Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

In the early days of PCs and Macs, hand-holding books and articles would always say something to the effect of: “Don’t worry about hitting the wrong key or clicking the wrong thing; you can’t break it.”

Well, fact of the matter is, you can. By installing dodgy software or tweaking settings the wrong way, or by delving too far into the underlying guts of the operating system — things do get broken.

I think it was Andy Hertzfeld who said that he recently asked Steve Jobs what one thing he’d do differently if he could go back and introduce the Macintosh all over again. Without hesitation Steve said, “I’d lock out third party developers.”

The iPhone is, to all intents, Macintosh all over again. As obvious as a toaster. A bicycle for the mind. Beautiful and flawless. Don’t tamper with it.

In the great bell curve of users of technology there are always — and there always will be: three percent who will never get it; ninety three percent who sort of get it; and three percent who totally get it.

Now, of the three percent who totally get it, there is yet another percentage who want to exploit the living daylights out of it; these are the geeks. You could say that in the PC world the last three percent who get it are the Mac users, and the Mac geeks are the ones who add the add-ons, who write the scripts, who hack the terminal.

They can get their Macs to do incredible things, but their friends see what they’re doing and want to do that too, and the geeks have to say: “Well, it did take a whole weekend to set that up, and if you don’t know what you’re doing…”

Steve loves his geeks, but he keeps them at arm’s length. He only adopts their ideas when those ideas are truly big concept ones — like Cover Flow, and Widgets. Ideas that, once tried seem obvious, even to the get-its. Most of the non-big concept toys used by the geeks are merely noise to everyone else.

So, the iPhone is the toaster, the bicycle, in your hand. Don’t tamper with it. But don’t despair: Instead, leverage the idea that the iPhone will be the ubiquitous way to access the web, and develop iPhone-friendly webpages that extend its usability — and fit in with its look and feel.