Anyone else sick of the iPhone?

iPhone this, iPhone that. It's seemingly all iPhone, all the time these days, from the moment it was introduced back at (non)Macworld in January. Here we are, with two weeks to go until the iPhone is available, and the hype is in overdrive. TV commercials. Every other post on Digg or Slashdot. The dominating subject discussed in seemingly every podcast. The Leopard keynote was a nice diversion, but it quickly turned back to the iPhone. Hell, it's been suggested that Safari for Windows is nothing more than a development environment for the iPhone, since there's apparently not going to be a SDK.

The point is that I'm a little tired of it. Sure, it's a damn sexy gadget, and I wouldn't turn one down if it happened to fall in my lap. However, I, for one, have not been counting the days or wasting excess brain cycles on it (except for this post, naturally). I don't see myself buying one, since I shockingly live in the real world where a starting price of $499 seems just a tad steep for a phone, regardless of the bells and whistles. I actually need a phone, not a Ronco food dehydrator and hair-in-a-can that happens to also make phone calls. Anyone have any idea what the call quality will be like? Seems a rather large detail to not have heard much about.

However, I am wondering how this will all play out, since Apple is quite obviously (to me, anyway) taking their eye off the ball when it comes to Macs. The new MacBook Pro models that were recently released are a perfect example. I have no doubt that they're great machines. Hell, I want one. But new Intel chipsets, Samsung LED panels (I think they're Samsung; going from memory here), and Nvidia graphics cards packed into a half-decade old design doesn't scream innovation on Apple's part to me. Apple wants to spend time on things like the iPhone, and is letting the Intels of the world handle the hardware side of things. That makes sense for the most part, but there are still way too many loose ends for my taste:

• Why do MacBook Pros and iMacs have FireWire 800 instead of eSATA?
• Why is there no eSATA across the board, for that matter?
• Why is the MacBook hard drive user-accessible while the MacBook Pro's is not?
• Where are the choices in third-party video cards?
• Why no SLI option on the Mac Pro?
• Why is there no entry-level Core 2 Duo-class tower?
• Where are the Blu-Ray drives?
• Why are Macs being updated less frequently than before the Intel shift?
• Where is the Mac Pro refresh? Where is the iMac refresh?

And that's just the stuff off the top of my head. Apple's answer to all of these questions, at the moment, seems to be, "but, but... iPhone!" Apple sees itself as a software company, and that's all fine and good, if Apple didn't sell hardware. But they do. They are a software company that relies on the hardware to provide a great experience to the customer, and while I'm all for that philosophy, when the hardware choices are incomplete and falling behind, I worry.

I'd like to see one of two things. One, just start keeping up. I know Apple loves simplicity, and having their lineup stay static for months on ends keeps things simple. That's fine, but at least offer more choices in the BTO realm for folks that want more out of their Macs. More video card options. Competitive RAM prices. Blu-Ray Superdrives. Junk like that. Or two, find a way to legally allow Leopard onto non-Apple hardware. I can't believe I'm about to write this, but I'd definitely put up with activation, a hardware dongle, charging a premium over the $129 Leopard price, or whatever else to be able to build my own rig with the hardware I want and legally run OS X on it. I'd put up with pain normally associated with what Windows users have to deal with in order to gain back some hardware choice. Hell, it'd even be fine with me if this "OS X for system builders" came with no support whatsoever. You're on your damn own, and you'll like it.

Anyway, I don't see option 2 ever coming to pass, so the situation is what it is. So I'll hear enough about the iPhone in the next few weeks to make me want to claw my ears off of my head, and I guess I'll have to like it, because that's what we get instead of Leopard and new hardware now. And, with that, I'll leave it at a single exclamation:

Crap...

Posted at 10:40PM Jun 15, 2007 by Kevin Schmitt in Mac and Apple  |  Comments[5]