John Gruber recently published a characteristically insightful piece about the Verizon iPhone rumors in the press earlier this week. Speaking to rumors of what Business Week has called the “iPhone Lite,” Gruber revisits Apple’s introduction of the iPod Mini, which was the event that turned the iPod from a single product into a product family.
He writes:
The formula behind the iPod Mini was simple: Apple made a smaller, cheaper device with more or less the same technical specs as the original iPod from October 2001.
[...]
So here’s how I see Apple applying its iPod strategy to the iPhone. At some point the iPhone will expand to two form factors:
A high-end iPhone with the same basic size and price as previous iPhones, but with significant new features…
A new, lower-priced, smaller, and more adorable iPhone, with more or less the same technical specs as the original iPhone. Given that those specs include the 320 × 480 display, I wouldn’t expect something tiny…. Shrink the iPhone’s forehead and chin and make it thinner … is what I’m thinking. Existing iPhone apps would run just fine on the new device, as it’d have similar, if not identical, CPU performance and RAM to previous full-sized iPhones. [emphasis added]
Reading the piece got me thinking back on the concerns I had about Palm’s fragmentation of both their prospective developer communities, as well as consumers, should the rumors of their introducing “Pre Lite” to the market.
Note the points where emphasis has been added. There are two reasons for Apple to aim for roughly the same specs as the first generation iPhone when it introduces additional models:
- a device with such specs will be significantly cheaper to produce more than two years later, and
- it helps ensure maximal compatibility of existing apps with the prospective newer members of the product family.
Apple has been very clear that minimal hardware variance is an explicit concern in their iPhone product design strategy (and, even their platform strategy for all devices running iPhone OS, or what I've been calling Touch OS X). Naturally, since the devices in the product family must continue to evolve, it’s impossible to entirely avoid hardware variance, but the more that the devices in the iPhone product family can have in common, the easier a job developers will have creating and testing the apps they make and sell.
By contrast, the Android platform is beginning to get its first dose of non-trivial woes around hardware variation issues, but more on this later.
There are plainly over a billion reasons that Apple would want to maximize the extent to which apps remain compatible across their entire product family of iPhones, and screen size and shape is one of the critical details to keep consistent in the mobile world, where developers (at least the competent ones) take great pains to make every last pixel count.
And for platforms like iPhone OS (and even Pre’s webOS) that are designed so meticulously around the user’s direct physical interaction with the screen, screen size is not a detail to be varied willy nilly.
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Business Sense Google Android, iPhone, Palm Pre, product planning
