Apple iPhone: The future has landed?

Ben Harvey is back for his regular weekly guest column – and this week he’s got a bee in his bonnet about the iPhone.

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So, earlier this week, I was reading an article on my iMac (whilst listening on my iPod to songs bought on iTunes) that the iPhone had a launch-date. I couldn’t believe my iEyes! It was truly an iSight to warm the iCockles of my iHeart.

Just what we need; yet another Apple product that’s so disgustingly wonderful we’re all forced – grudgingly – to get one, even though they’re bloody everywhere. This must’ve been what it was like in the first days of car-ownership. Yes, the Ford Model T was everywhere, and yes, you’d look like everyone else if you got it, but what can you do? The Model R only had three wheels and the Model S only got twenty gallons to the mile so, you know, what can you do…

At certain times in history, technology flips. At the risk of making a bad pun about ‘killer apps”, it’s easiest to see this when it happens with warfare (as opposed to business) if only because corpses are easier to count than assets. When the cannon was invented it was farewell to the castle. When the machine-gun was invented it was farewell to cavalry. When the landmine was invented it was farewell to the Kings Own Pogo-Stickers. But will the iPhone prove to be a similarly powerful sea-change? Will it do to the current market what an out-of-town Tesco always does to the village high-street?

Some analysts are saying that, in 2009, Apple may well be shifting 45,000,000 iPhone handsets. Forty-five million! Equating to ten billion dollars of revenue! That’s a Dr. Evil amount of money. When it comes to calculating turnover & share-price, the figures that get bandied about, in this debate, come mostly in the form of ‘$14 x 10^loads”. It’s astronomical. It’s giddy. It’s alarmingly optimistic and I think it’s…it’s a test of faith, that’s what it is.

It’s my educated, considered and thoughtfully humble opinion that the iPhone can’t fail because too many people want it to do well. Allow me to explain; it’s an emotional thing. For a significant part of the tech-educated population of the world, Apple are too aspirational, too consistently sleek and too good at presenting that winning image of being 60% cool, 40% genial (as opposed to Microsoft’s 0% cool, 100% genital). The first wave of consumers out there will read the product reviews through rose-tinted glasses and give the actual hardware the benefit of the doubt and then buy the bloody thing anyway..

How Apple managed to end up with this staggering reservoir of good-will is a bit of a mystery to me (and since it’s not been emulated or copied successfully by any other company it must be a mystery to quite a few other people, as well), but them’s the facts. In a thought-provoking article, John Dvorak proffers the view that the two giants of the mobile world (Nokia & Motorola) are just too dominant and will crush the upstart Apple simply by the fact that the profit-margins right now are too low to support a price-war, and they may well just starve Jobs & Co. right out of the market. Dvorak makes many good points but I don’t think he’s factored in the sheer ocean of happily-irrational favouritism.

So – to put all this in context, the all-time combined total of worldwide RAZR handsets is coming up to 60 million. And just two years down the line the current consensus is that 45,000,000 iPhones a year is perfectly achievable. That’s a big, big, big ask. I’ve got to say, I think there are some people out there who have gotten giddy with the sheer mood of the moment. And I’m one of them.

I’m on the verge of selling one of my kidneys just to get cash with which to buy Apple shares. I’m thinking of pimping my arse down Piccadilly just so I’ve got the money to buy some of this stock before it goes completely mental. Apple’s share-price has doubled in a year and I think that the iPhone is going to be so popular that a further doubling is on the cards.

Why am I so confident? Because it’s that rare thing – it’s a design icon that’s actually worth having. Zippo lighters; look incredible but they do make your cigar taste of petrol. Smart Cars; look smashing, but not that popular because nobody likes the idea of getting their legs crushed into a bloody pulp whenever a bug hits the radiator grill. This new handset is just different enough, just powerful enough, just clever enough to really, really change things. Provided that the 3rd-party-written applications are quick enough to come (and are as unwelcoming an environment for viruses and malware as the rest of the Apple line-up) then it’s enough to kick us all up into a higher plane of being.

Now, it goes without saying that this is all dependent on many factors. The screen has to be pocket-proof (anyway remember the furore over iPod nanos…?), for starters. Some people are already raising profound doubts over the battery-life, especially for a device that will, essentially, be pissing Bluetooth mojo from the moment it’s turned on. Others are even – get this – accusing Apple of acting like Microsoft when it comes to the distribution and availability of the 3rd-party codings. I’m reminded of that lovely saying that ‘obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off the prize”.

I think the only real danger, the only impediment now, is all the bad PR that’s going to come when the stampedes in shops crush people to death. But then again, that didn’t do Ikea any harm, did it…

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Thanks Ben!