The breakthrough wasn’t the gear, which all works and is pretty slick. The genius is the iTunes Store and the App Store. With immediate gratification, who can resist a $1 song or a $5 app?
The genius was the user interface. When it first came out, I sort of laughed... who is going to browse the web on such a tiny screen.
After a few months I went into an apple store out of curiosity and tried it out. With the touch screen and the intuitive zooms and scrolls you could actually surf the web! I was sold and got a 3G when it came out and loved it.
But I still wished for a larger screen. When Samsung came out with the Galaxies I switched and still have that galaxy and it works great.
But all the credit goes to Steve Jobs - he was a true genius. He understood what people wanted more than the people themselves. His uncompromising stand on aesthetics and ease of use was unsurpassed.
The genius is Apple's SHARE of the money from $1 or $5 purchases for content they did not create.
So very true.
It blew my mind when I read two days ago that the App Store made $500,000,000 in one week in January!!!
Probably all those new iProducts folks got for Christmas the week before.
I went into the Apple store the day after Christmas. It was pretty full as usual. I sat down at a table to wait. This guy who looked and sounded as though he just got off a flight from China ran up to the clerk. He ordered 6 new iPhones.
Maybe the iPhone hasn't changed some fools in this world, but others are happy that it is here...
From ZDNet:
Despite the recent comments by some iPhone developers on the harsh economics of the App Store, other developers are making a killing by cranking out inexpensive but popular apps. Newsweek's Dan Lyons profiles Ge Wang and Jeff Smith the brain trust behind Smule, creators of four $1 and $2 apps including a virtual lighter (Sonic Lighter), a virtual firecracker (Sonic Boom), a voice changer (Sonic Vox) and a virtual flute (Ocarina).
Ocarina has already racked up 400,000 downloads in less than a month and the company which originally forecasted about $100,000 in revenue this year, will instead rake in a cool $1 million. "It's amazing," Smith says. "The business is already profitable."
Pangea Software's Brian Greenstone, developer of Cro-Mag Rally, Bugdom and Enigmo, expects to generate $5 million in revenue this year and is another App Store success story. "In the last four and a half months we've made as much money off the retail sales of iPhone apps as we've made with retail sales of all of the apps that we've made in the past 21 years—combined."
The other developer mentioned in the piece is Steve Demeter, the developer of Trism, a $3 iPhone game that pulled in $250,000 in just two months.
It's a good read and will undoubtedly motivate a flood of new developers trying to follow in their footsteps. One man's crapware is another man's cash cow.