Actually – this isn’t really about the iPhone antenna, at least not directly. Rather it’s about this page Apple put up today following their press conference.

Every smartphone has a cellular antenna. And nearly every smartphone can lose signal strength if you hold it in a certain way

I’m not sure what the right answer is for Apple in this scenario, but I feel fairly certain it’s not to say “the iPhone 4: just as bad as every other smartphone!” The page is a list of phones from Blackberry, HTC, and Samsung, along with an iPhone 4 and 3GS showing that iPhone performs no worse than those phones.

Apple is making the case that an iPhone whose phone function is similarly bad to every other phone is still the better device, and this is probably true. But it’s a coldly intellectual response that I’m not sure will resonate for an emotional customer base. For a brand like Apple, I’m not sure what is gained from even talking about other phones unless you’re talking about how much better you are.

It’s a small thing, and likely of no consequence to Apple. I’m not convinced that any amount of back and forth on something like antenna design is going to dissuade people from buy what is, if nothing else, an attractive phone. Frankly, at this point, there just isn’t a product on the market that represents a level of competition to the iPhone to render this kind of mistake meaningful.

Still, it seems strategically sloppy to me.

Also, this.

Back in April, when Apple announced iAd as one of it’s “tent poles” of iOS4, I was pretty ready to just hold for Windows Mobile 7 and see how that looked. I’d had some time to mess with my sisters Zune HD and between that experience, and some of the Win 7 demos I’d seen, I was thinking maybe it was time to make a switch.

Not so much.

Of all the ways Microsoft could have gone after the iPhone – the hardware, the ecosystem, any of it – they pick iAd? The new platform is going by the name Toast for now and the goal is, as stated above, to turn their phones into “an ad-serving machine.” Good lord.

Like Apple, Microsoft is trying to spin this as a feature:

“For consumers, what this means is basically seamless experiences, seamless social connectivity”

Uh, what? On what planet is advertising a seamless, social experience? Advertising by its nature is about disrupting the users experience. It’s about taking them out of whatever they’re doing and saying “hey! look over here!”

What really takes this platform over the top for me is that while iAd is limited to applications, Toast runs in the main OS, serving ads right to the home screen of your phone.

I’m a bit a stuck record on this, but since we’re all here I’ll say it again: display advertising is an artifact of the print and broadcast worlds. It ignores all the best aspects of the web in exchange for showcasing its most boring. Worse, its left huge sections of the digital content economy in shambles, resulting stupid pagination schemes, and user hostile page layouts all designed to squeeze in one more ad. It’s bizarre to me that here on the cusp what should be the next wave of connected systems two companies that should be leading the charge are playing last decades game. I was genuinely hoping Microsoft would come into the mobile space with Win 7 and give Apple something to think about. But if this is how they’re going to do it, what’s the point?

BPGlobalPR
Sometimes people ask me about the name of this site. The answer is projects like BPGlobalPR. BPGlobalPR is a perfect example of the asymetrical nature of competition on the web.

In a time when corporations seem able to actively limit journalism, BPGlobalPR may be one of the few points of commentary on the matter generating any large scale response. I’ve read that it was the images of dead sea animals and destroyed landscapes that fueled a national boycott of Exxon after the Valdez. Absent that, this may be the best we can do. Without a press free to report on the actual situation, this stands as a small beacon of hope that multi-national corporations and their PR firms don’t control everything just yet.

Lost
Yeah, okay, so I just yesterday wrote a post about Lost as a cautionary tale for designers. I stand by that – as a product, Lost ended up being pretty terrible. But there was a reason I watched it for 6 years – aspects of the show were also pretty amazing. So much has been said, it seems silly to write more, but I can’t think of a program that has done more to layout a map for what narrative television could be in a post-internet world than Lost. Whether it was their consistent usage of DVR easter eggs, ARG’s; their direct response to conversations with fans written into the show, or their usage of other non-connected mediums to tell the meta-story (how many books were referenced in the show?); Lost stands a milestone in post-modern T.V. narrative.

The Texas Tribune
You could be forgiven for believing there are just two sides to the problem of journalism and the web – pay wall, and no pay wall.

The fundamental question these two sides actually seek to answer, though it’s rarely stated as such, is: “How do you maintain exactly the same business model you’ve always enjoyed in technologically and culturally changed landscape?”

The answer is becoming increasing clear to a lot of people: you don’t.

Enter the The Texas Tribune an online, non-prift news site started about 6 months ago to try a different path. This is from their About page:

“Because the Trib’s focus is exclusively public policy, politics, and government, there’s nothing to distract us from the task at hand. Because we’re non-profit, we don’t have to sacrifice our mission at the altar of commercial considerations. Because we’re nonpartisan, we’ll give you the straight skinny—the facts—without an agenda or bias. Because we work for you, the people of Texas, not shareholders or other corporate overlords, we’ll never get our priorities out of whack.”

The Texas Tribune I think makes clear a needed distinction in the conversation about the future of journalism: are we fighting to save journalism, or fighting to save profits? Looking the Tribune, I’d say journalism is alive and well.

The Tribunes 6 month report card

AfriGadget
This morning I’ve seen a bunch of tweets about a rumored update to Apple TV. Google just announced their version, Google TV. In a couple weeks we’ll all be seeing the next iPhone. For many of us, innovation can add new levels of convenience, new ways of creating, or new ways of communicating. Working in marketing, innovation can quickly become something viewed in terms of new “brand opportunities.”

The AfriGadget blog reminds me on an almost daily basis that for a lot of people, innovation is a matter of life and death. This isn’t capacitive touchscreens, or 1000fps cameras, its car batteries, broken mirrors, and old bikes, each of which is having profound impacts on peoples lives.

Okay – so that’s only 4 things, but it’s my first try. 5 next week for sure.

The bad thing about a dictatorship is that once the leader looses it, the whole thing starts to come undone. And they always lose it. There’s always something, some person, some event, that starts to place seeds of doubt and in the end, that single point of vision becomes a tyrannical mess of paranoia and irrational behavior. It’s clear Jobs hates Google. Not in a competitive way, but in some deep, personal and increasingly irrational way. For a guy who seems to have never made much of a bad decision, this target fixation has seemed over the last months to begin to take him off his game.

iAd is, for me, the first real manifestation of this unraveling.

Thursday morning, I tried to get out of the house early so I could stop by Voodoo doughnuts on my way into the office. One of the advantages of having your own agency is that you can declare any day that Steve Jobs is on stage as a company holiday. I had made it known early in the week that we’d be taking the morning off and taking over the conference room to project various tech blogs, eat doughnuts, and talk about Apple magic as it happened. For most of the presentation, for 6 “tent poles”, thats exactly what we did. Then came tent pole 7, iAd.

Here is my fundamental problem with iAd: It’s make no sense from a brand strategy point of view. It’s irrational, and philosophically counter to nearly every previous decision Apple has made under Jobs. To be clear, it’s not crazy in the way that most people will ever notice, after all, most of us have spent the last 15 years being trained to expect display advertising as just a way of life. But advertising is fundamentally user hostile. That’s the core nature of it, it’s why it works. It makes you stop whatever you were doing and look at something else that you didnt choose to. While it probably seems histrionic to take something so seemingly small and blow it up to this size, I do believe this marks a fundamental change in motivation for Jobs and Apple.

What Id like to do is agree with people like John Gruber that Apples motivations are to preserve the overall user experience of the iPhone, and honestly up until iPhone 4, that has always been what I believed. But iAd negates that premise on fundamental level. This is the first time I can think of Apple has chosen to make money at the direct expense of it’s customers product experience. People can, and have, argued for a long time that those of us supporting Apple and its draconian control of it’s platforms we’re just begging for this to happen. But I think it’s critical to consider that until iAd, the goal was to create a specific notion of quality user experience. For many of people, it wasn’t the experience they wanted, but that it was customer focused is hard to deny.

Of course there are already ads in applications so it could be argued that iAd doesn’t really change much. Or, to Jobs’ point in the presentation, this is a chance to make those ads better. This line of reasoning doesn’t seem to hold water though either. For a company allegedly so focused on preservation of good user experience that they’re willing to through Adobe under a bus, why would they invest so heavily in making intrinsic to the iPhone experience a system that would invite what is arguably the worst aspect of user experience on the web into their device? I can’t think of a reason. But the real difference here is that with iAd, Apple has actual financial motivation to have the iPhone/App UX degraded. Previously, Apple could take no position on in App advertising, but now, with a 30% cut of each ad, the more ads that go out, the better Apple does.

One could argue that Apple introducing iAd is better for their customers in that it allows more developers more opportunity to create applications and make a living off them. And this is true. But if Apples motivation were bring more developers into the fold, why on the same day they announce iAd would they choose to proactively lock out Flash as a development platform. Gruber’s take on this, as it has been from the start, is the Flash is simply not capable of producing a user experience at a level Apple feels is on par with the overall device. Fair enough. But if UX is the central issue, it’s hard argue that in app advertising, ads Apple will not be vetting, produce any better UX than Flash. After all, iAd gives huge amounts of iPhone user experience control to ad agencies, people with no track record of being able to produce anything other than bad UX and no motivation, monetarily or otherwise, to do anything other than throw away work.

Rather than spending their time and resources to update the App Store, something thats been asked for from nearly day one, iAd seems to be an investment by Apple in a race to the bottom. Tying application developers’ livelihood to the same display ad system that has left huge parts of the content creation industry on the web in shambles. Why not instead invest in making structural updates to the actual purchasing process to help elevate the developers doing the best work, and then help them find a way to actually charge a living wage for their work? Why not take the same, revolutionary approach Apple always has and find a way to free developers from having to find ad real-estate in their applications so they can focus on continuing to make their, and Apple’s, products even better?

The only logical answer is clear: To beat Google.

But given that a company whose name has always been tied to changing the game, such an investment in playing someone else’s game leaves me wondering: does Apple have the cultural and organizational underpinnings to manage a system that is both open to outside development and the clear frontrunner in a category, while maintaining their history of a clear focus on user experience? If iAd is any indication, the answer is no.

With Mac, Apple has always been able to be the contrarian second place. Making huge profits while catering to a smaller, but vastly more loyal base of fans. The iPod on the other hand is clearly the industry leading platform, but it’s closed. Apple has always had top to bottom control of everything that goes it save for the music. iPhone is something different though. It’s neither the plucky niche product of Mac, nor the highly controlled iPod.

In Apple’s seemingly desperate effort to control this rapidly expanding system, the strains on the dictatorial system are becoming evident, and it’s not clear Apple has the systems in place to stay sane. In fact, it would seem this new found position has resulted in increased paranoia and a fixation on beating specific competitors in specific ways rather than making revolutionary advancements. That they would try to lump iAd in with other user focused features is either completely disingenuous, or evidence of increasing detachment from reality. For whatever reason, Jobs has decided his mission now is to beat Google first, beat Adobe second, everything else comes third, including Apple user experience.

This isn’t to say that Apple will stop making good products, they’ll likely continue to for a long while. But as a post-Jobs Apple moves nearer, the questions of what drives the company without him become more important. iAd is a strong signifier of the kind of brand confusion that I think is beginning to emerge, and without Jobs in place, the “do what it takes to make money” path is now just viable as the “make great products” one. We’ve all seen “money at any cost” Apple of the 90′s, and it wasn’t pretty.

The good news is this: if you do manage to punch the monkey, you’ll win an iPad.

Note that every aspect of each device that HP pulls out is a technical specification. It’s the size of the screen, graphics cards, ports and so on. No where does HP mention the experience of using the iPad as it compares to the Slate. There is nothing about ease of use or ease of installing applications. Most striking to me: no mention of the OS.

To be fair, HP doesn’t have total control over a lot of these aspects of the device as they’re the hardware manufacturer so it may only make sense to speak to what they can own. Additionally, this may be intentionally geared to the person who would be looking at the HP in the first place.

None of this is meant to be critical of HP, I just find it interesting to see what motivates a brand, and how those motivations manifest themselves in the final product.

The iPad is Apple’s reconceptualization of what a computer is to a regular person.

Therein lies the challenge of todays event, and one of Apples two biggest failing with the iPad launch. First off, in the iPad, I feel even more strongly than I did Monday that what Apple has on its hands the 2010 vision of the 1997 iMac, or the 1984 Macintosh. It is basically the computer most people should own. It’s Apple’s first computer in a long time targeted at regular people with average computing needs, and the price really drives that home.

But that was also the first hurdle they needed to get over that they didn’t. Today’s event was the first time in a long time that Apple has launched a product that not just not targeted at core Apple customers (the kind that watch these events), but actually the type of product that the core would be predisposed to both not understand and not like. If you work all day making videos, working as a photographer, making websites or designing products, the current interaction models for computers either works pretty well, or you’ve invested so much time in learning it, that it’s hard to see another vision of a computer. But for most people, the metaphors a lot of us take for granted are not just non-obvious, they’re downright confusing.

As I pointed out Monday, something as seemingly basic as the file system is a total mystery to most people. And forget keyboard commands. For the vast majority of computer users, keyboards are for typing and nothing else. In the iPad, Apple has a product that addresses the idea that in 2010 everyone has – or needs – a computer in their lives, but almost all of the interaction models we have are based 30-year-old concepts of keyboard and mouse as primary input devices. Why? Keyboards are, again, really about making words, and a mouse is a legacy pointing device that is mostly not ideal.

So, Apple has this device, this “new” computer.

This fresh way of seeing the world.

This third option.

And what do they do?

They spend the entire presentation NOT saying that.

This was, without a doubt, the single worst product drop I’ve ever seen from Apple.

I came into this morning so clear on what the iPad could be, and by the time the event was over, all I could think was “Jobs did everything he could to make this sound like a giant iPhone.” In my mind, what he needed to do was come out, explain the issues surrounding computers in 1984 and how the Macintosh overcame them. Talk about the issues facing computers in 1998 and how iMac overcame them. Talk about the issues facing computers in 2010, and then spend the rest of the presentation explaining how this is the new Mac, pounding the message: “if you need a computer for your LIFE, this is the one.” The price should have come much earlier, and should have been much more tied to the product’s reason d’etre. “Thinking about buying that shitty Acer laptop for $700, let me show you this Apple for $500.”

This needed to be an event about the concept of the iPad, not the specific features.

Maybe he’s been pitching to fanboys for too long, I don’t know, but this is most assuredly NOT a spec sheet device. From that point of view, it is basically an over sized iPhone. But in re-concpetualizing the computer, size matters. Simplicity matters. Access to both content and software, easily, matters. iPad is about the computer in your life, just like the Macintosh, just like the iMac, and I feel that Jobs totally failed to bring this concept home.

Literally nothing else mattered…

…and he missed.

He set out to reintroduce a product category – the computer designed for home life – and he failed to bring that single point home.

What makes this critical is that while you can rev the hardware and software feature set, as we saw with the iPhone, you can’t rev whether or not people believe in the idea. The brilliance of the iPhone introduction is that while people could and did rip on the initial features, or lack thereof, every single person knew exactly what the iPhone meant conceptually. That didn’t happen today, and I’m worried it may be fatal. If the average person – not the person who watched today’s event, but the person at whom this device is targeted – can’t understand why this for them, they’re probably not going to come back to it. At the very least, that is a profoundly more steep hill for Apple to climb than explaining or revving the object specifications.

The second huge flaw, and single point that broke my heart about the device itself, is that for everything I just stated above, Apple seems to also view this as an accessory. What this needed to be was a computer. A new, better, more relevant computer, but a computer. That Apple expects people to sync this to another computer is either profoundly short sighted, or just stupid. Neither of which feels like the Apple I know. By positioning the iPad as peripheral, Apple took what should have been a really cheap, amazing computer in a world of terrible cheap computers, and instead positioned it as a really expensive toy.

My mom, my dad, Megan’s mom and step-dad, they all want Apples, but always felt like they were too expensive. To be fair, you have to either buy into the Apple aesthetic or understand computers in a deeper than average way to justify a $999 13 inch MacBook in a world of $700 17 inch Toshiba’s. But with the iPad they have a chance to charge right into that space. It’s the exact same price point, with a totally different, and in my mind, clearly better experience. That concept has been severely damaged by leaving the Mac as the center of the Apple universe. Im guessing that you may not need to sync the iPad, but it says a lot about how Apple will position this and it feels like a terrible choice: it reduces the importance of the device, and again, muddles the ecosystem for the average person.

Anyway, it’s done with now and we’ll see how things shake out. I still love it, and I’ve talked to a number of people who are genuinely excited by it. At the same time, I can’t help but feel that today was a critical day for iPad, and what should have been easy, breakaway slam dunk, instead put up as many obstacles as it took down.

It’s not an answer to ultra-portibles or e-books or any of that. It’s an answer to what personal computing should be now.

In a lot of ways, the original Macintosh from 1984 is a better model for the type of paradigm shift I think the tablet will be. But in one critical way I think the iMac is still the logical successor: in 1984 you didn’t need a computer, by 1998, the computer was becoming inextricably tied to society. It wasn’t just something you had at work, or something you noodled on at home, it was becoming a critical part of peoples lives. The iMac, in my mind, represents a branch in the linage of computer evolution, a branch says not just that the notion of computing at home is fundamentally different than computing for work, but that this home version needs a fundamentally different tool.

In 1998, issues of approachability, simplicity of setup, connection to the internet, and the role of the computer in daily life were all at the forefront. Apple solved each of these largely by taking things away from the product rather than adding more. The original iMac had a total of 5 pieces if you include the power cord and phone line, and was advertised as have “no step 3″ in the setup process. Accessibly to hardware, and compatibility to legacy systems were all shed in exchange for simplicity and stability. But the industrial design was maybe the most important aspect of the iMac. It’s design, both technically and aesthetically, worked to fulfill on the idea that a computer could and should be something you engaged with for fun, something that was part of your life; and that this paradigm would require a different set of features than a work computer. In this world, issues of simplicity, clarity, stability and approachability were more important than power, compatibility, or customizability. So much has already been written about the design of the iMac that it seems pointless to add any more, but the importance of the iMac being “friendly” and approachable can’t be overstated. Even that awful puck shaped mouse was important. The “toyness” of the whole package presented a computer that was non-threatening, non-technical, and didn’t need to be figured out, but rather, to be played with.

My feeling is that the tablet is the next evolution of this branch.

In spite of the groundwork laid by the original iMac, computers are one of the last places where we see little differentiation between products designed for professional work and those created for home life. When it comes to listening to music, no one would expect home audio equipment to be the same was what professional audio technicians use. While I can’t imagine a better camera than my DSLR, my mom would get nothing out of it. Her point and shoot if far easier for her to use, and because she can understand it, it makes better pictures for her than my camera ever would. In both cases, we happily exchange power and absolute quality for something we can understand and use easily. But when it comes to computers, even though my mom and I have radically different needs, hers is the same as mine.

Why?

My feeling is, when it comes to feature set for the tablet, what it wont have is as important as what it will have.

Things it wont have:
A built in keyboard.
A visible file system.
A way to add applications outside an app store.
A way to customize the interface.

Things I think it will have:
A dock allowing it to be stood up in either orientation
A USB port
A Mini-display port
A Webcam
Enough processing power to handle new versions of iPhone and iMovie

I agree entirely with John Gruber’s assessment of the tablet:

“And so in answer to my central question, regarding why buy The Tablet if you already have an iPhone and a MacBook, my best guess is that ultimately, The Tablet is something you’ll buy instead of a MacBook.

I say they’re swinging big — redefining the experience of personal computing.”

It’s the home audio system or the point and shoot camera of computers. This is the computer people will buy when they don’t want to buy a computer. In my mind, the tablet’s mantra is: simpler is better than faster, stability is more important than openness, accessibility is more important than compatibility.

And this is all true. For the vast majority of people, the ability to access their RAM is of no consequence. Why does any one other than a programmer need access to the file system? Why does anybody at all need the convoluted system of keyboard shortcuts developed in Photoshop over the last 20 years? Those only exist to support the input systems that were available at the time. Even the concept of application versus website is becoming increasingly arbitrary. A recent conversation I saw on Twitter about whether or not people would pay for the service went on for about an hour before someone pointed out that most of the people in the conversation were working in applications they had paid for. The service and applications that support it had become completely synonymous to everyone.

We know that most people put all their files on their desktop because its the one file system metaphor they get. So much like the iPhone, the file system in the tablet will be gone from the users perspective. Photos and videos get stored in a “gallery” app, media is in “iTunes”, and anything else is accessible from the app that made it in the first place. Not that there will be a ton of documents to manage anyway outside photos and videos, and media. I think the tablet, like the iPhone and like the iMac will take a hard line on making things simple. It will not be a work machine of any sort. Sure, people will make spreadsheet editing apps, and apps to expose or create a file system, but that will be functionality you’ll have to explicitly add. Apple is going to take the stance, and correctly I think, that people who will be upset by the closed nature of the device, both physically and from a software point of view will buy a MacBook instead.

For all the complaints around the limitations, both functionally and technically, of the iPhone when it was launched, the fact remains that it continues to be the pinnacle of taking an incredible amount of functionality, and packaging it in a system that everyone from children to seniors can understand nearly instantly. It’s not the right device for everyone, but it is the right device for most people. And I suspect the tablet will be same thing. I’ll still need my MacBook, as will my designer and programmer friends. When people are at work, they’ll still need a specific type of tool. But for most people, most of the time, this small, closed, simple little device will be the computer they’ve been waiting for. This will be the beginning of the end for everyone having essentially the same computer at work as they do at home, and in less than 10 years, probably less than 5, it will seem stupid that for 30 years people had to use the computing equivalent of a hollywood movie camera when all they wanted to do was make home movies.