hype  

You have to remember something about Jobs...
He sees his role as advancing consumer products by packaging technological capability that has long been there, but which major players usually for strategic reasons find not yet ready for prime time.
The first Apple OS with GUI was a Xerox word processor that Xerox could not yet trust the commercial possibilities of.
The first iPod had been technologically and production cost feasible for many years before he took the plunge and built and marketed it. What held up introduction of such a product was: a) sufficient resolution of Napster related legal issues on music downloading; and b) an economy with enough kids and adults with legal access to computers and downloadable music to create a critical mass of consumers. A and B were intertwined. Anyway, the iPod, or digital pocket sized equivalent of a ghetto blaster boom box kicked butt at a time when a lot of knowledgeable persons still thought the timing was not right. And some were just certain that a video game generation of kids would NEVER go for a sound only device. WRONG! Music as every generation learns eventually is better without visuals than with. Music on its own is sublime. So: Jobs was selling access to sublimity. He was selling the means to divorce oneself from the music borg that had taken over popular music and tied it to music video pornograhpy for 20 years. For young kids, music without visuals was an utterly new experience. Admit it: the only real reason to watch a music video the last 20 years has been to see a freak show with NIN or Marilyn Manson, or watch a simulated strip tease/dominance routine with the latest bimbette). There's been some great music the last 20 years and all of it would have been better, including Mikey's Thriller and Madonna's serial hump and grind sight tracks with music only.
For baby boomers, iPod was simply a rediscovery of the awesome joy and imaginative powers of music without visuals.
Jobs is trying something entirely different with the iPhone. He's trying to converge media in your pocket. He's trying to let you watch TV, play video games, and eventually look at who you're talking to--all from your Levis, or your butt huggers, or whatever you wear. This effort is not marketing sublimity. This effort is marketing total access. It is less fanatically received in the beginning, because sublimity stokes fanaticism, whereas, total access is frankly just the super market approch to media access.

You have to remember something about Jobs...Pt.2
But in the long run, the iPod, or something like it down the road is going to become THE device in our lives; this is why Jobs gambled so big with a device, good as it may be, that does not really do what the hype promises. The game was to get as many eyes as early as you could, and lose as little money as possible doing it (hence the ridiculously high price for a thing that probably costs 50 cents for the actual hard bits). because by the time Jobs waited to really be able to do what he claimed, Jobs chance to converge media would have been balkanized and gobbled up by nintendo, microsoft, motorola and nokia. In the long run, people are eventually going to jettison much of what they own and live mobilely from their own bodies, not because they want to but because in the long run our economy is making everything but bytes too expensive for most persons to own. in the long run, shipping bulky computers, and giant tvs, and all manner of digital electronic stuff is going to become cost prohibitive. Frankly, it already is. Almost no companies make any money off the digital consumer products they make. They make their money from susidiaries who make their money off the ad clicks, the content fees, the service fees related, and the financing arbitrage on really huge volumes. To paraphrase a friend of mine, there's no money in bits, only in bytes, because bytes have incomparably low marginal costs at high volumes.
Digital electronic goods are now made and marketed by companies as a means of leveraging their way into the bytes game. If they had to make a living off bits, they would all go out of business.

You have to remember something about Jobs...Pt.3
Apple makes iPods and computers; that is, they are heavily bit oriented. They need to diversify quick. Hence the movie content biz of Pixar and eventually the fusion with Disney media. But they have never been a good software competitor. They can only do propietary softwary embedded in their bits. So the likelihood of a bunch of new Apple software is doubtful.
And Apple computers are being migrated incrementally to interchangeability with Microsoft boxes. Soon the only difference will be the OS itself. And at some point, MS may even take over the OS from Apple, or make a
Windows so close to Apple OS that it will become indistinguishable. Jobs niche is and always has been integrated software/hardware consumer goods that he did not have to foot the bulk of the R&D for. Understood this way, Jobs had no choice but to jump into the iPhone game. It is his kind of product, at a time when he needs to diversify, and at a time when others are sitting on their hands and waiting.
Now, it looks like this could be more like one of his Lisa and Next Cube attempts than one of his MacIntosh and iPod attempts; that is, he may be trying to do too much too soon with too little technology.
But Jobs had to take the gamble to save the company long term, otherwise he'd just be being a very cool John Sculley 2.0. If he gets enough eyeballs, he can converge technology along a path sensitively dependent on the initial conditions he sets; that is, he creates chaos for competitors with a strange tendancy all his own. If he fails, he just keeps betting on other paths until he runs out of chips.
As Dylan said, "He not busy being born is busy dying."

Maddox strikes
Maddox strikes!
I thought he would weigh in on the iphone. Below is the link, its a pretty funny way to write, and he gets to the point rather quickly doesn't he? I would be suprised if Apple isn't sending out a plea to him right now!
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone

those links - apple reviews
are spot-on. and that colorful language most appropriate. once bush and cheney move out, it will be hi time to steady the arrows on both apple and google.
only one without a life would be fool enough to purchase a "lifestyle". does Jobs really believe the world is populated by fools? yes and apparently that is the key to his genius. everyone who bought the iphone should get together for a massive collective lifestyle rally at the largest apple-imall known to man and demand a really righteous lifestyle, waving their VISAs, and scream at the top of their lungs so that they absolutely must be heard, "DON'T OVERESTIMATE US!!!" We should demand more of Mr Jobs: the occasional expensive dependency-producing underperforming product just isn't cutting it. More merchandise, please. :')
thanks for the links.

The Eames rocker story...
The Eames rocker story reminds me of a recent trip to Cappellini. I actually sat down in the Wanders rope chair--was that dumb? Anyway, I might has well have been sitting on a pile of barbed wire.