| Tuesday, October 1, 2002 |
00:46 - Your iPod just became a PDA
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So now iCal and iSync are out, and .Mac is in place, and Jaguar is on everyone's desks... and without really so much as a press release, iPod owners everywhere may well be startled to realize that they suddenly have PDAs in their pockets where they thought they'd only had a few hundred CDs' worth of music.
All the functions of a PDA that don't involve live input-- address listings and schedulers, most importantly, plus the ability to sync those things back and forth-- are now built into the iPod. Ever since it was released a year ago, people have been speculating about the potential it holds as a more-than-just-an-MP3-player platform. It has a nice screen-- just fine for browsing songs, but a bit small for PDA functionality. It has a great physical interface, but no real input mechanism. It has an extensible OS in firmware and an immense hard drive, and it has FireWire and a rechargeable battery that's supposed to last up to six or nine years depending on how heavily you use it.
Plus sides and minus sides. Some have said Apple should redesign the interface to have a real input mechanism. Some have said a color screen would make it an ideal portable movie player. Some have said that all it needs is for Apple to open up the APIs that they've so selfishly tuned to the Mac OS, so Linux users can partition the drive with Ext2FS and drop their MP3s and DiVX movies in via the command line (damn that crApple! What kind of arrogance is it that concentrates on "ease of use" for one particular platform instead of pushing for the obviously more lucrative and honorable market of the h4xX0r community!).
But I think that within Apple, it's no secret how people use their PDAs. Nobody really enjoys writing with a stylus. Back when Palms were new, everybody bought one, whipped it out visibly during meetings, scribbled notes in Graffiti, kept the alarm volume up on high so they could flip it open with a smirk when some event came to pass, and beamed stuff back and forth like it was the Next Big Thing to trade the latest adapted video game or little software trinket while they were supposed to be paying attention to the guy with the agenda at the end of the table. This went on for like two months... and then, by the end of that period, you never saw the PDA again. Why? Carrying it around was a pain. It was nice to have those phone numbers and appointments handy all the time, but... mobile e-mail? Pocket web-surfing? Writing notes on the little tappity-keyboard? After two months, a given PDA was more likely to sit unused inside someone's belt-holster in a drawer with its batteries drained than to get whipped out in a meeting.
And meanwhile, everybody's been continually harping on how Apple should have capitalized on the Newton-- Doonesbury mockery of its handwriting-recognition system notwithstanding-- and captured the nascent PDA market when it was still malleable and Microsoft hadn't decided to own that too, like an afterthought to the desktop, like Monty Burns buying the left-handed sports car on his way to the cash register in the Leftorium. Nah, never mind how the PDA market is in the crapper and Palm's market dominance is slipping by whole percentage points each week. This is a perfect market for Apple to get into!
Nah. Apple is smarter than that. Or so said most people... except for one thing. This weird little wild-card called the iPod.
It wasn't the iWalk that was unveiled last November-- not the long-rumored "Apple PDA" that people had sworn they'd seen floating around the skunkworks labs in One Infinite Loop. It was something smaller, something heavier, something with a weird disc for an input device and a small squarish screen. Something with a hard drive. An MP3 player? Ah haaahhh... Apple's throwing in its lot with the music-swappers, instead of the corporate PDA toters. So that's their little game, is it?
After selling literally millions of the little boxes, within a month Apple released Jaguar, .Mac, iCal, and iSync-- and with the wave of a hand transformed each one of them into a device that incorporates all the genuinely useful features of PDAs as well as steadily augmenting how much of an MP3 player it is.
So was it part of the original game plan to gradually add PDA-like functionality to the iPod over the subsequent year-- or was it in deference to massive public demand? Is this the fruition of a long-term goal, or an admission of defeat?
iSync is the key to that. How long was it in planning? How much was involved in its production? As an application, there's not much to it. It's just a little palette that you call up either by running the app itself, or by plugging in your iPod or pressing the cradle button on your Palm. It has a .Mac button, an iPod button, a Palm button, and a Bluetooth cellphone button-- each of which only appears if you have such a device. All of those devices can support iCal calendars and contact info out of Address Book, and pressing what Lance calls the "big greasy button" on the right side of the palette synchronizes those databases from your computer to the .Mac server and all the devices at once. It merges conflicts like a champ, presenting you with a rather smart-looking "Safeguard" dialog letting you know what changes will be made. And the real icing is that it's written with owners of multiple Macs in mind-- you can register all your machines under your account on .Mac, and use that as the central repository for your address books and calendars. Changes from any machine get published to the others any time you sync.
Pretty simple in concept, really. But it depends on a great deal of infrastructure and territorial cooperation with other companies. First of all, iTools-- now .Mac-- had to get put in front of a critical mass of users. (Then it had to be converted to a pay service, which appears to be going well-- Apple just announced another 80,000 .Mac subscribers that had signed up in the last 2 weeks alone, adding to the 100,000 that had signed up immediately following the July MacWorld announcement.) Then Apple had to get a critical mass of iPods sold, then strike up a cooperative relationship with Sony-Ericsson and other companies making Bluetooth-enabled phones that can do calendaring and address-books. To say nothing of interlocking into the Palm HotSync software to bring PalmOS devices into the fold.
It's a tiny little application, but it's the capstone on a very large infrastructure that's been all but invisible until now. It's the proverbial mushroom that pops up above the forest floor, betraying existence of the fungal mass below. A metaphor most frequently used to refer to al Qaeda recently, I know, but it's still the visual I get.
And the upshot is that now, for the first time, Mac users are equally capable in their contact listings and their appointments whether they're at home, at work, on a plane with a laptop, or in a gym with an iPod. They're all part of the same store of data now.
Naturally, this again vaults the iPod to a new level of usefulness for Mac users only, which may be why Apple felt it was safe to make a Windows-branded iPod to sell to the other side. They'd reaped the profits from the first nine months of iPod sales to Mac users and to Windows users willing to put up with some inconvenience (or buy a Mac, as many ended up doing); now, they could let the Windows side in on the music-player fun, while at the same time turning it into an extension of each Mac-using owner's online life. They've retained the Mac's premium while keeping the Windows olive branch nice and green. Neat trick.
iSync is just a beta right now, by the way. (A good thing, too, because I've found a few minor bugs that I've already submitted through the handy feedback mechanism-- something Apple has been incorporating into all their applications lately.) But they don't release betas that often. This means they really wanted to get people using it as quickly as possible; maybe they wanted a clear benefit of paying for .Mac to be thrust into people's sight. Maybe they've got a bigger plan in store-- something they plan to make more public within a month or two, or in the MWSF timeframe. Or maybe they just really wanted to let people start synchronizing everything.
Whatever. These things tend to have the effect of being cool enough to be useful individually, but all the more so cumulatively. I'll enjoy the benefits of it even if this is as far as it goes. Somehow I doubt it will be, but there's no way I can speculate about where it will all end up.
Jaguar was where OS X really came of age; we came out of the period of painful transition, and began to really reap the rewards of the new platform. Apple isn't writing tools to help people cope with upgrading anymore. Now they're writing new stuff. And there's more new accessory software coming out of Cupertino now than there ever has been before. It's no longer just about the OS. And looking back on the past twenty years, I can hardly see why anybody in the Mac camp thought the OS alone made such a strong case for computing philosophy.
And now we have iApps, iPods, FireWire, and a world of peripherals that work seamlessly with OS X without any need for drivers. Everything's networked, everything's synchronized... and even the game developer world is coming online with OS X titles where they'd all but abandoned the Mac two years ago.
It just keeps getting better and better.
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