iPhone: Three Plus Four
September 10, 2007
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When I listen to Mac Break Weekly, or Mac Notables — particularly after product announcements — there’s often a lot of speculation in their discussions about “When are they going to make something geared more towards the enterprise market?” Or, “When will there be one-button Upload to Flickr?”
Probably never.
I think the simple answer to these questions, and others covering features that aren’t there, is that Steve speaks the truth when he says they design products that they themselves would love to own.
Take the iPhone. I bet that during its development, Steve was, among other roles, the “Battery Czar.” Whenever anyone suggested a new feature the first thing he would ask is: “Will it still go a whole day on a single charge?” If the answer was no then that was the end of it.
Flickr is a great service and has solid community-based features, but Steve looks at it and sees something as ugly as hell; end of story. It’s the same with Google: he loves what their back end can do, but hates how it’s presented on the web.
Copy and paste would be great on the iPhone, but it’s just too many steps away from just “whipping it out and using it.” Same with the idea of multiple selections. On the one hand you could have extra capabilities that are invoked through clever but sometimes hard to remember combinations of buttons and gestures (the sort of features that might require another trip to the handbook), and on the other hand you have fewer (sometimes quite cumbersome in the number of taps) capabilities, that are at the same time — always obvious.
The best scenario to please advanced users would be a set of basic obvious features with a more advanced subset underlying them. The trick would be to make those advanced features available to those who hold the “magic key” (hold this while tapping that, or whatever) while making it impossible for the casual user to accidently stumble across them and get lost within them.
For now such a scenario isn’t worth the effort. It’s all too new — just like the original Mac with its deliberately arrow key-less keyboard.
To summarize: they are leaning towards features that can be explained in a sentence, rather than a paragraph; look at Boot Camp as an example: “With Boot Camp — you reboot and you’re running a Windows machine with no sign of the Mac. Then you reboot and you’re back to your Mac, with no sign of Windows.” Simple.
Now try to explain the other Windows virtualisation options such as Parallels in a sentence without getting an: “Eh? Say that again” reaction.
It’s the old three plus four thing: There’s an urban myth that says that phone numbers are broken up three plus four (555-1234) because people can easily remember or digest three things; somewhat easily remember four things; and have no hope at all of remembering five or more.
The iPhone is three devices in one; those three devices do four things really well. When those things are automatic and ubiquitous is when the really cool second-level stuff arrives.
