpace) and so what we are learning is that there are now significant advantages to "first movers" in new emerging markets.

Apple will continue to win big for several reasons. 1) its a fast-moving company 2) it utilizes open-standards (H.264, MPEG4, OpenGL, HTML 5) rather than inventing its own stuff like it did in the past, 3) they can fully integrate software and hardware, 4) they are great designers and great marketers, and lastly 5) people love Apple. Only Baby Boomer MS Fanboys rant on about Apple anymore.

They should love the iPhone SDK. Gives them a chance to really get paid for their work.

I also expect Apple to come out with a larger format device (the rumored Safari Pad) which would run these same apps with minor modification.

In two years there could easily be a market of 20 to 40 million iPhone/IPod Touch/Safari Pad users out there.

BTW, it's worth noting that the worldwide web was developed on a NeXT machine, and the first web server was a black magnesium NeXT cube running on Objective-C. So Objective-C is arguably even more important than the above article aleges.

>Let's be clear. It is not the language, but the libraries that matter.

Thats right, .Net supports 25 languages. It has incredebly mature libraries that span almost every area of modern computing.

>As the complexity of our software increases, so do demands on libraries. Microsoft learned it the hard way with years of set backs when it rolled out .Net.

That statement is completley false and strange. What setbacks? Many developers have embraced .Net since its beta days.

>Had it simply embraced and optimized Java, it could have been years ahead instead.

MS tried to embrace Java and was met with tons of flack from Sun. .Net is what Java wishes it was.

>When Java came along, Apple was unmoved, because it was just too slow.

So the author states MS should embrace Java, but Apple shouldn't.

>Beyond rock-solid APIs, developers get an end-to-end set of development tools. XCode is the studio for developing applications (not free)

Strange. .Nets visual studio has free versions that are hardly gimped and provides one of the best development IDEs availble today.

>And the most impressive piece of the tool set is a fully-fledged iPhone simulator.

That is not impressive, its standard these days to have a deveice emulator in IDEs like that.

>Redmond's convoluted APIs, COM, OLE, and ActiveX still make developers shake their heads.

That is why .Net was made, to get rid of most of that stuff. You can't compare a new SDK to technologies from 7 years ago.

>Facebook's PHP, Flash and JavaScript with a restricted, primitive UI doesn't even come close to the beauty and elegance of the iPhone SDK.

The fuck is this guy talking about. Facebook is a web app. It cannot be compared to an iPhone app in this scope.

>In a lot of ways, web applications have been playing catch up with Desktop apps.

No shit. The author clearly doesn't understand why.

- send FILES and lots of MP3s thru Bluetooth
- use SIM card with any operator
- record video
- send MMS messages
- use VoIP and IM
- use it DIRECTLY without the ugly iTunes
- create your own themes and icons without hacking
and etc.

Besides all apple products are too expensive!!! With that much money i can build better PC!

Yes, Jobs and Apple know what they're doing and yes, they have some good tools and good strategy, but they're still not everything even in today's world, nor will they be everything in the future. You can't just ignore everything non-Apple and claim they're the best, even if they do seem to be rising rapidly for many good reasons. So, good article, but next time let's have a balanced view from multiple perspectives.

Two problems with your unbounded optimism:
1) iPhones are expensive, meaning until the price point comes down considerably, mass adoption is a long ways out...
2) open is the way of the future... vendor lock-in to proprietary, closed standards never has and never will win big.

Having an iPhone or developing for an iPhone will get even you dorky geeks laid.
Hot Chicks dig iPhones. They don't care about "API's" open or closed systems, etc. They like cool iPhones and iPod Touch.

They like cool stuff and if you code for something as cool as iPhone you will get laid. You spout about all your other Nerd knowledge no one but other techno weenies will care.

iPhone=Cool=Laid
Forum Poster Opinions=Whine=No Getting Laid.

Now who is getting laid?

While I admire and support the course of unix and the open 'ix world, I submit that commercial advantage and product leverage is the force that yields the tremendous rate of growth and incredible variety we enjoy. and continue to do so in the face of open practice. We're not there with ubiquity yet. maybe one day. I'm a boy scout too but for now, 'open' is more an abstraction than common practice. it's way too pricey a way of doing business.

Great article. maybe too many superlatives, though. It could have been tempered with a story about what developers are faced with on other platforms. suggesting competitiors' increased complexity is fine but I want to hear more.

Android FTW!

Simply not true. From day 1, Apple had 3 APIs they natively supported on Mac OS X: Yellow Box (now Cocoa), Blue Box (now Carbon), and Java. In fact, many things Apple has done in the past 7 years took longer than they should have, because of Apple's desire for Java support.

But people hate crashing phones even more. And full openness brings the likelihood that the platform would be more unstable. This is what Apple is trying to avoid, and a key fact that many pundits seem to forget about. "Closed" does not mean completely "bad". There are benefits. These benefits are exactly why Apple customers are the most satisfied customers in the industry.

Apple's iPhone ruled over both of those in Q4 of last year. It was only second to RIM with a marketshare of 28%.

iPod has ruled with 80% of the entire market place and it appears the iPhone is going to do the same within 3-5 years. So much for people not liking 'closed systems'. The fact is, the iPod/iTunes dynamic has been more open that the PC counterpart with less drastic DRM, and with Jobs on record to do away with DRM, which would really open things up.

The bigger and better the corporation, the shorter the mission statement focusing on the service it provides. For the biggest firms, the mission statement can boil down to a verb ultimately. For instance, Amazon’s mission: Sell stuff. Ebay’s: Resell stuff. Google’s: Advertise stuff. What’s Apple’s mission? I think Apple needs to focus on a "verb" mission as well: Purchase stuff.

How? Based on its iTunes/iPod/Phone successes, it can pair the iPhone with an "iChoices" app to do all the tasks related to handling our money: order, purchase, track, reconcile, budget, plan.

As client/web software the iTunes Store is more than halfway there. It requires an Apple desktop client, to replace Quicken, along with all the services that Apple can build in related to finances: banking, investing, ebillings, etc.

Apple, take on the banks. They are even more outmoded and unhelpful than the music guys. It's the next big thing for Apple, which needs gigantic solution-level things to do, now that it’s one of the big dogs.

Apple does best when it can run a content stream through its hardware: Music, now video. Money may be the ultimate content stream. It's certainly the ultimate revenue stream.

http://gallery.mac.com/stevenagel01#100085/ApplePie-001&bgcolor=black

Better? Why? Every evidence points to the fact that Apple, given the opportunity, will be every bit as money-grabbing, dominating and exploiting as Microsoft has been for the last 2 decades. At the end of the day you just cant ignore the fact that its all about keeping the stockholders happy. Just look at the iPhone launch and the AT&T deal. Power corrupts. What can I say.

More recently, my friend, the IT manager, said that the iPhone would never make it in the enterprise. I'm going to go easy with him this time and keep my mouth shut. After all, he is my friend. Yet I can see the day coming soon when his pride will be tested to the limits. The iPhone is about to give him an electronic wedgie.

But I also agree with people who say that Objective-C is low-level and tedious to write, and I think the answer to that is to use a high-level language on top of it. I spent a long time trying to help Ruby be that language (http://www.rubycocoa.com, http://www.rubyobjc.com) but eventually decided that nothing could be better than a language designed specifically for the job. So I wrote one: http://programming.nu, and before me, Philippe Mougin had already written http://www.fscript.org. I expect there will be more little languages built on Objective-C. Laurent Sansonetti at Apple is busy on a deep reworking of Ruby: http://trac.macosforge.org/projects/ruby/wiki/MacRuby

"Wrong! XCode comes free with the Mac. The iPhone SDK comes free. Thus you can design apps for the iPhone for free. This is hugely different from Microsoft - where you have to pay for their development software. Only if you want to distribute the software to others do you pay $99 a year to have Apple host and sell it for you on the iTunes music store."

It is simply incorrect that you have to pay for Microsoft's development software. Anyone can develop and distribute any software they like for Windows for free, including basic developer tools:

· You can download the .NET Framework from the Microsoft Download Center for free.

· You can download the Express editions of Visual Basic 2008, Visual C# 2008, Visual C++ 2008, Visual Web Developer 2008, and SQL Server 2005, all for free.

· There is no charge for distributing applications built with .NET, whether they are web applications, desktop applications, or mobile applications.

COM, OLE and ActiveX are complex technologies but to say 'Microsoft pushed for complexity' would be stretching it too far. No company, Microsoft included, embraces complexity on purpose.

There is a real problem that these teams set out to solve and indeed did so. Way before there was talk of Data Portability, SOA etc, there was Bill's vision of data and functionality being transported between applications on a desktop. The end result was OLE and COM.

To innovate is terrific of course, but to do so in isolation, with your own proprietary interfaces cuts down a lot of challenges.

>The fuck is this guy talking about. Facebook is a web app. It cannot be compared to an iPhone app in this scope.

lol

We at Microsoft are not sitting around doing nothing you know!
This entire article is lies! Before we let it get that bad we will buy them the plow the place under!

I'd like a much more measured appraisal of Apple's ability to innovate in the face of not only competition, but also the growing need for a truly open mobile platform (and no, I'm not interested in Android). Frankly, I'm amazed at how many walls Apple has constructed around their SDK.

The fact is the day Apple truly becomes a useful platform beyond its current niche is the day it loses the ability to "execute perfectly." The albatross of supporting a million pieces of hacked crapware will drag them down. That's the problem with M$. Enough legacy support to prevent true innovation but enough new to break something for everyone.

Computing on a PC was around for a time, but when the mouse was introduced, the metaphor by which people could come to understand computing changed. The idea had been around, yet the implementation made computing more powerful, easier to use, and more engaging.

iPhone does the same thing. yes, the same things could bee accomplished today on other devices, yet statistics already show that iPhone crushes the competition in terms of how many users access the web on their handheld, for instance. Not all of those people are tech geeks who forget the rest of the world doesn't get off on struggling through obscure geeky phone functions to get something to work the way they want it to.

For those who keep saying that the iPhone and Apple's handling of the software issue is not revolutionary, go right ahead and keep repeating history. You guys who are insiders into the tech field keep missing the point-- most people are not like you, thank goodness. If they were, we'd be mired in crappy engineer-only gadgets that would keep tech isolated from the masses.

What makes iPhone so powerful is that ANYONE can use it and use it well. That is revolutionary because it helps push tech into peoples' hands-- people who may not have used that sort of thing before.

Design is function. This means that if things are designed well, they work well for the user. Features ≠ function. More capabilities means nothing if no one uses it. Until geeks get this, Apple will keep running circles around the competition.

Keep arguing. It's good. It gives solace when Apple makes you look bad, I suppose.

The incredible on-the-go gaming potential for the iPhone and iPod will continue to migrate new generations to Apple and Mac OSX.

Once developers use the great tools to bring games and applications to the iPhone, they will be enticed to stretch a little further to get to the desktop and other yet to be seen devices from Apple.

Can you imagine Apple TV becoming a gaming device attached to your HD TV with a motion sensor touch pad controller to boot. How hard can it be to augment an iPhone game to that sort or device.

Apple TV will someday be more than a hobby to Apple.

The iPhone is about to eat the planet, folks, semi-literate screeds notwithstanding. Symbian and WinMobile and Linux Mobile? Yes, we've all heard of them. We speak of them in the same sentence as 24-pin dot-matrix printers, cathode ray tubes, and other obsolete technologies.

They're toast.

The comment about Microsoft should embrace Java instead of .Net is hilarious. I have not a very high opinion of "slow slow" Java and I know a lot of .Net-developers who really think MS did FINALLY something well.

Sorry, I can't agree with your opinion, maybe I didn't get the argument (I'm not a hardcore programmer or something)...

I'm looking forward to later generation iPhones & iTouches having both a camera for still and video input, plus a similarly sized tiny MicroVision laser projector presenting wall sized visual output at resolutions at least as good as today's monitors.

In the near future we should be carrying pocket sized Apple computers more useful and powerful than today's desktops or laptops.

It seems that many who mention the iPhone being stuck with AT&T forget that they can also get an iPod Touch instead and work through WiFi.

Btw, i DONʻT LIKE the AT&T deal myself. It would have been better INMO that Apple offered iPhone to all GSM enable carriers and got a smaller piece of the monthly subscription. In other words... volume... The price of the iPhone will come down sooner than most people think.

I am not a developer. But an investor. So, if the thing works... i could care less about all this other stuff going on behind the scenes... I think the gaming aspect may win a number of users for the iPod Touch

It is not in Apple's DNA to dominate, because they not a mass marketer. Apple likes high margins on their products which leads to a niche markets, unlike Android which has a potential for mass adoption across handset providers because it is free and developers because it will be used by many handset providers.

Leopold Record Pre-orders!
iMac Sales off the charts!
IPod Sales Still on Rise!
Newton Slate in Development!
Stock Price climbing weekly!
New Stunning MacPro Coming!
Laptop Sales Growing!
Apple market-share over 8%
Yada yada yada ......

All I can say is "watch yourself Mr. Jobs!"
Why?
Well here at MS we have had Protocol 666a in place for the last 12 years, it reads thusly:

"Any competing company which threatens the MS business model by exceeding 10% OS market-share and/or having quarterly revenues exceeding 25% of MS quarterly revenues shall be targeted for elimination for market contention by any means necessary. Said company being....”

Protocol 666a is built into all of our systems and business models and is implemented automatically whenever the offending companies trip it! Apple is getting close! I'm a nice guy though and am formally issuing this warning, "tone down your growth Mr. Jobs, by that I mean your OS! If you value your pretty little candy coated company that is, you haven't seen us get ugly yet!"

While I found the article to be right on the money, I am just so surprised to see that many other writers still have NO CLUE as to why this Apple SDK and enterprise solution is so huge, a real game changer.

And with Apple having control of all the hardware AND software, they are in a unique position to be sure that the parts in a system (iPod, AppleTV, Mac, iTunes, iPhone, etc) just keep playing nice with each other and to build that into a great synergy.

I think the next 6 months are going to be very interesting.

en

Its just not what was needed here. And the SDK cant really fix that, maybe the IPhone 2 can, but competition is coming in the form of Google Android, and it remains to be seen, who will be the winner of this. I do not believe that Apple will dominate in this market, but we will see a big fight between Google and Apple, with a certain looser... Microsoft.

Think about it:
1. Common and free development environment most Java developers use now.
2. Not locked in to a single cellular carrier.
3. Two separate programming competitions which award prize money to the top 50 entries!

I don't know about you, but I'm so waiting for this.