Lessons From the nano

Experience is, it is often noted, the best teacher. Unfortunately humans are not the best students, they sometimes tend to extrapolate truths revealed in on endeavor to a seemingly related but wholly dissimilar task. Serving as a personal example of this less than logical methodology: I once drank an entire pot of what was generously called “Medium” salsa. In truth it was little more than thickened tomato juice but my friends were deeply impressed and I, being underexposed to Mexican cuisine, thought I was the master of all spicy foods. A week later a friend who actually had some experience with food that had a bit more bite than ice cream challenged me to drink an entire bottle of Tabasco sauce for the then princely sum of ten dollars. Drawing on my previous experience I entered the wager with confidence. After removing the stopper that prevents more than one drop from issuing forth at any particular moment (turns out it is there for a reason) the challenge began. About halfway through the bottle I noted that the pleasant vinegary flavor of the Tabasco was accompanied by a most unpleasant heat. Bead of sweat popped out on my forehead and I lost ten bucks and spent the next several hours suffering an exquisite amount of digestive tract pain. My error was, obviously, assuming that the salsa experience would be completely analogous to Tabasco experience which proved, in a most uncomfortable manner, not to be the case.

The above experience can be related to Apple computers. Few would deny that the iPod is a hit of major proportions and it would be only natural to assume Apple would use the lessons gleaned from taking the iPod from a Mac centric digital audio player to a market dominating music buying experience and attempt to apply them to the Mac in general. This, in passing, seems like a perfectly good idea but when we examine the information the iPod has imparted to Apple we realize that perhaps applying lessons from the iPod to Macs is not the best idea.

So what has Apple learned from the iPod? If we look at the trends in the world of iPod the answer is crystal clear. Consider the full-sized iPod, a marvel of technology with a positively copious amount of space. The iPod houses tens of gigabytes while still maintaining a nominal size. For all this utility consumers expect to pay a bit more than lesser iPods but to the logical among us the full sized iPod is by far the best value. Sure, as a pure music device the drive is oversized but after you mix in photos and miscellaneous data there is no better value in the iPod line. Yet instead of pushing the full sized iPod by rapidly expanding capacity or adding an FM tuner Apple chose next to introduce the iPod mini. The mini held a fraction of the amount of data (music or otherwise) than the full sized iPod but it did come in colors. The mini then promptly outsold its larger cousin. At this point one would suspect that Apple would attempt to make the high dollar iPod more attractive in an effort to make the full sized iPod more interesting to would be mini purchasers. Apple, surprisingly, took a completely different road. They followed the mini by introducing the Shuffle. The Shuffle is a screenless iPod (the lack of the screen explains why Apple could afford to use a capital “S” in the product’s name) that bordered on the ridiculously small and the worst value of all the iPods. They were an instant hit.

At this point the trend is becoming obvious, smaller would seem to better in the eyes of the consumers even if it means sacrificing small features like a screen. But that doesn’t really tell the entire story. As it turns out of the three form factors the most popular was the mini. So Apple decided to replace the mini with the nano. The nano is substantially smaller than the mini in size, features less storage and decreased battery life. On the other hand the nano does feature a color screen ostensibly for displaying photos but the screen is of such a miniscule size that one seriously wonders if it will appeal to anyone but hard core philatelists. It is a hard decision to defend in a rational manner but the muddle headed morons of the computer world won’t be able to resist the industrial design and built-in hippness factor. In short one expects the nano, even with all the compromises to eclipse any iPod thus far released.

The wild acceptance of the nano becomes troubling if we apply it to Macs in general and laptops specifically. Apple is switching to Intel’s chips in order to get a better laptop experience for their portable customers (read more powerful machines with better battery life). Better power consumption means more space for the laptops to shed which, in turn, means an ever-increasing chance of new form factor laptops. The question is where will the trend end. If Apple starts making laptops that trade functionality for size then one suspects the results will not be the same as with the nano. Consumers, and applications, have come to depend on a screen with a decent resolution. Consumers appreciate full-sized keyboards mightily and, contrary to the nano experience, when it comes to computers numbers matter. The hard drive size is something a purchaser is interested in, as are the number of ports. It would be a shame to see Apple continually yank features or storage out the iBook or PowerBook lines just to get to a more pleasing (ridiculously small) form factor.

It is easy to imagine a PowerBook denuded of features and easy to imagine the spin Steve Jobs would put on such a change ("We found most of customers don’t use FireWire or need anything bigger than a 10 GB drive) but perhaps it isn’t something likely to occur. The iCEO seems to approach the Mac market share with a certain amount of frustrated acceptance of late:

What’s really been great for us is the iPod has been a chance to apply Apple’s incredibly innovative engineering in an area where we don’t have a 5%-operating-system-market-share glass ceiling,’ Jobs says. ‘And look at what’s happened. That same innovation, that same engineering, that same talent applied where we don’t run up against the fact that Microsoft got this monopoly, and boom! We have 75% market share.’

On one hand it is a bit disheartening to imagine that the executives at Cupertino are resigned to such a meager slice of the pie but it might bode well for the continuity of fully featured Apple laptops. Hopefully Apple will not turn its attention to ever-smaller laptops but instead use the lesson of the nano on some as yet unrealized product.