The noise this week has been deafening. iPhone pandemonium! iPhone catastrophe! Oh, the iPhonity! Today, the so-called Jesus Phone makes its second coming, and sure enough, its return has been preceded by a time of strife and tribulation.
Or, at the very least, a nasty public-relations hitch. The howling over the prices that Rogers originally planned to charge Canadian customers for their iPhone has produced a prolonged spectacle. First, the online petitioners struck, amassing a list of more than 55,000 disgruntled consumers, calling Rogers every name in the book: monopolist, price-gouger, extortionist, lay-about, communist sympathizer, puppy-kicker.
Then came a wave of salacious rumours on the Web claiming that Apple was so upset with Rogers that it slapped sanctions on the wireless operator. (Rogers denied these claims.) It's public-relations gold for Apple, which saw its iPhone being painted as a desirable damsel locked in a tower, kept away from its adoring masses by a monstrous jailor.
In the end, Rogers relented and cut its prices. In one press report, a Rogers exec grumbled that it was just to “satisfy a very small group of people, the early adopters.” The fact was, Rogers was faced with a universal point of agreement about the iPhone: People want it.
In fact, it's almost as if we need it. It's more than simple desire – people talk about the iPhone like they do the price of oil, as though it's a too-expensive but compulsory purchase. As The Globe's Jack Kapica wrote this week, Canadians are approaching the issue with a sense of entitlement. If we don't want to pay iPhone prices, he wrote, why not just abstain?
It's true, you can never discount the cultish devotion that Apple inspires. It's also true that the outcry taps broadly into a fulminating resentment at high wireless prices charged by all carriers in Canada. Like other monolithic corporations, the wireless carriers cut a windmill-like profile that invites recreational tilting.
But in this instance, I suspect that the outrage boils down to Canadians feeling entitled to something else entirely: the Web itself. Of all the things that the iPhone signals, the most potent is the arrival of the ubiquitous Web, the one that will follow us everywhere and, in a million sly ways, change everything.
The iPhone isn't the first smart phone to grace the planet. More or less every phone these days makes some attempt at surfing the Web, and some brands have found widespread adoption in other markets.
The iPhone, however, is the first mass-market device that shrinks the Web to pocket size while keeping it easy to navigate. There's no need to resort to special pages formatted for mobile devices, or to watch regular Web pages get mangled as they compress to fit a tiny screen. iPhone owners flick their way through the Web with their fingertips, using a series of simple gestures to scroll, click and zoom.
It's hard to overstate the importance of getting those fundamentals right. What do we do on the Web if not click, scroll and zoom?
Apple has always understood that the success of gadgets always comes down to the last mile of the user experience. It doesn't matter that your computer is powerful if you have to type in too many arcane commands to make it do simple tasks. It doesn't matter that your music player can store 100,000 songs if it's a chore to flip through them. And it doesn't matter that your smart phone can surf the Web if it is so ungainly – and expensive – that it would just be easier to wait until you get home.
Every mobile-phone ad I see these days seems to feature a crew of faux teenagers demonstrating how they can use Facebook on their cellphones, or loathsome beavers surfing the Web with their oily paws. (While we're on the topic, I have only one word to say to Frank and Gordon: taxidermy!) Yet, anecdotally, I've never witnessed anyone socially surfing the Web on anything other than a corporate BlackBerry. Perhaps I'm not hanging out with enough teenagers or CGI beavers, but there's a disconnect between what we're being sold and what I see being used.
The iPhone has the power to change that, and the effects will be both profound and subtle.
Having the Web handy changes how we navigate daily life, much like access to mobile telephones already has. It's a cure for uncertainty: Constant access to online maps means an end to getting lost; constant access to retail websites means comparison shopping on the fly; constant access to Wikipedia means always having an answer in an asinine debate at the pub.
None of the above were iPhone innovations. But then, Apple didn't invent point-and-click computer interfaces either – its Macintosh computers merely refined and popularized them.
In much the same way, the iPhone isn't about early adopters at all. It's about the late adopters, the users who don't care for gadgets that don't meet them on their own terms. The iPhone doesn't just make the mobile Web accessible; it makes it appealing. No wonder we feel entitled.
