[Edit – bugger; I drafted this on Dec 30 (http://twitter.com/JofArnold/statuses/1085661133) and binned it because I though it was a bit lame. Now everyone’s talking about Android! That’ll teach me. I’m back-dating the post so I look clever again.]
First, let me open as I often do, with a disclaimer. Whilst I believe the iPhone is the best consumer device ever invented, and I have a lot of respect for Jobs/Apple, I’m not OSX’s biggest fan. It’s very fast, but I find the user interface to be very cumbersome compared to Ubuntu and XP… the subject of another post some day.
Now that Benjie and I have become iPhone devs 100%, I think a lot about Apple’s future. I want to think they are invulnerable, but it’s dawned on me lately they’ve a serious Achilles Heel and that’s OSX (the desktop version at least).
If I were in Cupertino, I’d be mulling over these following trends;
- The general public are more aware than ever of non-MS operating systems.
- Much of Apple’s defensibility is based around perceived leads in UX and quality…
- … the rest is based on lockdown and halo-effect.
- Market penetration of advanced mobile phones.
- Apple’s transition from high-end geek niche to mass-market may mean leaving the fanatics behind.
- Commodisation of computing hardware through netbooks.
- Google’s increasing influence with OEMS – eg Chrome.
- OSX10.6 is looking like a difficult transition for Apple; OpenCL + legacy hardware + 32/64bit + new hardware innovations = trouble.
- Ubuntu/Canonical.
- The economy.
Why do I think this means trouble for OSX? Well the key issue is that I don’t feel OSX is defensible any more. On the one hand its drive to becoming a consumer OS makes it less and less attractive to geeks, and on the other its consumer features are both trivial to copy and – let’s face it – a step too far from Windows for some people. What made me realize this is that my granny is happy with Windows and Linux, but struggles with the outcast UX paradigms of OSX. Worst still for Apple, much of the prettiness of OSX is trivial to copy in other ‘nixs or – especially in the case of KDE 4.2 – substantially improve upon.
Now I know what you are thinking – “but linux looks crap”. My answer to you is; “do you really think there are only one/two good OS designers/illustrators in the world”? Not only are OpenSuse and Ubuntu already great user experiences, but with Shuttleworth’s design fund it won’t take long until these free operating systems overtake OSX in the looks front.
Of course, I’m not seriously considering Linux will beat OSX any time soon – that’s crazy talk – but it’s an important piece of the jigsaw and it’s critical in eroding OSX’s perceived value. “But this free operating system looks WAY better”. Ie in consumer eyes “looking good” no longer equals “premium” for OS’s.
No, the real trouble for OSX/Apple is Google – particularly Android.
Google’s business plan is the antithesis of Apple’s. Google is indifferent as to the money OEM’s make on hardware and software – it simply wants to be totally pervasive. Android is an incredible Trojan horse for Google, and one that will see Android as one of the widest-installed operating systems in the next few years. In itself, I don’t see Android harming iPhone sales but it does pose a huge risk to OSX; if Google were to leverage its growing influence with OEMS and the growing ecosystem surrounding Android it could – in principal – turn to netbooks [Edit: And the community have done it for them!]. In the process of doing so it could seriously undermine any attempts Apple may make in this market and thus any opportunity for releasing a profitable netbook (cos you don’t seriously think these netbooks are making their makers serious money, right?). Sure, it won’t be attached to fancy hardware, but when times are hard people will perceive Apple to be well out of their price range. What makes it worse for Apple still is that Android/Linux will be a smaller learning curve, act like the users’ phone, and be attached to such low-price hardware that people will be less scare of change. “But I’m really not sure about paying $2000 to learn this new operating system that really looks no better than the others and all I want is email anyway”.
At the moment Apple has none of these problems, but this is just current circumstance. Apple is in a position where its customer service is sufficiently scaled to make up for the poor quality of its hardware (you heard me! Find me a Macbook Pro that hasn’t broken down within 6 months). Crappy headphones broke again? Don’t worry, Apple will replace them. GPU broke again? Don’t worry, Apple will replace it. The reason I see this as a problem is that Apple is such a premium brand that if/when some serious quality issues crop up (*cough* Nvidia *cough*), their fanatical customers will use their fanaticism in less positive ways.
Why would Apple’s customers turn on them? They haven’t yet. No, they haven’t, and this is because Apple can handle them. But what if OSX 10.6 goes horribly wrong like Vista did? For me, there’s every reason to believe this could happen – even small updates cause consternation in the blogger community and OSX10.6 is a big transition. 10.6 features a huge amount of new code and needs to straddle 32 and 64bit operation. This has never in the history of an operating systems gone well.
So my predictions for this year?
- iPhone will drive Apple’s sales
- OSX10.6 will be Apple’s Vista.
- Their netbook either won’t be released or it will be and it won’t fly off the shelves
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Nice post - I agree with 2/3 :) , I disagree that Snow Leopard will be Apple's Vista.
The problem with Vista was the MS tried to convert their entire stack to .NET, and implement big new features and changes. When it became apparent that .NET wasnt going to do the job they had to scramble to re-implement everything, leading to the mess they are left with today.
Snow Leopard, on the other hand, is very much billed as an upgrade, with few new features. I think for this reason it will be a disappointment to many people, but it will still achieve its goal inside Cupertino i.e. conversion of a large part of the OS/X stack.
Lets see!
Matt
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Re hardware, I deleted a section about their Nvidia partnership so I could get it released but it's asking for trouble. The idea of single-sourcing the components of a flagship (or perhaps formerly flagship) product is suicide - especially to a company known to be secretive about serious quality issues. I just don't get it.
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