Dvorak Disses iPhone Platform, Wants You Off His Lawn

by Eric March on March 28, 2008 at 1:38 am

For a tech writer, PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak doesn’t really get it, and frankly never has. As far back as 1984, Dvorak dissed Apple’s first Macintosh and the whole concept of mice, believing that no one wanted to use those infernal things. (Lawn! Off! Now!) He even thought the first iMacs would never take off, excoriating Apple’s new-fangled industrial design concepts as too “girly” and “juvenile.” (I’m not fooling now, you kids go home or I’m calling your parents!) Even as recently as three years ago he griped that the good press Apple was getting was due to press bias because most newsies used Macs.

To be fair, he did predict that Apple would create a Video-enabled iPod when The Steve himself denied it, and that Apple would eventually switch to Intel chips. ‘Course, he also said they’d switch to Windows, too.

So, you take enough shots, you hit a few targets, and now that he’s met his quota, he’s back to rattling his cage and flinging poo. His latest PC Mag column has him complaining about how the iPhone couldn’t possibly be the next platform. He cites its diminuitive stature, the fact that people tend to leave them lying around, drop them, dunk them, and don’t bother protecting them or the data they contain like they do laptops. He’s pretty uptight about laptops, too, but the iPhone in particular, specifically hearing people bill it as a new platform, has his hackles raised. In his mind, it is not a platform, and it could never replace a real desktop computer.

Unfortunately, John, I’m afraid that you have managed to miss the point entirely. In fact, you’ve shot at the point and managed to wing Paul Prudhomme instead. (Fortunately, it just bounced off.)  The iPhone is not, and never was intended to be a replacement for anything but another smartphone, no more and no less. (How ya like your Motorola and Nokia now?) That the fact that it runs OS X has been played up was simply to underscore its potential power. That they have released an SDK is to expand its feature set. That it is an eminently capable game machine, PDA, and phone all in one smartly tarted up device is what makes it as good as it is. But it is not a desktop replacement. It’s not even a laptop replacement. It’s a companion device, intended to enhance either or both of these. Why would you think it were otherwise? Did PalmOS or Windows Mobile replace the desktop? Of course not. Wherever would you get the idea then that Apple was trying to position the iPhone as something that would, then?

With the iPhone, Apple is in a very good place right now. PalmOS has become all but irrelevant, Symbian hasn’t really gained any further ground in the market, and while it has risen to the dominant SmartPhone OS position, even Windows Mobile is still fraught with enough issues that it has left the general public with a desire for something that “just works.” This is the crack in the market into which Apple has driven the wedge that is iPhone. By delivering the very thing that satisfies this public craving (irrational Apple detractors notwithstanding), they have made significant inroads and captured no small portion of market share away from the existing stable of stale systems. While they are not in the dominant position yet, they have a very good chance of getting there. In fact, their only serious competition, in my opinion, is from the forthcoming Android platform, which itself will offer again something fresh and new and slick to pry the public away from the lumbering, barely-changing juggernauts of yesterday.

And neither of them will replace full-blown desktops or laptops. They aren’t intended to. Perhaps, John, you should approach the iPhone from this perspective and treat it as the computing adjunct it is in part designed to be, not the future urinal cake you think it will become.

(Source: PC Magazine)

Posted in Op/Ed, iPhone Related