Like much of geekdom, I too stood by and read the breathless excitement that poured from yesterday’s MacWorld keynote. And I was ready to admit that the Apple iPhone had some positive things going for it. But then the fan boys and girls started blogging stupid over-generalizations like:

This changes EVERYTHING. B-bye limitations. Hello raised expectations.

(Chris said to me as I was jumping up and down with excitement: “Why are we excited about this? It’s the way things were supposed to be all along. It’s about time.”)

It’s when the hype hits my head that I get pissy. So, without further ado, the reasons why the iPhone is not worth creaming one’s pants over:

• $499 or $599. Being an elitist snob was never cheap. You can’t plug an inferiority hole with something common.
• Cingular only. Considering that Cingular has always been the expensive cell phone carrier see the first point.
• The touch screen. Sure, it looks shiny, shiny out of the box. But take a pair of glasses and squeeze a lens in the palm of your hand. Then try and look through it. This is what viewing info through a touch screen will be like times ten.
• The ‘keyboard’. Engadget had coverage showing Jobs dissing other ’smart phone’ input methods saying that they take up too much real estate (shown above). The iPhone’s solution is to make all the buttons virtual – buttons which are still tiny but now lack the tactile feel of hardware to help you find what to press.
• He says it runs OSX. Bullcrap. It may have the ‘essence’ or ‘feel’ of OSX but there is no hardware that exists that can run the same software as a Mac Pro in the form factor of a cell phone. It WILL be a lobotomized version.
• Content zooming is not new. It is neat but it has been done before – think Opera on the Wii.
• Data transfer rates will be through the roof – downloading that New York Times page shown in the demo could easily cost $5.00. (last two items from Authentic Boredom)
• Data transfer will be slow. It’s using the equivalent of a dial up modem for Internet access. Even Treos have had better components since 2003.
• The closed system. Apple says no third party development. Period. So much for a diversity of applications.
• Syncing with iTunes. Come on, that application is bloated enough. It does video, podcasts, iPod, iPhoto, Address book, and iCal and now a whole slew of other stuff is getting thrown in? Apple’s digital synching strategy is broken.
• Convergence. We’ve had telephones and stereos and tvs for generations and yet have never felt the need to smoosh them into one single-point-of-failure Franken-moster of a consumer electronics device. Why do we feel the need to do that now?

What am I missing?

I think the iPhone can be a good product. But there are way too many chiming in how ‘insanely great’ and ‘world changing’ this new device is. They are good Apple tools spouting the iMessage after a MacWorld iSync .