In his announcement keynote, Steve Jobs called the iPhone 3 products in 1. The relative adoption rates of these different products are shown above. Based on this, it seems that Apple ought to downplay the smartphone and even Mac-like aspects of the phone and instead focus on the iPod and phone aspects of the device.
While this device doesn’t innovate as a pure telephone (and in some cases takes a step backwards), it is the big step forward for iPods that we were all clamouring for prior to the iPhone announcement.
Innovation on the iPod front has typically come with larger capacity, and while the 4-8GB may seem to cripple this product, the vast majority of all iPods are only 1000 songs or 1GB. The larger model at 8GB therefore is a big leap upwards in size and comes with a new widescreen and constant, wireless connectivity. It’s this that makes the small storage irrelevant. Because I am constantly connected, I no longer need to have all of my content stored locally. Instead my content can be continually refreshed either drip by drip over the EDGE network, at decent speeds through wifi, or in one big gulp when I sync to my computer. Instead of having a locally managed playlist, I could turn over management of my content to Apple or some other enterprising company who would agree to supply new audio and video content to me for a monthly fee.
It would surprise me if some form of plan like this is not already underway. The iPhone is a platform for services. I don’t think that Apple are looking to disrupt the phone market, instead, I think they’re actually looking to disrupt the plateauing iPod market.
UPDATE: According to Om Malik, people are already hacking the iPhone to kill phone service and therefore create very expensive “6G iPods.” Alex King posted about this on his blog and the comments are pretty interesting.
