MacWorld reactions

Being both a Mac guy and a human factors/user interface guy, I’ve had a lot of people ask me about my reactions to MacWorld. Actually, this happens with almost every MacWorld but this time I thought I’d actually blog some of my thoughts on this.

Obviously, the big announcement was the iPhone. This is an interesting device to be sure, with a high “wow” factor. A big touchscreen with softkeys and multi-finger gesture recognition certainly seems like a better idea than the dumb little keyboards on most “smart” phones today. And the thing is clearly loaded in terms of cool tech like the accelerometer and the skin sensor and such. And the form factor seems about right, too; with all that stuff, I was worried that it would be too thick to really be a good pocket-dweller. With all that, one of the first questions one of my colleagues asked me was “So, how long after the first ship date will we see you with one of those?”

Well, despite all the coolness—and there’s one heck of a lot of that—there are some issues. I will qualify this with two things: I didn’t watch the keynote very carefully, and I’ve only had a somewhat cursory run over the iPhone web site.

Now, to the issues: first, Cingular is not presently my provider, I have T-Mobile. T-Mobile’s plans are much better deals than Cingular’s, and I know virtually nobody who’s happy with Cingular’s customer service. I really don’t think it’s worth breaking my contract over it.

Beyond that, I don’t recall any discussion of battery life. (Am I wrong? Was this mentioned?) Seems like an awful lot of bright, high-rez display… won’t this thing need a recharge every day, maybe twice a day? That might be a limitation.

Speaking of that bright, high-rez display (160 ppi sounds very slick), I also wonder about keeping it clean and scratch-free. If your fingers will be on it all the time, how do you keep it clean? Some displays are a lot easier to keep skin oil off of than others. And how easily will it scratch? I have a little case for my Nano so I don’t worry to much about that, but this thing is all about the display and I’m not sure whether a case would interfere with the whole multi-tap stuff, and if that sexy display gets scratched easily, that’ll be bad.

It also wasn’t mentioned (I think) but there’d better be an “airplane mode” where the antenna can be turned off so you can use it as an iPod alone. It would be Very Bad™ if they screwed that up.

Another concern I have (again, maybe I just missed it) is that I don’t recall any mention of a dock connector. That seems like an oversight. First, I have a hard time believing that syncing over wireless is as fast and reliable as a physically-wired connection. Second, and much more of an obscure concern is the lack of a proper line out. I know, most people won’t care, but for audio geeks like me, that’s a bummer.

The last thing is that these things are a bit dear for the storage capacity. I’m not really objecting to the price—yes, it’s expensive, but I’d use it a lot, so I would be OK with that—but for $500 I want more than 8Gb. If I want to throw more than one movie on there along with a pile of music, space will be pretty tight. I’d like more like 12Gb for $500. Yeah, I’m a greedy little bastard.

So,. yeah, when my current T-Mobile contract is up (in 16 months), I’ll probably get one, but I’m not in a big rush. Between now and then they’ll get some of the kinks worked out, probably offer more storage, and if they offered an unlocked one, that’d be even better. I’ll have to see how the early adopters actually like the thing after a few months before I get TOO excited.

Other reactions… well, AppleTV looks nice. I’m not sure, I don’t have a strong urge to rush out and buy one of those, either, because right now I have a computer hooked up to the HDTV in my living room. Why do I need to shell out another $300 to do what I can already do from that machine, exactly? Of course, for lots of other people—those who don’t want a computer in their living room but do have an HDTV—it seems like a cool toy.

My other reaction was, to be frank, “that’s it?” I know the iPhone is a big deal and all, but I was really expecting more. iLife ‘07 at the very least, and I will admit I was really hoping for iWork ‘07 to be released with a spreadsheet, as I’m not especially thrilled with my current spreadsheet options. Excel has a crummy UI in some respects and crashes a lot, Mariner Calc is nice in some ways but has it’s share of issues as well, such as lack of many statistical functions, some bad UI choices of its own—for Alan Kay’s sake, why don’t the row and column of the currently-selected cell highlight so you know where you are?—and I’ve found calculation bugs in it, so I’m not sure I trust it. Am I missing some other great choice here? Anyway, I guess I wasn’t surprised at the lack of Leopard stuff or new quad-core machines or a subnotebook, but the lack of new iLife really surprised me.