Is the iPhone the 128K Mac?

That's no brilliantly original observation--inevitably, Steve Jobs himself compared the phone to his pioneering computer when he unveiled the iPhone back in January. But the similarities are deep indeed, in part because both gadgets reflect the Steve Jobs philosophy of product design--which has remained remarkably consistent over the past thirty years--so clearly.

When Jobs compares the iPhone to the Mac, of course, he's talking innovation. The original "128K Mac" had a user interface that DOS PCs didn't even sort of catch up with for six years; the iPhone has one that's spectacular enough that Jobs's claims that its software is five years ahead of the rest of the industry may not be pure reality distortion.

But that first Mac, for all its revolutionary goodness, had some fundamental flaws--most notably its parsimonious 128KB of memory. (Ever used an original Mac? The floppy-swapping shuffle you had to go through to perform the most mundane tasks remains one of the most mind-numbing exercises in the history of computing.) And while Apple and AT&T are defending the iPhone's use of a relatively slow EDGE data connection rather than the faster UTMS/HSDPA technologies--for one thing, it permits better battery life--it's possible that the phone's pokey data will turn out to be a comparable compromise to the Mac's skimpy memory.

Actually, there are enough parallels between the computer and the phone to call for a comparison table. Such as this one...

In Steven Levy's immensely readable chronicle of the making of the Mac, Insanely Great, he said, "People like myself who bought Macintoshes in 1984 were so delighted with the machine's virtues that we stubbornly tolerated its faults--but late at night, when nobody could hear us, we secretly despaired about them." Especially after reading the few initial iPhone reviews by Levy and others, which are full of both glowing praise and sharp criticism, I think it's possible that early iPhone buyers will be similarly delighted and despairing.

Starting tomorrow night at 6pm, we'll know for sure...

Comments

Harry has too much free time. Just keep swooning over Zune and let Apple alone.

cameljockey

June 29, 2007

1:40 AM PT

I did find another phone that is up iPhone's alley. http://www.openmoko.com/press/index.html the Neo phone seems to be capable of much the same features as the iPhone but has more potential for rapid groath due to its open source applications.

I look forward to seeing and playing with both. Gadgets are cool, prices are all that slow people down.

67comet

June 29, 2007

2:38 AM PT

Stretching reality and distorting the past to produce an article is not unknown in journalism. Still, what a dumb criticism. Back when the 128k Mac was new, it was slicker than sliced bread. However slow floppies are, back then we were so thrilled to be using such a great machine that our irritation about disk-swapping didn't even begin until we were shown a better way: the shortly-thereafter introduced large storage drive (20mb - lol). Will the iPhone improve over time? Sure. But right now, it's slicker than sliced bread. And "the future" will come even faster than it did for the Mac.

gbdoc

June 29, 2007

3:05 AM PT

I will say that they are similar in one very big way -- both were the start of a whole new platform. In this case, it's OS X in the pocket.

HoraceTheThird

June 29, 2007

4:36 AM PT

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